The sub-project examines literary and cinematic narratives of migration in the Italian narrative community in order to analyze the aesthetic staging of invective social conflicts since the beginning of the 20th century. The project asks how invectives are narratively functionalized, how social conflicts, political identifications and cultural scripts are negotiated and made plausible in the media, and which historical discourse politics, knowledge regimes and affective dynamics underpin this.

The Venetian Marco Polo was neither the first late medieval traveler from the Italian peninsula to undertake long journeys to distant regions of the world, nor the first to write about them. Nevertheless, he initiated a tradition that would shape a large number of travelogues written by merchants and bankers, seafarers, cartographers and other travelers after their return to Europe and the Italian peninsula until the end of the great discoveries around 1530. The research project examines these travelogues of the 15th and 16th centuries.

The project focuses on the interferences of reality and representation that develop between political, economic or social events and their representation in the media. The object of investigation is literary or cinematic narratives from the Italian cultural sphere that explicitly deal with the political reality of the country.