"Da Brindisi a Lampedusa: le migrazioni via mare nella cassa di risonanza della popular music italiana"

From the landing, in 1991, of thousands of Albanese people on the Apulian coast, to the daily landings on the Calabrian and Sicilian coasts that increased starting from the 2000s, immigration by sea and the countless victims of these movements to Italy are on the daily agenda, in the collective speech of this country. To narrate this tragedy that is taking place day by day under our eyes, different communicational strategies have been adopted, depending on the media used and the political objectives pursued by the individual ‘speakers’. Without a doubt, the attention of writers, film directors and artists increasingly helped to render to this phenomenon a more profoundly human dimension, bringing the public closer to the individual tragedies. Italian popular music has actively collaborated with this sort of artistic counter-discourse, since the years of the arrival of Albanians in the ‘90s. In the present article, examples of different musical genres will be analyzed, covering most of the time frame in question. The methodology pursued will be mainly that of Imagology and of Cultural studies.