ABSTRACT
The intellectual enterprise of the Italian sites of memory (Luoghi della Memoria) is told here by its main designer, Mario Isnenghi. The first point on which he insists is that this memory is divided, that Italy’s past gives rise to conflicts of interpretation and that those who undertake to write its history cannot stay completely away from these conflicts of memory. Moreover, working on Italian sites of memory also implies understanding their temporal dynamics; memory is a living reality that evolves over time, and the history that takes it as its object must take these reconstruction processes into account. Finally, he underlines the evolution of his own view on the relationship between history and memory: if, at the beginning of this work, what seemed important was to safeguard endangered memories, what seems important ten years later is to safeguard the rights of history in the face of the risk of too much memory, which would condemn history to be no more than the sum of individual memories.
