Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination

Description

Turning to a region of South Italy associated with Greater Greece and the geographies of Homer’s Odyssey, Marco Benoît Carbone delivers a historical and ethnographic treatment of how places defined in public imagination and media by their associated histories become sites of memory and identity, as their landscape and mythologies turn into insignia of a romanticised antiquity. For the ancient Greeks, Homer had set the marine monsters of the Odyssey in the Strait between Calabria and Sicily. Since then, this passage has been glowing with the aura of its mythological landmarks. Travellers and tourists have played Odysseus by re-enacting his journey. Scholars and explorers have explained the myths as metaphors of whirlpools and marine fauna. The iconic Strait and village of Scilla have turned into place-myths and playgrounds, defined by the region’s heritage. Carbone observes the enduring impact of Hellas on the real Strait today. The continuous rekindling of cultural and visual traditions of place in the arts, media, travel and tourism have intersected with philhellenic historiographies, shaping local policies, public histories, views of development and forms of Hellenicist identitarianism. Elements of society have celebrated the landscape of the Odyssey, appropriated Homer as their imagined heirs and purported themselves as the original Europeans–pandering to outdated ideological appropriations of ‘classical’ antiquity and exclusionary, West-centric views of the Mediterranean. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgements Author’s Notes 1 Introduction 2 The Strait of Homer and the Strait of Reality 2.1 Methodology: Textuality, historiography, ethnography 2.2 The exceptional landscape: Myth and history 2.3 The South-as-Greece: Hellenicism 2.4 Constructing place: The mediated and the real 2.5 Projecting identities: Banal identitarianism 3 Chronotopes of Hellas: The StraitDuring the Grand Tour 3.1 Geographies of Graeco-Roman mythology 3.2 Cartographies of Homeric landmarks 3.3 Maps of monsters: The feminine asnature’s beauty and dread 3.4 Southernizing the landscape: Europe and its Others 3.5 From the travelogues to tourism 4 Mediterranean Place-Myths 4.1 Travel, exploration and mythological journeys 4.2 On the track of Odysseus: The Homeric Mediterranean 4.3 Italy from the sky: The picturesque South 4.4 Vistas of stillness: Greater Greece and Mediterraneanism 4.5 Playing Odysseus: The literary travellers 5 Myths of Myths: Mapping the Odyssey 5.1 Homeric geographies: Between epos and history 5.2 Contested mappings: Traditionalists, revisionists, heretics 5.3 Observations and expectations 5.4 The viper fish and the whirlpool: Claiming Homer in the Strait 5.5 Experiencing the sea of myths 6 Materializing Heritage: Tourism in Scilla 6.1 Symbolic accretion and pervasive heritage 6.2 Tourism in Scilla town 6.3 From the ground: Expectations and disappointments 6.4 The canon and the environment 6.5 Monumentalizing antiquity 7 Denizens of the Odyssey: Greater Greece in the Strait 7.1 The Greeks and the ‘rabble’: Popular histories of the Strait 7.2 Greece and its Others: Dominant historiographies 7.3 Foundational fathers: Homer in Reggio 7.4 Banal identitarianism: Hellas and contested politics 7.5 Heirs of Homer: Local hide, global pride 8 Conclusions: (Re-)Imagining the Strait 8.1 Mythical lands and historical mirages 8.2 Deconstructions and reconstructions 8.3 Places and bodies: Inhabiting history 8.4 The Strait and the Mediterranean 8.5 Re-imagining the Strait Notes Bibliography Index