Adrift in Time: Lived and Silenced Pasts in Calabria, South Italy

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has become a trigger for reflection on highly affective, shocking and upsetting silenced pasts in Reggio Calabria. Personal consideration of the present, as Benedetto Croce suggests, unlocks the archives of past crises such as the displacement of adults and children as a result of natural disasters—events which, for long periods, have remained shrouded in silence, inaccessible and well guarded. I argue that silence should be understood as a nonpathological transmission of knowledge of the past.