Identity, language and place: reassessing macabre and funeral places as sites of cultural promotion from dark tourism to the interdisciplinary project ‘tutTO sotTO’

Abstract

This article aims to turn a critical lens on the connection between identity, language and place by looking at the idea of dark tourism and dark sites, in particular cemeteries, whose wealth of material and immaterial culture suggests a reflection on memory, and in parallel fuels a social and economic promotion of local communities. Such an argument stems from an interdisciplinary two-year research project entitled ‘tutTO sotTO’, which aimed to unveil some apparently bizarre aspects of Turin’s heritage to encourage a rethinking of the overlapping between identity, territory and memory. Drawing from different dis- ciplines such as tourism, cultural studies and discourse analysis, the paper examines the emergence of dark tourism, identifying its theoretical context, linguistic strategies and inner tensions, and then focuses on the specific case of Turin’s Monumental Cemetery, discussing some of its complex narratives, from the tombs of WWI English soldiers, the mausoleum of an Anglo-Italian poet to the grave of an Ethiopian princess dating back to the colonial time.