L'insularità tra teoria geografica e archetipo culturale.

The first research line in geography connected to insularity intented to find out if specific social forms and spatial organisations where associated to isolation as a phisycal data. Bruhnes saw in every island a small “whole” of mankind and insularity became to him a universal heuristic criteria. Nevertheless, a few years after, research underwent an abrupt change of direction, following the statement of possibilism by Vidal de La Blache. Febvre fierce criticized the geographers looking for a supposed “law of the islands”: his lesson was accepted in his more radical implications and lent to the ostracism even of the word insularity itself. Insularity is a rich concept, but ambiguous as well: the island transcend his own physicalness of land surrounded by water, to become a universal archetype, and yet variable according to civilizations, ages, cultures. Insular identity is born from the connection with the territorial rule, identifiable with the continent, in a use of exchanges and flows. Therefore, seems necessary to demolish the trlilogy “island-insularity-isolation” and to go beyond the idea that an insular environment, for the simple fact of existing, produces nothing but costs. The archetype of island always took up a privileged role in western literary production. To classical culture island had an intimate relationship with sacred: you have only to think about the Homeric poems. To the Middle Ages island spoke the language of the hereafter: wonderful and terrible. To Renaisssance islands where the location privileged by the speculation of the utopians. In modern and contemporary times insular symbology assumed a nature each time more ambivalent: the island is enchanted and damned at the same time, it is mysterious, elusive and deceiving; it calls to the adventure, but hides a dark side. It spreads cuoples of dicotomic concepts: privacy and isolation, control and captivity, protection and tyranny. The island is a paradox. It is a prison privating of freedom or a paradise protecting against the uglyness of the outside world. An insular context can house the aberrations of colonialism, as well as the surreal demension of a children’s tale, it can be the case of sensuality or the penalty to the most distressing loneliness. Anyway, the theme of insularity, hanging between geographic theory and literary suggestion, keeps on being strongly evocative and fascinating, perhaps inescapable for the western thought.