Refiguring Italian Cultural Quarters: "Il Ghetto di Venezia. 500 anni di vita" [The Venice Ghetto. 500 Years of Life] (Film by Emanuela Giordano, 2015) and "Primavere e Autunni" [Springs and Autumns] (Graphic Novel by Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte, 2015)

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.