the degradation of some streets and the increase in the rates of violence, drug dealing and prostitution, problems that have been generating continuous complaints from the population. Preservation Heritage awareness is a recent progress in the city. For a long time Caxias do Sul did not give the proper attention to its artistic and architectural legacy, resulting in the loss of numerous old buildings of high artistic, social and historical value. Part of this phenomenon happened due to the massive repression of Italian ancestral memory during the Vargas era, when the federal government sought to form a new cohesive and unified national identity by deciding to eradicate all foreignisms. During this period, even speaking in Italian became a crime; in fact, many cases of coercion, violence, and imprisonment of immigrants and their descendants who dared to manifest their ancestral customs and folklore were recorded. According to Ribeiro, such repression led to an effort of self-censorship on the part of the Italians themselves and their descendants, discouraging the cultivation of memory even in their own homes and interrupting, as of 1938, the celebration of the Grape Festival. This process was dissolved in the 1950s, when the official instances sought a reconciliation with the foreign past, and the typically Italian contribution to the local society became more valued. However, a deep-seated rejection of everything related to the past has remained, which to this day has not been entirely reversed and has been an important cause of the historical neglect of the inhabitants of Caxias do Sul towards their historical heritage, causing a wave of demolitions of buildings of notable historical interest or aesthetic quality, such as the Cine Teatro Ópera, the National Bank of Commerce, the first headquarters of the Clube Juvenil and the Tobias Barreto de Menezes Cultural Center, as well as old houses of traditional families. In this process of rescue and revaluation of the Italian heritage some landmarks must be mentioned. The first was the reorganization and reopening of the Municipal Museum in 1975, which started collecting scattered historical and artistic pieces, forming a large collection, and dedicating itself to research, whose results were published in a special bulletin. In the following year the Municipal Historical Archive was created, starting a fundamental work to rescue the written and photographic documentation regarding the city. A little later, a department of historical heritage was created in the Secretariat of Culture, which