ABSTRACT
This chapter connects the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro to other contemporary historical traumas that ramify across different levels of society. It attempts to craft a language of interpretation that simultaneously accommodates the vision of individuals, families, civil society, and the state. The chapter does this by focusing on varieties of individual and collective mourning and commemoration, and the ways these varieties intervene to re-imagine the world left wounded by historical trauma. It develops further the original distinction drawn between melodrama and tragedy as modalities by which to understand such traumas and through which societies live them. Victor Turner's social drama framework was originally developed to explain phenomena in small-scale societies, phenomena where a crisis threatens to break the society apart and the society enlists ritual and symbolic mechanisms to preempt such a rupture from occurring. The chapter concludes by exploring what the recuperation of Aldo Moro's own voice might contribute to projects of collective mourning and historical comprehension.
