ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the role of images in shaping public knowledge of a controversial event: the terrorist attack that took place at a Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980, in Italy. It aims at elucidating how and to what extent the visual becomes a mode of relay about the past. The chapter analyzes a special set of photos: the photos of a clock placed on the front of a Bologna railway station. The photos considered depict the clock stopped at 10:25 am, exactly the time when a bomb exploded in the waiting room of the station, killing eighty-five people and injuring two hundred during the terrorist attack that took place on August 2, 1980, on the first Saturday of the summer holiday break. This clock does not just represent an unusual example of the objectivization of memory; it constitutes an intriguing case of the intersection between public discourse and the collective representation of a past event.
