Search

An unexpected "work" travel turns out to be, for the young and naive researcher, a good chance to improve his experience and make personal acquaintance with a complex reality as that of the Basque country. The destination for many years fancied in the dreams of a hopeful surfer, charmed by breakers and social antagonism, suddenly becomes the possible springboard for the more matter-of-fact ambitions of an aspiring professor. The narrative that follows will develop by crossing the different rails (interpretive paths) the writing subject experimented during this short experience with those he had built years before in his head, focusing on the potential and inevitable inconsistencies (derailments) between the mental image hypothesized in the past and the movie presently lived in. The result of this weaving will be the natural testimony of the changes in perspective the writing subject developed in the course of years.

Can the travel experience, to the eyes of a semiotician, make him reflect on the alleged capability of verbal language to give everything a form, and on the crucial role that, on the contrary, spatial languages often play, as possible pass keys for any traveller who, not sharing the local language, finds himself plunged into a meaningful space to be explored? A meaningful space is also, and above all, thick with a sense inscribed in itself by the semiotic practices that establish it such as it is, and that, in their turn, deliver it to the traveller who is able to read it and wants to interpret it by raising the game of sense which originally brought it into the world.

Travel and music are variations on a potential difference; some of Propp's (1928) categories can be applied to the analysis of a trip seen as a narrative. The travel is a communication process: the sender is the starting place, the addressee is the place of arrival, the message is the traveller, the channel is the means of transportation, the code is the map, the context is the landscape or the territory (Jakobson 1956). Erring is the essence of traveling, forgetting the end. Organized tourism, which offers the experience of moving without getting lost, and wandering, that is getting lost without moving, are the twin poles of the antinomy of travel with respect to the noise, the de-viation, to be kept in balance. The bridge is the metaphor of travel, which is the metaphor of the metaphor (trans-porting): in the place where I arrive I find another aspect of the place I came from. Displacing of senses. The landscape is the summary of the trip, and we travellers-readers give it every time a new sense, interpreting and assembling what has been written for us with what has not. We look from above at the route we wound, looking for the traces of ourselves, the balance of our being.

The industry of tourism progressively strips the travel of one of its core anthopological and existential values, namely, being a laboratory where the traveller is allowed to experiment a temporary break up of his/her habits of sedentary belonging, shielded by the planned return home. In such perspective, the non-touristic travel is one of the best ways to test the limits of one's tolerance of cultural diversity and therefore to assess the identity of one's cultural and existential 'home'. Nonetheless, modern and contemporary travel texts usually celebrate the traveller's heroic ability to pass the limits of his/her tolerance. By arguing that the above emphasis springs from the colonial wish to tame and assimilate the world and its diversity, the article aims at subverting this logic and replacing the panoramic travel literature, dominated by the subjects' will to power, with the prosopopeial (that is, based on personification) one, which tells the stories of how the things of the world, the relics from centuries of civilisation, reject the traveller and his/her desire of domestication and conquer. As an example of such a subversion the article proposes a semiotic exploration of toilets, their variety and their 'cultural resistance'.

I'm living for the holyday of my life! Graduating with flying colours in a very short time and having research interests in urban studies: is all this enough to build yourself a socially acceptable alibi to get away for one whole month to New York City? Trough the flighty gaze of a thirty-years-old female tourist from Milan, we will go through the semiotic analysis of the hyper-experiences she lived in New York global urbanism. Curious and eccentric, the protagonist of this travel will love getting lost in the boroughs, with the excuse of urban studies and of researching on a case of gentrification in Brooklyn. Almost an illusion of academic legitimation, together with the attempts to the cultural de-complexification of this new urban space, which will earn her the nickname of "wild"!

The first part of the article consists in some travel notes from the "nonexistent country", as once Jarry defined Poland. The second part is an attempt to draw some metasemiotic consequences of the impact of a different culture I was not prepared to face. I do not deny that in such cases we try to make inferences, but I believe they are always wrong. There is no cognitive, pre-existent, inborn mechanism capable to make our hypotheses always successful. Furthermore, the objects alone, which, according to some scholars, constitute the trigger of semiosis, are in themselves, as an exhausted candle, totally unable to feed it. To this purpose there exist codes: the appropriation of a town goes through a series of performances intimately tied to the language, which is the primary modelling system, and by which we recognise what is ours in the other's, making in such a way our culture and the other's mutually accessible.

Two travels that are different as for the places and environments (Brasil and China), the purpose and reason (one was for voluntary work in international cooperation, the other for tourism), the depth of the contact (one was residential, the other in ceaseless move), yet similar as for the perspective of observation, the individuation and narration of "things seen" (objects, daily occurrences, habits, events, short encounters, talks) that pile up until a salient interpretive theme appears, and becomes the access key to understanding the country itself.