Conservare il visibile, raccontare l'invisibile: costellazioni di memoria e patrimoni difficili nel sud Italia / Preserving the Visible, Narrating the Invisible: Constellations of Memory and Difficult Heritage in Southern Italy

often simplified and trivialized in common narratives, conveyed above all by the media. However, these places are much more complex and deeply marked by a dense web of traumatic and violent events. In light of this, it is therefore essential to question how they are memorialised and, therefore, how they are narrated. How can the material traces of violent events be preserved, translated and made narrative? How can events so complex that a community would prefer to forget them be remembered? And again, how can the invisible meaning that places of trauma hold be shown? These questions drive the reflections in this contribution, which aims to explore the role that architectural conservation can play in the processes of memorialisation and spatialisation, preserving material traces – when present – to perpetuate and translate their meaning, and constructing new traces – when missing or erased – to recount what the sites of trauma hold. This starts from a broader perspective than what is commonly referred to as diffcult heritage, seeking a possible representation in the construction of a constellation, which takes the form of a critical tool composed of spatial, temporal and meaningful relationships.