The Gleno Dam Disaster (1923). Cultural Trauma and Collective Memories of an In-Depth Mountain Community in Italy a Century Later

Abstract

There is the wreckage of a broken Dam in Val di Scalve, a remote valley in the Italian Alps. At 7:15 am on December 1, 1923, the Gleno Dam collapsed and the flood wave swept over the villages below, all the way to Lake Iseo and the plain, killing about 356 people (out of a population of about ten thousand people). Our research takes stock of the social vulnerability of the affected communities, one hundred years later, and aims to interpret this disaster in the broader framework of the irruption of industrial modernity in the Alps and its consequences. What did modernity mean in the most peripheral areas of the Alpine mountains? What conditions of vulnerability did it generate? And, under what conditions can the social memory of the past heal the wounds of communities affected by disasters? And under what conditions can it further aggravate the sense of trauma suffered? The research was conducted using hermeneutic methods and qualitative techniques to investigate the processes of collective memory construction, with specific reference to social vulnerability and cultural trauma, among the communities affected by the Gleno disaster. What emerges is a picture of an Alpine community in which the representation of the pain of one’s past still constitutes a major activator of social phenomena and ferments one hundred years later.