Introduction: For a New ecology of the Gaze in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Over the past few decades, as we have entered the new millennium, Italian cinema has undergone a fairly apparent transformation, and yet one that was somewhat announced in the early 1990s. If we were to try and give a panoramic picture of such national cinema in this new stage of its development, we would have to observe a frequent tendency to rewrite space, both the one we inhabit in a difficult daily relationship between inside and outside, city and country, culture and nature, and the one we conceive as a generally termed Southern space of the world in its diverse articulations, as landscape and as environment in both natural and cultural terms.