Bellezza. Sant'Elia: discorsi, percezioni, emozioni di uno spazio-margine

Cattedra R

;Memoli M

2021-01-01

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Abstract

Beauty, particularly that which is intrinsically associated with Cagliari's landscape, reveals itself today as a salient element of its image. An element that also transpires as an attractive value of its recent tourist success. Beauty is a perception of the spirit but it is also almost a feeling, an emotion: Sant'Elia, emerges-almost an antinomy-just from a working-class neighborhood, an urban district subject to social and spatial stigmatization in the collective imagination. By comparing an “external” representation of the neighborhood, observed mainly through the words and discourses of the press, and an “internal” representation that emerges from an experimental action-research approach that involved with the researchers the inhabitants this contribution testifies that it is possible to question and perhaps overturn the image of a neighborhood painted too often as a marginal, homogeneous and insecure place, precisely if one is to listening to the voices of the inhabitants. The gray space of negative connotation can thus be transformed into a space of beauty, of intense colors and also of normality, participating the normality and pride of its inhabitants.