This chapter's main goal is to build a portrait of the sociology of memory in Italy as it developed from the theoretical-conceptual framework developed by Maurice Halbwachs in his pioneering volumes on the relationships between memory and society. The reflection on the sociology of memory in Italy is preceded by an analysis of Halbwachs's theoretical proposal, as presented in his three volumes specifically dedicated to memory, and by the historical reception of Halbwachian work in the Italian sociological debate.

Maurice Halbwachs, Sociologist of Memory

Halbwachs's studies outlining the social origins of memory concerned a large part of his intellectual life. They developed in particular in the years following World War I, mainly during his time teaching at the University of Strasbourg, where he worked between 1919 and 1935 (Craig 1979). In 1919 Halbwachs was appointed to the chair of sociology and pedagogy, succeeding Georg Simmel, who had occupied it from 1914 until his death in 1918. In Strasbourg, Halbwachs experienced years of intense intellectual activity and established fruitful links with the psychologist Charles Blondel and the founders of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. In these years, under the influence of the particularly rich and stimulating intellectual and cultural climate – Strasbourg was, for example, an important meeting place for German and French sociologists, where new and cross-disciplinary problems were generated (Guth and Pfefferkon 2019) – Halbwachs undertook the project of studying memory, understood as a collective mental act. It was a project that had already surfaced in a not entirely explicit form in several pieces of writing prior to his time in Strasbourg: his first reflections on the role the past plays in social life actually appear in some articles from 1905, specifically La psychologie de l’ouvrier moderne d’aprés Bernstein (Halbwachs 1905a) and Remarques sur la position du probléme sociologique des classes (Halbwachs 1905b), and in his work La classe ouvriére et les niveaux de vie (Halbwachs 1912).

Halbwachs therefore devoted himself to the subject of memory for a long time and until his death in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.