Walking Tours, Subjective Maps, and Spatial Justice: Urban and Non-Urban Spaces in Contemporary Italian Literature

This article focuses on the representation of urban, suburban, and rural spaces in contemporary Italian literature, by examining a corpus of fifteen titles published between 2004 and 2015. 2004 saw the start of the Laterza series Contromano, which marked a significant increase in the amount of texts providing literary tours or maps of the most various areas of Italy; for this reason, that year has been chosen as the starting point of the present investigation. Particular attention is paid to three aspects: 1) The use of walking as a way to achieve a more personal relation to the “topographical system” (De Certeau), as opposed to the abstractions underlying urban design; 2) The questioning of the boundaries between centre, periphery and countryside, as well as those surrounding areas inhabited by ethnic minorities; 3) The emphasis on abandoned or neglected spaces, usually leading to a broader reflection on the human costs of neoliberal modernity. In conclusion, despite their diversity, all of the selected texts aim to bridge the gap between our subjective experience of space on the one hand, and the abstract processes regulating our lives on the other; in order to do so, they attempt to unveil a hidden rhetoric of space, whereby a given place can become a metaphor or a synecdoche for broader phenomena