The new section of the memoryscapes.it platform is entitled 'Sguardi del Sud', the project of the Home Movies Foundation-National Family Film Archive of Bologna which makes the private films of Italians available online, which since 2002 the Foundation has collected, preserved, restores and digitizes to make the richness of private film heritage accessible to all.
There are over 400 films shot between the 1930s and 1980s, selected by the Foundation in collaboration with the University of Catania and with the "Archives of the South" project, which provide a cross-section of the South through the "bottom-up" gaze of the population, of tourists and also of scholars and anthropologists: from the miracle of San Gennaro to the funeral of the Sorceress of Serradarce, from the processions for Santa Rosalia to the images shot by immigrants returning to their land, the films of "Sguardi del Sud" make up a journey among the rites and myths of Southern Italy, an unprecedented anthropological and ethnographic journey, cultivated by the gaze of filmmakers, among beliefs, rituals and popular traditions.
The most represented cities are Palermo, Naples, Catania, Trapani and Messina. The numerous patronal feasts are correlated with visits to sanctuaries and places of worship: from the festive images of the Madonna of Pedigrotta in 1969 to that of the Feast of San Rocco, of the rows of barefoot faithful for Santa Rosalia, up to the miracle of San Gennaro and a colorful celebration of Sant'Agata in 1963, patron saint of the Etna capital, with the parade of baroque candlesticks in the Piazza del Duomo and Piazza Stesicoro in Catania. The theme of 'nostos' emerges, emigrants or children of emigrants who return to the South, to stay or to find their family, and film it, fixing on film the memory of their origins, but the rural and peasant dimension, now lost, is also documented , as well as the urban and suburban landscapes of the large cities of the South, filmed by filmmakers - local or on holiday - very often before their building upheaval, mass tourism or at the height of their social vitality.