Italian Semiotics of Memory: Genealogies and Current Perspectives

The article gives an overview of the development – in Italian semiotic research of the last fifteen years – of a semiotics of memory, as a specific subfield of a semiotics of culture. After a brief account of how memory has usually been defined in the different semiotic traditions (generative, interpretive and, above all, cultural), and after a focus on Eco’s theorisation on memory (and its parallels with Aleida Assmann), the article presents some recent semiotic studies on the subject in Italy – mainly, but not exclusively, in the context of a research centre at the University of Bologna (TraMe), dedicated since 2009 to the study of memory from a semiotic and interdisciplinary perspective. Memory (especially cultural memory) has also been a relevant field of investigation for several Italian semiotic scholars that have explored different aspects related to a semiotic approach to cultural memory.