Alcide De Gasperi dealt with several proposals of drafting and publishing his memoirs, which nevertheless did not achieve their editorial goal. A rising penchant for autobiography led him to multiply private and public references to his political background. The hindrance that prevented De Gasperi to convert them into a full memoir opera was the self-censorship on the «secret history» related to his underground trouble with the Holy See. On one hand, he refused to authorize portraits and biographies proposed him by journalists and insiders, out of fear they could misrepresent his political laity as religious disobedience. On the other hand, he delayed to write his memoirs which were at last interrupted by De Gasperi’s death, but started over by his daughter Maria Romana and merged in her book of 1964, De Gasperi, uomo solo. This essay reconstructs the interweaving between the attempts to autobiographical reconnaissance that arose from De Gasperi’s political rethinking and the biographical and memorialistic ones which could not reach him as interlocutor.