for the 80th anniversary of the Fascist anti-Semitic Racial Laws of 1938, first signed into law by the King of Italy at San Rossore near Pisa in September 1938, and of the subsequent expulsion of Jewish professors from Italian Universities, marked a highly significant moment in the compositions of a public history and memorialization, in the on-going history of a consciousness of this dark moment of fracture in modern Italian history (and its position within wider historical arc of Fascism and war). Quite apart from the complex and highly loaded question of the pertinence of generational and collective discourses of apology for historical wrongs, as hybrid civic, moral-political and historical acts , such ceremonies also raise a series of unresolved questions about the role and meaning, and practical effect, of calendar commemorations, anniversaries, dates in the processing of historical legacy and in the cultural transmission and memory of recent history. Dates and anniversaries are a powerful shared matrix for memory and also a constraint and condition frame for interpretation . This deceptively simple category thus carries remarkable weight in the long-term arc of evolving memory of the past and its cultural discourses, and the case of the Fascist Racial Laws with their tangled relation to the wider European Holocaust, the ebbing visibility of one in relation to the other over the long post-war era, can be shown to be a powerful case in point.