Risemantizzare il concetto di degrado ambientale: la ‘Terra dei Fuochi’ da Gomorra a oggi

Abstract

The expression “Land of fires” has appeared since 2003 in a Legambiente report on eco-mafias (Legambiente, 2003), but in Gomorra it is reused by Saviano for a connotative purpose to allegorize the situation of profound degradation affecting a part of the territory between Naples and Caserta, where the clans burn buried waste, producing highly toxic fires. Afterwards, the phrase had immediate resonance thanks to the global success achieved by the best seller, becoming common knowledge due to its great communicative effectiveness and its media-journalistic pervasiveness (there are many blogs, websites, youtube channels, newspaper pages and social platforms that have been dedicated over the years to the criminal and cultural phenomenon connected to it). However, this good fortune has contributed to re-semantising the term "Land of fires", which over time has seen its referent change, becoming a dynamic and ever-changing rhetorical-discursive construction, a metaphorical and allusive condition with labile and sometimes ambiguous boundaries that some have defined as a “porous symbol” (Alliegro, 2017).

In fact, the expression today no longer designates a physical space or a defined geographical-territorial perimeter, but rather a mental area, a shared psychological horizon, a conventionally "peripheral" dimension of identity in which some communities or local groups reflect themselves. The formation of this (self-)representation device (which has been compared to a real "disaster brand") (Alliegro, 2017) is however fueled by the profound "coalescence", typical of the Italian scenario, between the mechanisms of “mediacracy” and the cultural production ones (see Bodrunova, 2010): Saviano himself is aware of this compromise as in a recent interview with the "Corriere della Sera" has said: "So much attention and an incredible emotional investment they didn't change things much [...] At a certain point people confused the land of fires with the emergency of rubbish in Naples. But it was a virtuous short circuit because the Neapolitan emergency drew attention to the land of fires” (Saviano, Sforzini 2022).