Sicani-telling: small stories from Sicily’s margins. – This article tells some stories from the Sicani inner area, in Sicily. Drawing on the considerable debate that in recent years – particularly after the National Strategy for Inner Areas, launched in 2012 – has flourished, this article aims to contribute to the deconstruction of the aestheticizing visions that invest these territories. In particular, the narcotized image of the bourg is critically considered: a discursive and political tendency that underlies selective and pacified imaginaries. Following the idea that small stories produce the world, the article describes some narratives collected during an experiential guided tour through walking research methods. This storytelling is analyzed asking what discourse is produced on these marginal places. As a result, the small stories are a mode of the geographic discourse: a method in doing geography with an embodied and affective approach.
Landascape of Decay. Landscape of the Camorra: Characters, Perceptions and Storytelling. – For a reading of the landscapes of the Camorra, the peculiarities of a territorial nature should be analyzed: economic, urban planning, social, criminal and narrational of these particolar landscape scenarios of degradation. By practicing a critical analysis of the relationships that are established between organized crime and the landscape. In its physical forms and in those of individual and community life. The Camorra landscape is produced by a system of community relations achieved by a range of widespread illegal attitudes and behaviors, converging in actions of laceration of the civil fabric. The perception of this set of negative values is a fundamental component of the generation and perpetuation of this landscape. The individuals and communities of those territories have the perennial cogency of an "underlying" landscape present to their sensorial and cultural perception, based on disvalues distorting every action and behavior, therefore every feeling of them. The territory, its use and its governance, is strongly characterized by uses, practices, meanings and a particular storytelling. Made up of values charged with social and criminal negativity, but also fully perceived by the communities. Communities are forced to undergo this particular territorial connotation, which becomes fundamental in the emergence of this landscape of organized crime.
The Queen’s Bodies: Transcalarity, Transmedia storytelling, Media events. – On 8 September 2022, Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and also head of the British Commonwealth of Nations, passed away at the age of 96, after 70 years of reign. The funeral took place 11 days later, and constituted a mighty “media event”, involving some 4.5 / 5 billion spectators, for a ceremony lasting over 13 hours. In this context, the “queen’s bodies” are articulated in a composition that we can perhaps indicate as “binary duplicity”. On the one hand, following the classic path of Kantorowicz (1957), we observe the double body: physical and mystical. On the other hand, the corporal emblem rests on a double scalar reference: the nation and the empire. This essay, precisely, illustrates and interprets the model of the binary duplicity of the “queen’s body”, with the main purpose of: i) explore transcalarity as a geographical form of transmediality; ii) reflect on the role of the territorialization process in the constitution, development and outcome of media events.