Abstract

This paper has the aim to examine the connection between fiction and social report as part of a geography of the environment, using two semiotic devices that frame the relationship between text and image: the iconotext and the graphic novel. The case studies focus on the contiguity between natural landscape, industrial sites (or tourist resorts) and housing in the damaged environment of Emilia-Romagna, especially in those areas where property speculation put an end to the illusions of wealth encouraged by the economic boom. A previous example, that shares similarities with both of the abovementioned cases, can be found in the aesthetic research carried out by landscape photography from the Seventies, which describes the difficult process of constructing one's cultural and social identity for those who live in regions where costant and deteriorating environmental mutations occur.