This article addresses one concern that is central to much of the sociology of memory currently ongoing: how can we remember terror and how can we forget it? And moreover, is there any cultural shape of remembering terror, which is more suitable than others? By addressing the issue of the social representation of a very controversial past - the massacre at the Bologna railway station in 1980 - the focus is here on the relation between the collective knowledge of public events, such as a terror attack, and the process of their fixing and shaping into social practices (commemorative ceremonies) and cultural objects (public symbols of the slaughter). It will be shown how, in the Bologna case, this process reflects tensions and articulates contradictions in the public inscription of the legitimate version of this past, between state and civil society. It will be argued that, due to a specific group of agents of memory - composed primarily by the association of the victims’ relatives and the committees of solidarity founded in the city during the last two decades - the structure of the commemorative ceremony has led to the public fixing of a specific genre of memorization in Italy for the victims of terrorism. This genre, that defines the number of its degrees of freedom (the range of possible variation within itself), becomes a crucial key to understanding the public making of cultural memories. The methodological considerations that arise from this research are related to the possible ways to analyse controversial versions of the past. It will be shown how ethnographying public enactment of personal experience and interviewing the victims and their relatives represent a very specific type of research experience, where many usual assumptions used by qualitative interviews are violated.

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How can we remember terror, and how can we forget it? How can we commemorate it? What is the most suitable cultural shape of remembering terror? By addressing the issue of the social representation of very controversial pasts, this chapter addresses the relation between the collective knowledge and memories of terrorist attacks in Italy and the process of their being fixed and shaped into commemorative social practices and cultural objects. This process may reflect tensions and contradictions between state and civil society in the public inscription of a dramatic past. A proper commemoration of terror, in fact, requires constructing adequate sites and objects of memory, but accomplishing those tasks requires a functioning civic sphere. A comparative analysis of the events of the Bologna massacre of 1980 and the bombing in Milan of 1969 will explore technologies of remembering and forgetting and analyze why in some cases civil society is successful in articulating and institutionalizing the commemoration of terror, why in other cases not, and especially what consequences for the public sphere this lack implies. ) in his pioneering studies argued that the past is a social construction shaped by the concerns of the present: not something given once forever, but instead a work in progress constantly shaped by institutional and individual conditions. This conception of the past has posed the question of whether there are some constraints to the social production of collective memories -if not, one would not be able to explain the deceit, unreality, and disremembering. By observing that neither are all memories allowed, nor are all different constructions possible, it has been argued that the range of different possibilities in the reconstruction of the past is determined by the competing versions of the past. Many recentThe Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture Edited

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