Città di sabbia. Pratiche di costruzione del senso in una località balneare

Mondello is Palermo city’s inhabitants favourite seaside resort, a long white sand strip that assumes different meanings depending on the season: during summer, when it is invaded by lido’s facilities that make an urban system of it; and during winter, when some of them are removed and it becomes a savage land, where the contact with nature can be experienced. The most important among the devices that perform this resemantization is the “capanna”, a small wooden cabin rented for the entire season to extended families with which the sandy surface is splitted, organized, oriented. A system made of streets and squares, but more than this on social relationships, those typical of a small community that transform the beach in a village. In this scenario, new identities and conflicts raise, i.e. the one between capanna owners and those who don’t have such a facility that are forced to try to set them up day after day in the only part of the beach protected by the law from any kind of license: the water’s edge. This way, an intense semiotic activity takes place on the seaside: new spaces get sense – such as Mondello-Paese and Capo Gallo’s rocks – and new identities are being constructed, in a resemantization game well represented by the semiotic square that articulates the opposition between /nature/ and /culture/, a theoretical tool that not only clarifies the semantic value of different spaces but also helps to explain the transformations of their meanings.