This data collection contains the metadata of readers’ letters to Curzio Malaparte concerning his column Battibecco (‘Squabbling’) in the literary magazine Tempo during the 1950s. This column in which Malaparte commented on a range of societal problems, was very popular across the Italian-speaking world and invited hundreds of letters from readers with comments, complaints or requests.

These letters are derived from the so-called ‘Malaparte archive’ (Fondazione Biblioteca in via Senato, Milano, Archivio Malaparte, ‘Corrispondenza Tempo’).

This first research collection (A) contains the metadata of the first 101 letters, including the date of writing, information about the author of the letter (place of writing, name, gender, address, latitude and longitude, and professional title if available), the addressee (the magazine, the directors, or Malaparte himself) and the salutation.

Aside from the dataset itself (.csv), the data is visualised in an interactive online map in Carto (url can be found in the code book, and .carto file). Also included are full (anonymized) transcriptions of thirty letters, as well as five student papers that have been written based on this dataset.