La folla criminale. Celano 1923

A lynching with religious reasons, occurred at the end of 1923 in Celano, a mountain town in the Appennini highlands, not too far from Rome. The fact shook peasant life of the village, it became the object of attention of national media and marked indelibly community’s self-representation. The article, which follows a microhistorical perspective, reconstructs what happened contextualizing it and its significance in local and national culture, through various written sources: court records, texts of local historians, the ethnography of an American anthropologist arrived in the town to complete his PhD and the novel dedicated to that tragic event by the writer Renzo Paris, born and grown up in Celano, before becoming one of the most relevant Italian writers of 1968 generation. Through a hermeneutical comparison of these different narratives on the same historical fact, the article intends to problematize, epistemologically, the concept of memory, especially considering even current use of that memory to identity and political purposes.