Physical places and cartographies of memory. Notes on Sicilian landscape in Tornatore's cinema

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Sicilian tetralogy elevates many of the island’s locations within the cinematic imagery. Each landscape evokes its own double in his memory, so much so that even movies shot outside the island look Sicilian. This contribution proposes an itinerary through the shooting locations, combining the physicality of the landscapes with their projection on the screen, to preserve not just the material places, but the specific and unique relationship existing between those and their own cinematic portrayal. Tornatore builds an island-simulacrum by deconstructing tangible places of Sicily, to bring them together on the screen like tiles of an imaginary mosaic. Indeed, this representation seems to be linked not to real places, but to cartographies of his memory that oneirically mix different pieces.