This paper focuses on remembrance and commemoration practices in the Gorizia region in the 20th century. In the first part the author explains the theoretical framework of the study on how the remembrance sites are formed and what symbolic value these places carry within the formed collective communities. As the object of the study of remembrance, this space offers a chance for exploring and interpreting the relationship of a community to its past, the selection of events that strengthen the formation of the identity of a community, and narrations that accompany these selective stories. In the second part the author analyses the emergence of remembrance places and the understanding of the role of regions, monuments and the act of commemoration itself in the border area. Special attention is given to the analysis of forming the Italian collective memory of WWI and the formation of Slovenian collective memory after WWII within the prism of discourses and monuments that visually embody these stories. War memorials carry a defined political role, which offers the identification with ancestors and the national struggle through the initiated discourse of sacrifice in the name of nation and freedom. Public memorials are, as the paper intends to show, the products of mediation between the community and its collective memory, they are tangible subjects that strengthen and substantiate carefully written historical narrations. The presented case of the Gorizia region shows how the practices of collective memory of the border area are formed in the relation to the events of the 20th century. Although individuals are those who remember, commemoration as a process is a social formation, built by the factors of collective memory such as language, commemoration practices, rituals. The act of remembering as well as the establishment of commemoration sites, commemoration acts and collective celebrations of selected calender days build the views of the past, which are necessary for the present social time. The formation of memorial sites, which was the novelty of the first third of the 20th century, offers researchers a fruitful ground for new research. They especially offer the possibility for the encounters of the meanings of interpretations of formed discourses in the time when narration emerges as well as through the prism of a public symbol that catalyses such narration.