Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce) [A Critical ed.] 1498566014, 9781498566018

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Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI

Advisory Board: Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe University, Turkey; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Julia Tofantšuk, Tallinn University, Estonia; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Recent Titles The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction, edited by Mario Wenning and Nandita Batra Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), Gianni Celati, A Critical Edition, edited, translated, and introduced by Patrick Barron Gender and Environment in Science Fiction, edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia M. Bora Confronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward, by Rebecca Young Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education, edited by Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, edited by Reinhard Hennig, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by Christopher Schliephake

Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), by Gianni Celati A Critical Edition Edited, translated, and introduced by Patrick Barron

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1989. First published as Verso la foce in Januaray 1989 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, Italy. Franco Arminio. “Introduzione alla paesologia.” Viaggio nel cratere. Milan: Sironi Editore. 2003. 13–19. Translated and published by permission of Franco Arminio. Massimo Rizzante. “Camminare nell’aperto incanto del sentito dire: Due riflessioni su Verso la foce.” in Riga 28: Gianni Celati. Eds. Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi. Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 2008. Translated and published by permission of Massimo Rizzante. West, Rebecca. Gianni Celati’s La strada provinciale delle anime: A “Silent” Film about “Nothing.” Romance Languages Annual 4.1 (1992): 367–74. Reprinted by permission of Rebecca West. Serenella Iovino. Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhibitation and the Po Valley. In The Bioregional Imagination. Ed. T. Lynch, C. Glotfelty, and K. Armbruster. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 100–17. Thomas Harrison. “A Tale of Two Giannis: Writing as Rememoration.” Annali d’Italianistica: Italian Critical Theory 29 (2011): 269–89. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Harrison. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Celati, Gianni, 1937– author. | Barron, Patrick, 1968– editor. Title: Towards the river’s mouth = (Verso la foce) : a critical edition / by Gianni Celati ; [edited by] Patrick Barron. Other titles: Verso la foce. English Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2018] | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043743 (print) | LCCN 2018053902 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498566025 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498566018 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Celati, Gianni, 1937—Travel—Italy—Po River Valley. | Po River Valley (Italy)— Description and travel. | Celati, Gianni, 1937– Verso la foce. | Celati, Gianni, 1937—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC DG975.P7 (ebook) | LCC DG975.P7 C4513 2018 (print) | DDC 914.5/204928— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043743 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Figures

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Patrick Barron

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Towards the River’s Mouth Gianni Celati

1

1 Gianni Celati’s Towards the River’s Mouth: The Experience of Place between Writing and Photography Marina Spunta 2 Sight, Language, Time: To be Surrounded by the World Monica Seger 3 Gianni Celati’s Strada provinciale delle anime: A “Silent” Film about “Nothing” Rebecca West 4 The Posthuman Imagination of Gianni Celati’s Cinema Matteo Gilebbi 5 Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley Serenella Iovino 6 Forms of Impegno in Towards the River’s Mouth Michele Ronchi Stefanati

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77 89

101 117

127 143

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Contents

7 Witnessing the Po River: Disorientation and Estrangement in Primo Levi and Gianni Celati Damiano Benvegnù 8 A Tale of Two Giannis: Nihilism, Appearances, and Writing as Rememoration Thomas Harrison 9 Walking in the Open Enchanted by the Overheard: Two Reflections on Towards the River’s Mouth Massimo Rizzante 10 Introduction to Paesology Franco Arminio

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Figures

Fig. 0.1 Fig. 0.2

Ritratto di Gianni Celati, 1984 (Portrait of Gianni Celati, 1984), by Luigi Ghirri.

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Italia (Italy) (Corbetta, n.d.). Map from the mid1800s that highlights the immense Po Valley watershed and the mountains that define it. The arcuate (fan-shaped) Po Delta is located between Comacchio and Venice, just to the right of the ships at the northern end of the Adriatic.

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Detail of map of northern Italy (Northern Italy, n.d.), circa mid- to late 1800s, showing many of the towns and areas of the Po River Valley described in Verso la foce, including the onceextensive Valli di Comacchio (Comacchio lowlands), an area of brackish lagoons just south of the delta, most of which, as Celati describes it, was channeled and filled in over the centuries, especially during fascist-era reclamation projects.

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Contarina (Verso la foce del Po) (Contarina [Towards the Mouth of the Po]), by Luigi Ghirri, 1988.

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Fig. 0.5

Grandi Valli Veronesi, by Luigi Ghirri.

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Fig. 0.6

Ostiglia, Centrale eletrica (Ostiglia, electric power plant), by Luigi Ghirri.

