What is memory for us today? How do we think of it, how do we use it? The choice of memory as the key theme of the 2010 Fair stems from the realisation of a paradox: right at the time when, thanks to new technologies, we have endless databanks to hand, so vast that they challenge our own imagination and management abilities, we have realised that our relationship with the past has become distracted, intermittent, almost annoying.

While until Gutenberg learning by memorising was purely and simply what knowledge was, with the print revolution the ingenious classical techniques of memorisation, built on the image of a theatre, lost importance. In the 19th century, the political use of memory aimed to consolidate collective identity and for this reason created national festivals and heroes, such as Joan of Arc in France. “The invention of tradition” was born. Memory assumed a central role in psychoanalysis and biology, through the mapping of DNA. With Proust, memory becomes the primary driver of narration. Stronger than ever, the question of the delicate relationship between what to conserve and what to throw away has returned?

These are some of the themes at the centre of meetings and debates at the 2010 Fair, a starting from the keynote lecture by Gianfranco Ravasi on the religions of memory (“Fate questo in memoria di me”), by Mario Botta on the sensitive dialectical relationship that architecture has with the past, and by film directors like Giuseppe Tornatore (Ba’aria) and the Frenchman Claude Lanzmann, the author of the monumental docu-film on the Shoah, and also the overwhelming autobiography Le lièvre de Patagonie, on the cinematographic and literary use of memory. The same theme is also the pivot of the dialogue between Pupi Avati and Andrea Vitali.

The start will be the neurosciences. Edoardo Boncinelli, a biologist with excellent communication skills, will discuss with the neuro-surgeon Arnaldo Benini the hardware that manages the memorisation of our experience in our brain. The primary function that memory plays in psychoanalysis will be discussed by the Freudian Roberto Speziale Bagliacca and the Jungian Luigi Zoja. Luciano Canfora dedicates a keynote lecture to the invention of memory in the era of Pericles, while Valerio M. Manfredi reconstructs the fabulous weft of legends and myths that has been crafted around the tomb of Alexander the Great.

Umberto Eco and the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, with the semiologist Patrizia Violi, talk of “the delirium of listing”, the vortex of the cataloguing of what exists, with which humanity attempts to exorcise the damage of time and the limits of its own mnemonic abilities, but also of the need for oblivion. The meeting is entitled The future of memory.

In what way can the signs of memory invigorate an “educational challenge” that is needed more than ever today, but also increasingly difficult? This is the theme of the keynote lecture by Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Conferenza Episcopale Italiana.

Primo Levi had already recalled that personal memory should be subject to stringent verification, because it tends to modify, embellish, and constantly “rewrite” itself. A talk by the British Italianist Robert Gordon, one of the most acute scholars of Levi, in conversation with Domenico Scarpa is dedicated to the author and his reflections on chance and luck in a lager. The relationship between history and memory is the subject of the keynote lecture by Giovanni De Luna. A somewhat similar journey, from documents to literary re-invention, is what will be illustrated by two masters of the Italian historical novel, Alessandro Barbero and Melania Mazzucco.

But it is in the 20th century that tragedies that cannot be ignored are concentrated. Thus the Shoah, which also brings with it the difficulty of saying the unsayable (the books by Enrico Donaggio, Diego Guzzi and Carlo de Matteis, and by Helga Schneider). Or the dangerous relations between racial culture and literary culture in 20th century Italy (the Polish historian Bronislaw Backo, Luciano Canfora and Carlo Ossola discuss this). While Francesco Cataluccio follows the phantoms of the great central European cultures, destroyed first by the Nazis and then by Stalinism.