DIMORANZA: Manifesto for a Ubiquitous Civilization

There is a word the English language had not yet pronounced. Now it exists. DIMORANZA is the condition by which a place keeps inhabiting a person from within, and their children, and their children's children, across the ocean and across the centuries. It is not nostalgia, and it is not exile. It is the quiet power of a small town to write its own code into the nervous system of all who descend from it, even those who have never seen it. In this ambitious treatise, the fruit of ten years of research, Luca Cervadoro argues that the small villages of Italy, and of every land touched by emigration, are not dying peripheries but identity servers, always running, in the lives of millions of descendants scattered across the world. From a single town in Calabria, Maida, he builds a theory that speaks to anyone who has ever felt they belong to a place they cannot fully explain. Across ten essays, DIMORANZA moves from the senses to the soul: - why a flavour your grandmother cooked can move you to tears before you know its name (neurogastronomy and involuntary memory) - why the descendant who returns is not a tourist but an Ontological Stakeholder of the town - how diasporas can become a living form of capital for the places they left - what Maori whakapapa, Navajo hozho and Welsh hiraeth reveal about a structure all humanity shares >Erudite yet intimate, DIMORANZA is in conversation with Proust and Jung, Eliade and Carlo Rovelli, written in a triple register of rigorous scholarship, civic urgency and personal storytelling. It is a manifesto for a new way of understanding identity in the age of global migration: not by blood, not by soil, but by the code a place leaves inside us. For those who left. For those who never came. For those searching for a word that did not exist. If you carry roots you cannot forget, or a homeland you have never visited, this book finally gives your feeling a name.

Pages: 173, Paperback, Independently published