Il ponte Ionio-Adriatico. Un confine liquido. L’altra sponda negli autori del dispatrio

e study analyses on the narrative works of the Italian, Greek and Albanian authors of the expatriation, which focus on the relationship between Puglia and the other side of the Adriatic (Albania and Ionian Islands). A er a brief historical survey - which aims to reconstruct the events on which the novels unfold - it is underlined how the proximity between the two coasts has undergone, over the centuries, contractions and expansions turned into identity, communion, wall, frontier, otherness. e departure coincides with the common Magna Graecia roots: Lontano da Itaca, by Franco Mimmi, stops the odyssey hero in the tenth year of his return to Ithaca: he has lost all interest in life, crushed by a safe and repetitive daily life. But the departure no longer suits him: Telemachus will make the “folle volo”, a journey into the unknown whose goal is the journey itself, rather than the landing. A journey to life that also moved the Albanian exodus to the Italian coasts in 1990, in which is repeated the one of the eenth century, from which Arbëria was born: I nipoti di Scanderbeg by Artur Spanjolli and Il Mosaico del tempo grande by Carmine Abate trace this parallelism, while Ron Kubati’s works (and the documentaries La nave dolce and Anjia, 2012) insist on an aspect removed from the Italian narrative of the Albanian exodus: they escaped from a dictatorship, from absence of freedom, from impossibility to life, not only from hunger, poverty and lack of work. e comparison that Italy must establish, therefore, is not with the Italian transoceanic migration of the nineteenth- twentieth century (Lamerica di Gianni Amelio), but with the fascism. Centered on the relationship between Otranto and Corfù is the historical- noir novel Al passo delle cicogne bianche, by Leonidas Michelis, in which the search for the enigma hidden in a Byzantine icon pushes the protagonist in the Turkish occupation of Otranto, in the XV sec., and in the iconoclastic struggle, in the IX: historical moments in which the Ionian-Adriatic border becomes a barrier, and yet remains porous. e study concludes, finally, with the works of Anilda Ibrahimi, in whose echoes the epic rythm and the orality of the Albanian tradition: her Italian speaks Albanian, but only in the language of adoption she nds detachment to tell and make live a world that no longer exists. e Italian language becomes the vehicle of a cultural and identity “counterpoint” (Said), and in the Italian language the two Ionian-Adriatic shores come together again.