City Portraits. Considerations on religious Otherness and buildings of worship between intercultural legal spaces and new semantic mappings

Starting from a study of the semiotic concept of the city as a closed text, stratified and negotiated by its inhabitants, this contribution focuses on the aedes sacrae as monument-logos that reflect the different cultural- religious identities that nowadays populate modern post-secular cities. Subsequently, moving from the phenomena of ‘spatial competition’ that arise between native and non-native communities, the Swiss and Austrian controversies on the minaret are explored as well as the Italian constitutional jurisprudence on the famous anti-mosque legislation, trying to demonstrate how in its rulings the Consulta favored a ‘reified’ approach to the place of worship. Hence, finally, the starting point for proposing a semantically relational conception of the building of worship that can act as a starting point for an unprecedented rethinking of spatial arrangements through an intercultural application of law.