In Italy there is a new interesting wave in historical museums, in particular about XXth Century.
In the last few years, some new museums have been inaugurated, as M9 in Mestre-Venice; some others have been rearranged, as Museo del Risorgimento in Turin or Museo della guerra in Rovereto; and some other projects are on the stage (and strongly debated), as the Shoah Museum in Rome or the National Museum about Fascism in Predappio. In 2016 network "Paesaggi della Memoria" (Landscapes of Memory) was established to gather the most important museums and sites of memory about Second World War (www.paesaggidellamemoria.it).
In this paper I would like to analyze Italian memorial context in order to point out national features and developments; and the specific role of museums in the "memorial wars" of the new century.
I will try to describe this new generation of museums with particular reference to the idea of Italian History that they convey and the ways they use for communicating it.
"Parallel convergences" is a famous (and ambiguous) statement of politician Aldo Moro in 1959. I use this expression to underline the lasting gap between spread request for past as resource of identity and the lack of history as critical knowledge; and to underline the difficulty in facing paradoxes and traps of collective memory.
