'Venice' is elsewhere: the Stranger's locality, or, Italian 'blackness' in twenty-first-century stagings of Othello

What happens when stagings of Othello displace the story and its ‘black’ hero to another city and cultural space in Italy? Luigi Lo Cascio’s Otello (2015) and Giuseppe Miale di Mauro’s Otello (2017) relocated the story respectively to Sicily and Napoli, resorting to regional dialects for the translations-rewritings of the text. Shakespeare’s character exchanges the exoticism of a Moor who speaks perfect English for Italian regional belongingness and accent. The essay addresses the implications of this for the ideological construction of difference. Resorting to several influential intellectuals’ envisioning of the political role of dialects in Italy, the essay discusses the way the already multi-layered idea of Othello’s ‘otherness’ is reconceptualized by the Neapolitan and Sicilian Otellos.