Maria Antonia – a questioning about a place starting from pain

Abstract

Based on the idea that pain can constitute a permanent questioning in history, the aim of this paper is to think about Maria Antonia as a place which is an object of memory constructions, of nostalgic points of view. Focusing the temporalities of the place, the different times it implies - what leads to consider it as not prefashionable or predeterminable - makes it possible to explore the place starting from two nostalgic ways of happening: the “open nostalgia” and the “closed nostalgia”. What characterizes the latter is mainly the return, understood as a freezing of time (the past), or a redemption of time. The open nostalgia, implying a defamiliarization with regard to a place, points out to the possibility of a temporalization of the actuality in which the past inscribes itself in the present, allowing changes of viewpoints.