Lucania, Land of Fairy Tales and Cinema: Gigi Roccati’s Lucania and the Eco-Fairy-Tale Film

Giambattista Basile’s (1634–1636) Lo cunto de li cunti from the seventeenth century attests to the deep connection between fairy tales and Lucania. Basile drew from oral tradition, transcribing the folktales gathered in his travels through Southern Italy, in Campania, Puglia, and—especially—Lucania. However, Basile transformed these tales by taking inspiration from customs and rituals of the daily life of his time to criticize courtly society and literary tradition. While metamorphosis is central to fairy tales, seeing how shape-shifting is one of their dominant and characteristic wonders, the fairy tale itself has been subject to a continuous process of transformation and change. Many scholars have recently emphasized that it is at the intersection between fairy tales, media, and cultural studies that it is possible to analyze and understand the symbolic space in which these tales exist and act. How have the fairy tales collected by Basile metamorphosed in recent decades? What significant relationship exist nowadays between Pentamerone, cinema, and ecological thought? From an ecocritical perspective, reconsidering some Italian cinematic adaptations of Basile’s work, such as Francesco Rosi’s C’era una volta (1967), Matteo Garrone’s Il racconto dei racconti (2015), and Alessandro Rak et al.’s Gatta Cenerentola (2017), this chapter focuses on Gigi Roccati’s film Lucania (2019) and its ethics of interconnectedness and interdependence between humans and nature, which appear to be crucial for overcoming individual and collective traumas.