The Italian historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at Cornell University, is the author of important books on the Holocaust and on twentieth-century political ideas. In this text, he describes and analyses a transition that, from his point of view, marks the end of the twentieth century: the utopias gave place to the cult of memory, which led to the proliferation of ‘remembrance’ and set the melancholy tone that characterises the spirit of our times.