Senso dei territori. Recanati, Marca dell’Infinito

Recanati is a pretty town in central Italy, in the Marche region, to which thousands of tourists flock every year. This medieval hamlet owes its fortune to the fact that it is the birthplace of one of the greatest poets of 19th century and of all time, Giacomo Leopardi. After his death and especially in the last decades, a very effective marketing strategy has turned Leopardi into a brand. Every corner of Recanati appears as a semiotic manifesta- tion of scenes and atmospheres described by him in his poems. This article investigates the theme of tradition by analysing how a brand identity works at the scale of a territory. The theoretical stake is to discover, through an analysis based on the methodological tool of translation, how reality, i.e. the semiotics of the natural world, becomes, in Recanati, a secondary language with respect to a primary modelling language that is literature. Here, in fact, Leopardi’s texts constitute the source of the tradition, whose target is the world of life, a byt that is intertwined with them. In particular the “Hill of Infinity”, which is now a park and a vegetable garden in the frame of the promotion plan Where Infinity Begins, stands out for its ability to translate, but also to betray (tradurre and tradire), Leopardi’s famous song. An epistemological challenge also emerges, relating to the obviousness with which we tread the soils: how is Recanati the place where infinity begins? What properties are selected to mark it as such?