Come si fa una cucina regionale. Semiotica del gusto e gastrosfera siciliana

This chapter deals with the theme of regional cuisine in a semiotic key and introduces a specific case of analysis: Sicilian gastronomy. After a brief reconstruction of the historical, anthropological and social studies that have dealt with the subject, the chapter proceeds to the composition of a corpus of Sicilian recipe books that will be the subject of analysis in the rest of the volume. From a semiotic point of view, the textual genre of the regional cookbook constitutes one of the main vehicles for the construction and circulation of regional kitchens and represents, in addition to being a complex and challenging object of analysis, also a tool for the political construction of regionality: the cookbook selects and filters pertinences of different order (actors, times, spaces) corresponding to different points of view and values.