From a semiotic perspective on the study of cultural memory, this article deals theoretically and methodologically with the category of event, with a case study on the so-called “strage di Ustica (Ustica massacre, a plane crash that happened in Italy in June 27, 1980). In the first part of the article, I will describe how interpretative and generative semiotics dealt with the notion of “event”. In particular, I will look at how in the 1960s and 1970s Eco and Greimas tackled the topic in their writings but without elaborating it further. Hence, I will elaborate a hypothesis on how to think events semiotically and how to analyze them, as historical, public or media events. In the second part, the article will develop a semiotic analysis of the Ustica event, looking at how it was narrated in the news (in particular on newspapers) during the 1980s, based on a corpus of 766 articles from La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.

The polarization masculine/feminine which, in the 1980s, shaped the representation of sexuality and the body in the discourse of fashion – both in the delimitation of market segments (“Pour homme”/ “Pour femme”) and in the semantic positioning of the terms of the category of sexuality – dropped in the 1990s, under the impulse of new proposals that appealed to a new conceptualization of a more inclusive sexuality (in line with the newborn Queer Theory). The advertising campaign for the fragrance Calvin Klein One exemplifies this process; it is hereby analyzed with the aim to provide a paradigmatic example of such a shift in perspective, concerning the themes of sexuality and body representation. The analysis considers several aspects of the campaign and makes a diachronic comparison with other previous advertising campaigns from the same fashion house; thus, the innovation and shift from a separatist and stereotyping paradigm to a more inclusive and neutralizing one are even more highlighted.

The new protagonists of TV series, in recent years productions, are not any more “heroes without blemish and without fear”, but “complex” antiheroes. They are characters more and more realistic. This effect is obtained through the fictional representation of their particularly cruel and immoral behaviors. But which kind of narrative devices allows the viewer to stand and accept the wrong behaviors of these rough characters? This essay will start from Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s (2013) thesis, trying to show how the dialectics between realistic narrative content and a fictional (melodramatic) way of representation could be the key concept to understand the viewer’s engagement. That is, the principal aim of the essay is to outline how viewers engage with the protagonists of strongly realistic, uncanny and disturbing TV series. The Italian TV series "Gomorra" will be taken into account as a specific case-study. As a matter of fact, this TV series has been widely criticized specifically for its strong and almost disturbing realism.

The essay aims at relating the outcomes of a multidisciplinary research project focused on the relationship between a specific kind of social discourse, such as advertising, and the concept of “media memory”. Through the analysis of concrete examples of commercials, we have tried to outline a composite field of studies ranging from semiotic studies on individual and cultural memory, to the role mass media play in defining a collective memory, up to the processes of interpretation that the reader/user activates to understand texts which create a network of references to our past.

The article, by proving the importance of the analogy in the diagrams, aims to refute some of Jacques Bertin’s reflections within the field of graphics, with specific regard to what he stated in Sémiologie Graphique. It will be made use of the theoretical model provided by Louis Hjelmslev about the strata of the language, in order to better understand the scientific approach held by the French cartographer while studying the graphics. A section of the essay will therefore focus on the premises at the core of Bertin’s argumentation, according to which every graphic is based upon a symbolic relation to its content (sign as equivalence). Practical consequences depending on such a view of the discipline will be also taken into account and discussed. By referring to the topic of the analogy, a new interpretation of the discipline will be submitted in attempting to emancipate it from a theory which appears to be too strict, especially on the practical side. Once the iconic nature of the diagrams will be proven, as Charles Peirce argued, an alternative terminology will be introduced. The aforesaid terminology, coherently defined from what discussed, is intended to become an effective tool to (i) implement the means available to study and critique the graphics and (ii) to identify and widen the expressive potentiality of the diagrammatic language.

L’articolo propone un’analisi semiotica dello spot della campagna ministeriale #ioleggoetu, operando un confronto tra i valori messi in scena nella narrazione audiovisiva con quelli proclamati dalla comunicazione a stampa. L’analisi delle strutture semionarrative del messaggio pubblicitario, assieme a cenni di marketing esperienziale e al commento di alcuni dati significativi estratti dal rapporto AIE 2016 sulla lettura, ci consentirà di verificare l’efficacia e la coerenza valoriale della campagna promossa dal MiBACT.