The death of the Hero. The discussion of three recent essays, by literary critics George Steiner and Guido Paduano, and the young historian Guri Schwarz, makes it possible to attempt to decode some clues that could show the secret connections between the political religion of the Italian Resistance, the patriotic-romantic and modern Christian attitudes to death and, finally, two different classic paradigms of the Hero. These paradigms were probably still present in the burial rites after the second world war, in the worship as heroes of military, partisans or civilians, and in the veneration for the dead.The most important question involved in the new patriotic epic, so, may be the historical and morphological relationship between death and history, that is to say: a basic question in the history of cultures.
Keywords: Hero, death, civil religion, cult of the dead, romantic patriotism, neo-Chistianity.