Digitalising Commemoration: The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the remembrance of the terrorist attack in Piazza Fontana, Milan (December 12, 1969)

Global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic have profoundly changed the daily lives of entire communities in different national contexts. In this contribution we are questioning, a few years later, what short and long-term effects the pandemic has had and presumably will have in the near future on the commemorative ceremonies of crucial events, such as terrorist attacks. The lockdown during the pandemic, in fact, in Italy has lasted for many months with particularly strict conditions and, therefore, the use of the digital technologies in commemorative processes became inevitable and necessary. What is the impact of digital technologies on such processes and how do they influence and/or modify collective participation? This chapter starts with the analysis of a specific case to highlight the ways in which the Piazza Fontana terrorist attack was commemorated on December 12, 2020, during the lockdown, in order to examine the impact of digital technologies on the commemoration of one of the most dramatic events in the recent Italian history. Then, a comparison is provided with the commemorative ceremony of the following year, i.e. 2021. The implied idea is to highlight both the changes, if any, that occurred in the partially online commemoration of 2020, and the extent to which these changes also had an effect on the commemoration of 2021, which again took place in person. In other words, we question the permanence in 2021 (therefore in the short term) of the changes due to the pandemic phenomenon and the subsequent partial digitisation of the 2020 commemorative process.