'Garibaldi was here?!': Commemorative monuments and the emergence of a national memory culture in nineteenth-century Italy – a network approach

In: Studies on national movements, Band 10, Heft 1

Abstract

With the help of a database of historical-national monuments, the article will look at monuments' mediating function between the commemorated personalities and the locations of their commemorative presence. An analysis of this dataset offers a new way of studying the relationship between national and regional layers of collective memory. Italy offers an excellent test case to explore the possibilities of this data-driven methodology. The unification of a nationally Italian collective memory corresponds directly with the unification of the Italian state out of the pre-existing, old historical regions with their own, well-established historical consciousness. While a national memory culture becomes apparent in the late nineteenth century, public monuments remain predominantly local/regional in orientation, with only a few memory figures (especially Garibaldi) commemorated on a truly national scale.