La territorialità e i suoi confini elastici. Testimonianza odeporica e autoreferenzialità. Spunti di riflessione.

Abstract: The strong interest that Geography has for journeys and historical diaries is closely connected to the alienating adventure of going beyond and, therefore, of the transgression that this brings with it. The journey is an experience that deals with the border: territorial, metaphorical and physical dividing line, which separates the place known from the Elsewhere. In this sense, the Hodoeporic journal witnesses this experience in its existential and cultural limits. This study aims at thinking not so much about the destination, the point of arrival of each journey, but rather about the circumstance, not at all obvious, that each traveller lives from a territory marked by values and symbols that embodies his surroundings and to which he was socially educated, according to the specific aspects of his own cultural environment. The territory is, therefore, a space of influence where the cultural identification that creates the feeling of belonging starts, and it is geographically defined as territoriality. While the physical boundaries of a territory can be crossed with one step, those of its cultural signification are much more insidious because they are elastic. Yet transgressing the boundary of the “semiosphere” is an attempt that leads to the awareness of one’s own territoriality through the “different”. Thus, the boundary becomes metaphorically a mirror through which the traveller discovers himself by reflecting the Elsewhere.

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