The popularisation of History in Italian Contemporary Culture

One of the “memory obsessions” of our years is the proliferation of anniversaries. Among these celebrations, the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall had a significant impact. In this essay I consider three types of public discourse that, in Italy, celebrated the anniversary (the discourse of newspapers, the television broadcasting devoted to related historical themes, the touristic discourse), in order to investigate which kinds of narrative of the fall of the Berlin Wall they have developed and how they have presented an event of such historic significance as that. In other words, how, after all, they have assumed the responsibility of an historical discourse.