THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER
Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio
Throughout the history of
Italy, the South—an umbrella term covering Abruzzo, Campania, Basilicata
(formerly Lucania), Puglia, Calabria, and Sicily, has been considered a
too-distant and altogether foreign country. The notion of the South filled in
for a diversity of categories, most of which helped depict an otherwise unknown
and unrepresentable region; this bassa Italia (“low” Italy), this “Italian
India” (as it was referred to by sixteenth-century Jesuits, who thought they
could train themselves for life in the wilderness of the West Indies in Italy’s
South), came to be perceived as a reservoir of archaic cultures and costumes,
and of inaccessible languages.
The configuration of the “other half” of Italy relied
upon a series of vastly contrasting descriptions and on topoi of excess:
inhospitable wild woods paired with inviting picture-perfect bays; unbearably
hot weather in regions filled with equally hot-tempered people; urban streets
populated with urchins and imaginative, colorful vendors; memorable Mediterranean
sites decorated by vonGloedenesque, ravishingly healthy youths. Former home of
brigands and present haunt of the Mafia, the South, in its “excesses,” seems to
have always worked to trouble the dignity of Italy’s past traditions and to
disrupt an otherwise uncontested advancement of “high” Italy into history’s
scenario.
Most of the picturesque representations of Italy’s
South came into being in the eighteenth century, forged by foreign artists,
poets, and gentlemen on the Grand Tour of Europe, and were circulated
throughout the continent in sketchbooks, journals, and literature. Drawn to
the South of Italy by the discovery of the buried cities of Herculaneum and
Pompeii, many of these travelers ventured south of Naples, through Calabria
into Sicily, following a new and reversed itinerary to rediscover the world of
classical antiquity and “to recover the site of mythic Hellas.”
Today, Goethe’s Italienische Reise still remains a
paradigm of the picturesque and romantic mode of viewing, sketching, imaging
the South, a mode that informed much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Goethe marvels at a South that discloses its natural wonders in a
delirium of enchanting panoramic views, much like a photographic diorama—a
phantasmagoria of colorful natural scenes.
It was in Sicily that Goethe believed he had found the
long-sought Urpflanze, the origin of the vegetable world. For Goethe, “Italien
ohne Sizilien macht gar kein Bild in der Seele: hier ist erst der Schluessel zu
allem” (Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: here is the key to
everything).
Text and opening image [Ferdinando Scianna Enna 1963] is here:
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