The South from elsewhere: Place-telling and narrative crossings in Matera, European Capital of Culture 2019

Résumé En

This communication is based on the fieldwork I did in Matera, in the South of Italy, about the European Capital of Culture 2019. This event developed a place-telling (Pollice, 2017) which crossed the European dimension, presented as a source of modernization and innovation, and the Mediterranean one, evoked as a magic and archaic world and becoming an inspiring source for the future.From a cultural point of view rather than from a scientific perspective, this contemporary place-telling accounts for multiple crossings (as well as missed ones) that has contributed to elaborate a narrative of Matera after 2nd World War : Italian anthropological tradition in the South of the peninsula (whose most representative author is Ernesto De Martino), American sociological approach (mainly represented by Friedrich Friedmann, within the larger context of the European and American interest for the South of Italy), artistic attention (e.g. Carlo Levi in literature ; Henri Cartier-Bresson and Mario Cresci in photography). European Capital of Culture is presented as the accomplishment of a process of redemption started with the attribution of the status of UNESCO heritage site in 1993: Matera is a symbol of “Mezzogiorno”, taken as a synonymous of backwardness within the Italian framework, that bypasses a collective feeling of “shame” (as stated by the national leader of the Communist Party in 1948) for attaining honour and proudness – all Mediterranean typical categories of analysis (Peristiany 1966, Herzfeld 1980).This contribution aims at presenting this dialectic construction from an analytical and critical perspective, while observing the different shapes it assumed in political, social and cultural discourse on heritagization of the Southern dimension.