The Urban Body on the Mental Spaces of the World Cities: The case of the North-East Italian Territory

This paper deals with the relationship between body and space in the territory of Northeast Italy, after the economic boom in the Region, of the last forty years. We are interested in understanding what the experience of the body has become in daily habits and how the memory of the body has been modeled following the sudden change in the economic conditions of that territory. In these changes, the notion of time has been redefined, while new patterns of everyday gestures and behaviors seem to manifest themselves in direct relation to the processes of social mobility. Through a colloquium between different approaches and methodologies (the sociological text, the literary text, the empirical observation and the narrations on the territorial and social reality under investigation), we will try to draw the representation of the body in the urban space, in its consolidated daily habits. In particular, to achieve this goal, we will refer to the literary production of recent years whose protagonist (not "for setting") is the territory of the Northeast Region. Through changes in body language during the rise in the social hierarchy - described by writers during and after the years of the economic boom - we are able to gather a very fertile series of information, which reveal some details of great interest for the study of relationships between the individual, the space (private and public) and the everyday. Finally, we will try to understand how body language and certain spatial practices represent a testimony of social status and well-being achieved, and how the body and lifestyles convey emotional messages (eg, shame/pride) to the public (local society/social media, etc.) which receives and decodes them.