Lands of Taste. Still-life ways in Southern Italy from the Antiquity to the XVII Century

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the cultural phenomena that led to the birth of the genre of still life painting in the modern era, focusing the attention on the dynamics that developed in Southern Italy from Antiquity to the XVII Century. Starting from the first evidence in the Pompeian painting, through a series of iconographic comparisons, it is possible to guess that this figurative tradition has been transposed and then extensively reworked by the modern Neapolitan painters of still life, with an outcome of such thickness as to give a particular prestige to the genre.The historical continuity and the success tied to these themes is undoubtedly to be traced in the traditions and customs, the knowledge, the symbolic, magic and religious rituals which the people of this region has elaborated over time in relation to food, its ways of consumption, and to the seasonal works in agriculture, fishing and hunting related to it. This cultural process has undoubtedly contributed to define and strengthen the "place identity" of those people, who, since ancient times, used the visual representation of the riches of the sea, the earth and the sky not only, with a propitiatory value - as an expression of the divine grace and of the abundance bestowed upon them - but also, even though unconsciously, as an affirmation of the identifying characters of a specific environment, of its typical food and its cultural traditions.