Naples in Antonella Cilento's Narrative: "un corpo di animale antico" ("an ancient animal's body"). Per la pubblicazione, si vada al sito https://issuu.com/dida-unifi/docs/crossdisciplinary_approaches_to_italian_urban_spac

The book series, “Contromano”, in which the novel is included, is dedicated to describing some of the Italian cities such as Turin, Palermo, Trieste, Florence, and Naples (Naples has been illustrated not only by Antonella Cilento, but also by Massimiliano Virgilio, in his book entitled Porno ogni giorno. Viaggio nei corpi di Napoli, 2009) . This book series, “Contromano”, focuses on the cultural connections between prose narratives, especially autobiographic novels, and a range of urban environments; it also aims at exploring how the themes of memory and identity have changed in these past few years, as well as how the cultural movement of Postmodernism and contemporary sensibility have affected notions of canonicity and genre in the creation of urban space narratives. In Napoli sul mare luccica, the protagonist (the writer herself) wonders the streets of her city like a contemporary flâneuse, reflecting on its history, tradition, and current state – her childhood memories mix with today’s busy urban life. Her agile and direct prose is stimulating, the texture of her page is rich and wittily thought-provoking. The city’s different areas, each with their own set of social and linguistic codes, are absorbed by the global metropolis, without ever losing their essential characteristics. Therefore, to the reader’s eye, Naples is the real protagonist, with its geomorphic configuration and urban structure, with its peculiarities, limits, and huge potential. Thus, literary space is urban space, and urban space is life space, a sort of mirror which reflects people’s thoughts and feelings from a millenary tradition, with its problems, struggles, defeats and successful results. Cilento’s work elicits not only solid, rational considerations, but also an emotional response, by deconstructing Naples’ oleographic images and, at the same time, revealing a new symbology, a mixture of anatomy, geology, and alchemy, if I may say so, based on the metaphor of an animal body and, at the same time, on the four elements – fire, water, air and earth, according to the Greek philosophers of the “arché”.