Giovanni MODAFFARI, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
What is nowadays known as the Grecanic Area in Southern Calabria is a territory made up of small villages ('borghi') characterized by a series of social and economic problems that make it one of the most disadvantaged zones of Europe. After the end of WWII, the increasing flow of emigration towards the north of Italy and abroad led to the almost complete depopulation of the ancient inland villages. The more recent coastal towns were to share the same fate a few decades later, producing a landscape consisting of empty settlements, scarred by illegal construction sites, and joined up by an ineffective network of connections.
Nevertheless, from the Seventies, a few public and private actors began to work on retrieving the identity of the territory building on the legacy going back to the colonization of the ancient Greeks and to the Greko language, which today has only a few dozen speakers. The implementation of this placemaking strategy aims to rediscover this past also through the accounts left by foreign travellers who passed through these places before, and recreates them in the form of walking holidays with routes planned out by following their travel journals (e. g. “The Englishman’s Path”, in the steps of Edward Lear). Most of these initiatives have been undertaken by cultural associations and cooperatives.
In this contribution, we shall analyse the role played by these initiatives in the process of identity-building and in the economy of the Grecanic Area, in the designing of its perimeters, and in rediscovering and rebuilding the ancient road network. We shall also consider certain more controversial aspects, such as the degree of correspondence between how the territory is portrayed along these routes and the way it is described and inhabited by residents; and the risks that a territory with a richly stratified history becomes too constricted within a single limited cultural frame.
Keywords: Grecanic Area|Calabria|Travel|Tourism|Walking holidays
A104554GM