Decifrare "la trama che regge lo scenario": la questione regionale nella geografia politica di Pasquale Coppola

Interpreting «the Matrix Behind the Scenery»: The Regional Issue in the Political Geography of Pasquale Coppola. This short contribution aims to show some of the founding aspects of Pasquale Coppola's intellectual practice which find in the regional analysis (exclusively seen as political and political geography issues) one of the elective fields of geography research. The regional issue represents one of the main points of Coppola's reflections through which he expresses his critical view of a political geography guided by the ethics of social commitment. In the contemporary scenario of Italian geography, his attention about the regional studies is also characterized by the systematic approach towards these themes. For more then forty years, Coppola analysed the regional issue and the political-administrative frameworks either directly in some topic focused essays or under other collateral perspectives in various works not specifically devoted to these aspects. The present contribution gives an account of both perspectives via a bibliographical recostruction. From the experience of “Territorio e risorse in Campania” (1978) - which was one of the first analyses devoted to those aspects - to the basic volume “Geografia politica delle regioni italiane” (1997) till his last contributions. Coppola interpreted the regional problem as the result of multiscalar dynamics. His studies about the territories of marginality, in relation to the different scales (from Mediterranean to Italy and to the Southern of Italy) gradually focus on, at any one time, the contradictions between the traditional relation population-sovereignty-territory and the manifold definitions of state boundaries and administrative constituencies. Therefore, the region, as a topic, appears to be, according to Coppola, a strategy to talk about the disorder and to focus, at the same time, on the essential structures which create that «matrix behind the scenery» of the territories we live in.