Abstract

This article aims to question the construction of the filmic landscape of the Southern and Sardinian Italian rural communities around the sixties. Two films, Banditi a Orgosolo by Vittorio De Seta and Salvatore Giuliano by Francesco Rosi, reflect on landscape as a theme and subject, but most of all as an aesthetic and sensory experience which addresses cultural and historical issues, such as spatial identity or modes of inhabiting, and the cinematographic presence of landscape itself. The anthropological concept of «landscape as conversation» helps to grasp the specific work of the two films on the rural Mezzogiorno.