L’italica, etno-avventurosa vulgata del mare 1940-2000

Between the first and second half of the twentieth century, a literature of mingled origins and nature springs in opposition to an Italian Anthropology not too focused on the marine dimension. It is the answer to the "need for the sea" that the industry, the cultural one too, instilled in large layers of the population, being them middle and lower class, as a result of the strong push to consumerism that followed the economic boom and subsequently identifies in the marine dimension a new and thriving business. The publication of technical manuals in order to explain to these "new Neptune" how to swim, dive, fish, sail, surf, drive a motorboat go hand in hand with naturalistic, historical and cultural monographs together with encyclopaedic works. Tales of navigation and of maritime and coastal peoples also encompass elements with a strong ethnographic connotation. This context paves the way to authors with a complex and composite background: writers, journalists, photographers, documentary filmmakers, underwater fishermen, archaeologists, biologists, navigators and sailors who, in their expeditions to the seas around the globe, discover an ethnographic vein, a penchant for observation, often the result of the long time spent on the field. The authors we are specifically dealing with, certainly contribute to document an important object of investigation: the sea, in which Italian professional anthropologists were little interested.