Giovanni Gasparini

The author aims at analysing the relation between communication and temporality according to two points of view: communicating in present time and communicating through time. The latter focuses on three points. The first, «Communicating yesterday», highlights the difficulties represented by distance in pre-modern times, and therefore the impossibility of a communication based on ubiquity. «Communicating today», on the other hand, underlines the present-day possibility of acquiring knowledge on events and peculiarities of ancient societies, establishing a sort of communicative flow from the past to the present. Furthermore, thanks to the new technologies today we can actualise what once was the dreammiracle of ubiquity; it is also possible to have phenomena such as desynchronisation among actors and flexibilisation temporal models and of the use of time by the actors involved. «Holy places and religious traditions» highlights the crucial nature of religious tradition within the framework of communication across time and space: not only does tradition irradiate from the privileged points of space, whereby place assumes a fundamental aspect for religions, but collective memory likewise centres around specific places, underlining the need to fix revelation in space as well as in time.