Meraviglie nel Meridione d’Italia: lo sguardo degli intellettuali nordici medievali

In the 12th and 13th centuries, southern Italy became fully involved in a political debate on the legitimacy of royal powers. Northern intellectuals describing southern Italy manifested, on the one hand, an explicit program of appropriation of imagery and, on the other, projected onto the territories inhabited by the otherness of antiquity a vision that seems to partly substantiate a constellation defined by Scotti as «Mediterranean Gothic». In this article, we offer a brief overview of the representation of the wonders of southern Italy in the works of northern authors.