Le utopie smarrite della 'Bagnoli jungle' nella rappresentazione delle arti visive

Visual arts are an extremely effective media to represent urban environments and the inhabited landscape. The paper aims at analyzing how photography, documentaries and motion pictures have represented the Bagnoli neighborhood which today, after twenty years of unattended plans, appears to be a miniaturized shrinking city. Speculative interests have decreed, throughout the Twentieth century, the environmental destruction of one of the most powerful places in the Naples' area, with a neglected tourism vocation. With the glorious factory as the background or main focus of the narrative, through photographic and cinematographic points of view, the history of an anomalous periphery in one of Italy's greatest unused areas appears with a unique evocative strength. In the case of Bagnoli the photographic and cinematographic points of view caught, rather significantly, the relevance of misfunctions, the loss of identity of a proletary neighborhood, as well as a will of redemption.