Morte manifesta

“Death Manifest. The Verbal-Visual Narrative of the Wall Funeral Announcement” is a thesis project based on the analysis of the phenomenon of wall funeral announcements. The book is divided into two main chapters: the first focuses on a historical investigation of the different writing practices used for the public communication of death; the second focuses on the analysis of funeral announcements, with particular attention to those produced in the Neapolitan area.

Here, the death announcement, often characterized by the presence of the deceased’s nickname in dialect, becomes a linguistic and socio-anthropological document, a synthesis of individual lives that allows us to portray an entire community and grasp the meaning of living, its rituals, and its relationships.

With the aim of documenting and preserving this phenomenon, while providing an online reference platform for scholars and enthusiasts, the project proposes the creation of a digital collection of funeral posters from the province of Naples, bringing together photographs from different private archives.