Il Mediterraneo di Ernesto de Martino

In Ernesto de Martino’s research, the Mediterranean emerges as a historical-cultural space with constantly redefining expanded boundaries. It is recognized as a place of ancient civilizations, of cultures "related" to each other in multiple aspects. A Mediterranean in which de Martino traces and interprets, as evidenced primarily by the research he conducted in Southern Italy in the 1950s, the contents of historical memory and collective imagination: the magical-religious practices. He carries out historical-cultural comparisons that allow him to comprehend their meaning again, and to extend his investigation to that historical-geographical, symbolic, and politicaleconomic space indicated as the Euro-Mediterranean.