Commemorations, national festivities, anniversaries, historiography and mass media

Over the past thirty years, and especially in the last two decades, the purpose and significance of commemorations, national festivities and anniversaries have been mixed up everywhere. But here in Italy, 150 years after unification, they are now the principal target of discussion and controversy. Of course, the interlacement between commemorations and historiography subsisted previously, but it was the intentional consequence of a political and ideological plan. Now they have become confused. The sometimes almost extravagant union between commemorations and history nowadays is rarely the work of professional historians or the choice of publishers. It is the product of the the instruments of mass communication. It affects the popular historical outline of the past; influenced by the affiliation between past and present "discovered" in daily newspapers, monthly reviews, radio and TV, networks, internet. Often such products omit important events, including the most important, too, that require a sophisticated exposition of their complexity, over time and the "longue durée". But historiography, the real historiography, continues to follow the path of research and documented studies.

Keywords: Commemoration, memory, Risorgimento, united Italy, historiography, mass media

• 25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: symbolic dates of the past and Italy's transition Maddalena Carli, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies /2015 pp.252
  DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2015.997497

Bruno Bongiovanni, Commemorazioni, feste nazionali, memoria. Tra mass media e storiografia in "PASSATO E PRESENTE" 84/2011, pp 6-14, DOI: 10.3280/PASS2011-084002