Event Details
Thu, February 25, 2016
18:00 – 19:30
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence, Italy
In the Magazzino 18 and in the Museo della Civiltà Istriana Fiumana e Dalmata in Trieste, everyday objects left behind by men and women forced to leave after WWII are at the core of a museum of the long silenced story of the Italians from the North Eastern border. In the Fiume Museum-Archive in Rome set up in the 1960s, stones and tombstones, blood-stained shirts, alongside naive works of art, capture the trauma, the disorientation and the nostalgia of the “repatriated Italians”. Constructing a museum meant a great deal to the members of this scattered community, who chose to donate their own most cherished belongings, and to share them. In presenting the participative and controversial character of those museums, I will draw on the literature dealing with the complex interweaving of history and memory (Assmann, Nora), on postmemory (Hirsch), as well as on public history, and on the public use of history.
Featured Biographies
Ilaria Porciani
Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Department of History and Culture, Università di Bologna
Ilaria Porciani teaches Modern and Contemporary History and the History of Historiography at the University of Bologna. She has authored over 100 scholarly publications, including two monographs, 13 edited and co-edited volumes and articles in the field of cultural and intellectual history, history of historiography, history of universities and education, nationalism, gender studies, and more recently history of museums. She is presently working on a book on Museums, Archaeology and Memory in Partitioned Countries: Istria 1880 – 2015, and is directing the Bologna team of the EU Horizon 2020 research project CoHERE, focusing on food as a crucial element of cultural heritage and memorialization processes.