This article reviews the essays included in the book Resistenza e autobiografia della nazione. Uso pubblico, rappresentazione, memoria, edited by Aldo Agosti and Chiara Colombini (Torino, Seb, 2012), a multi-voiced profile of the interpretations and images of the Resistance along the different seasons of republican Italy, whose principal purpose is to ascertain the times and modalities of the troubled process of legitimation of the Resistance as the founding moment of the new democratic identity of the Italian nation. The steps of the historiographic debate are interwoven with the analysis of the instruments by which the Resistance has been "narrated" and "staged" in public discourse: memorial sites, cinema, television, school, music, theatre. The last section presents four essays on the official remembrance policies respectively pursued in France, Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia, offering thus useful hints of comparison with the Italian situation.
Keywords: Resistance, republican Italy, Europe, public use of history, public memory, historiography