Abstract
We live in a nostalgic era in which the past takes centre stage. The ubiquity and pervasiveness of the past, mainly due to new digital technologies, as well as the commercial use of nostalgia under the aesthetic form of retro, cause and determine the virality of nostalgic sentiment in the present age. Born in modernity as a disease, then demedicalised over the centuries, nostalgia is once again a highly contagious virus carrying a veritable epidemic of feeling (Boym, 2001).Nostalgia is the longing for what is currently unattainable in a past place or time and manifests itself as an emotional and cultural response to the loss or remoteness of something that was considered precious or meaningful. It is not limited to a simple regret of lost times, but is an essential indicator for understanding our relationship with the past, and especially with the present and future. While nostalgia retains some traits of its medical significance, it can be said that today more than ever it is an epidemic of cultural forms that is grounded in pop culture. It propagates through digital media, proliferates thanks to the latest technologies, confronts the sense of accelerating temporal structures and moves into intergenerational memory. Its pervasiveness presages a new form of advancement in history from a retrological view of the past and future. Nostalgia is the structure of feeling of the contemporary era.