Per una semiotica degli eventi. Analisi del caso ''Ustica''

From a semiotic perspective on the study of cultural memory, this article deals theoretically and methodologically with the category of event, with a case study on the so-called “strage di Ustica” (Ustica massacre, a plane crash that happened in Italy in June 27, 1980). In the first part of the article, I will describe how interpretative and generative semiotics dealt with the notion of “event”. In particular, I will look at how in the 1960s and 1970s Eco and Greimas tackled the topic in their writings but without elaborating it further. Hence, I will elaborate a hypothesis on how to think events semiotically and how to analyze them, as historical, public or media events. In the second part, the article will develop a semiotic analysis of the Ustica event, looking at how it was narrated in the news (in particular on newspapers) during the 1980s, based on a corpus of 766 articles from La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.