Historical experiences of violence influence political behaviour even during non-violent periods, although the effects of such legacies may diminish over time. However, political violence can re-emerge in democratic contexts, raising key questions: Do new incidents of political violence reactivate the legacies of earlier violence? Does the impact depend on the political identity of the perpetrators? Or is it shaped by the type of violence involved? We argue that local experiences of new violent events, particularly those perpetrated in areas with historical exposure to violence from actors within the same ideological spectrum, can retrigger political mobilization, thereby influencing local electoral behaviour. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a combined variety of electoral and violence dataset at the local level and analyse 40 years of electoral data in Italy (1946–1987), focusing on how the resurgence of political violence in the 1970s and 1980s affects the electoral legacies of historical violence preceding the democratic period (pre-1945). Our findings contribute to understanding the enduring and dynamic interplay between historical and contemporary political violence in shaping electoral behaviour in democracies, in particular shedding new light on (re-)activation mechanisms.