Refiguring Italian Cultural Quarters: 'Il Ghetto di Venezia. 500 anni di vita' (film by Emanuela Giordano, 2015) and 'Primavere e Autunni' (Graphic novel by Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte, 2015) (original) (raw)

2016

Abstract

This piece briefly summarizes the contents of part of a University course in cultural geography held at the University of Padua in the 2015/16 academic year, with the aim of suggesting a possible didactical contextualization for two recent creative works devoted to very different examples of “cultural quarters” in Italy (the Venetian Jewish quarter and so-called “Milan’s Chinatown”). The very first notion of comparing the docufilm Il Ghetto di Venezia. 500 anni di vita [The Venice Ghetto. 500 Years of Life] (2015) and the graphic novel Primavere e Autunni [Springs and Autumns] (2015) originated from a purely formal appreciation of them. The works, in fact, both present pieces of creative cartography of the cultural quarter, which have particularly stimulated our imaginations as cultural geographers (Figs 1 and 2). Subsequently, a deeper analysis of the complex implications of these informed and carefully arranged creative works led us to consider them precious resources for the teaching of cultural geography. Creative works became crucial given that we built upon them educational projects that refer to complex, transcalar, and multidimensional relations between cultural processes and spaces. In the initial part of this article, therefore, we draw on recent international and Italian literature on ethnic spatial concentration to contextualize the two works presented here.

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