Art and climate change communication: a promising synergy

1 INTRODUCTION The Master's degree that I am concluding with this thesis – despite being irrevocably marked by the pandemic that we are still struggling to overcome after more than two years – has been surprisingly rich in stimuli from unexpected contexts. Between the first and second year, a renewed interest towards sustainability prompted me to ask myself the tipycal questions that spontaneously arise as soon as one starts exploring this kind of topic. The first one had to do with the apparent indifference or lack of interest with which most people approached environmental issues, almost as if it were a matter of social desirability or a trendy theme, and not because it was actually a pressing emergency. Once I finished my exams, I moved to Venice to attend an internship at an artistic organisation in the city: there, I had the opportunity to get to know a place whose extraordinariness made it extremely popular all over the world. Venice is a city with a fascinating history and origins, and its territorial specificities and geographical location have always played a major role in defining its identity. Today, it still functions in a totally different way to any other Italian city: life has the rhythm of water and land, a slow pace unconstrained by wheels of any kind. Its majestic slowness contrasts with the overwhelming amount of people who every day reach the city for tourism, work or study, who crowd the Calatrava, the Ponte degli Scalzi and the beginning of Strada Nuova, only to get lost in the city's labyrinth and get in the way of the Venetians' swift pace, who know the tangle of calli by heart and are hardly enchanted by the millions of details that the city's architecture effortlessly offers at every turn. Venice is a case study in terms of sustainability for a number of reasons, and