Fig. 0.3

Fig. 0.4

Fig. 0.7

Casinalbo, by Luigi Ghirri. vii

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Fig. 0.8

Figures

Argine Agosta, by Luigi Ghirri.

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Acknowledgments

It has been many years from the time that the thought first entered my head of translating Verso la foce, with numerous sidetracks leading me elsewhere, even if often to nearby or overlapping territories. For this reason and others, I am glad to see the publication of Towards the River’s Mouth, especially with the welcome company of so many kindred voices. I am grateful to Gianni Celati for his trust in me, his encouragement, and his patience. My thanks also go to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for their support of this project; to Nida Caselli for her patient and generous help in revisiting tricky passages in the translation; to the contributors of the accompanying scholarly essays for their hard work and keenness; to Adele Ghirri, Maria Fontana, and the Luigi Ghirri Foundation for their help in locating and for granting permission to reprint a number of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs in the book; and to the many other people who have given me encouragement, vivacious or otherwise, along the way, including Gillian Haley, Rebecca West, Silvia Ross, John Welle, Michael Lettieri, Scott Slovic, Michael Branch, Jonathan Skinner, Christopher Johnson, Cheryll Glotfelty, Manuela Mariani, Piero Barron, and Giacomo Barron.

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Introduction Patrick Barron

Gianni Celati was born in 1937 in Sondrio, moved soon after to Trapani and Belluno, and then, a few years after the end of World War II, to Ferrara in the Po River Valley, his parents’ native region and the inspiration for Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth) and other books and films (Palmieri 2011, 86–87). 1 Widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary Italian writers, Celati first became known for fiction associated with the neoavant-garde of the late 1960s that focused on unstable identities and the socially marginalized in books noted for their disjointed, experimental language. His writing later moved toward minimalism, demonstrating a wariness of institutions while compassionately examining contemporary society in the context of cultural landscapes. He taught at the University of Bologna for a number of years, had visiting professorships at the University of Caen, Cornell University, The University of Chicago, and Brown University, and spent extended periods travelling across the US, West Africa, and Europe, including England, where he moved in the mid-1980s. Italo Calvino ([1971] 2008) early on praised his work, calling Celati “an extraordinary personality, an elaborator of literary theory and polemicist, whose proposals and rich references and suggestions are inexhaustible” (168). According to Paul Bailey (1989), Celati’s “unusual talent is among the most impressive in contemporary Italian letters” (40), and to Pasquale Verdicchio (2015), Celati is “arguably the most visually interested and active contemporary Italian writer today” (62). Marco Belpoliti (2016) makes the case that while Celati is “the most literary of all contemporary Italian writers,” he is also one who “aspires to something that resides beyond literature, or perhaps before it” (xi). Rebecca West (2000) claims that “Celati’s work, which is like an apprenticeship in its continued investigation of the potential and limits of the act of writing, succeeds . . . in making the world more xi

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livable, for it consistently seeks to bring everyday life and literature closer together” (12). Robert Lumley emphasizes that Celati’s work shows “a desire to return to the business of living rather than an escape from it. The stakes are high because the eco-system itself (and this, for Celati, includes language too) is at risk” (Celati 1990, 40). And, as Monica Seger (2015) puts it, “the physical and social landscapes are one and the same for him; individual experience and the external world are intimately connected. The message behind his work is that if we do not observe the world at hand closely we are likely not only to destroy it but also to lose our connection to self” (70). From his first published work Comiche (Slapstick silent films, 1971), for which Calvino wrote the postface, to award-winning books such as the 1972 Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi) and the 1985 Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains, 1989), Celati’s reputation has consistently grown. At present he has written over sixteen books and numerous critical essays, and produced four films, three of which focus on the Po Valley—Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of the Souls, 1991), Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri (The World of Luigi Ghirri, 1999), and Case sparse—Visioni di case che crollano (Scattered Houses—Visions of Collapsing Houses, 2002). He has also translated many books from French and English—from Balzac’s Droll Stories (1967), Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1980), Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (1991), Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1993), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1997), to most recently, Joyce’s Ulysses (2013). In 2016, his collected works Romanzi, cronache e racconti (Novels, Accounts and Stories) was published in Mondadori’s Meridiani series. A rich body of critical articles, reviews, and monographs has grown up around his work, supported in part by the increasing number of translations of his books into German, English, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, French, and other languages. With his long-sustained interest in perceiving and narrating the external world, he has become one of the most fascinating contemporary Italian writers to translate the complex spatial relations of a variety of postmodern landscapes into compelling stories, essays, and films that affectionately describe the most ordinary of places. The entangled activities of translation, rewriting, and retelling are integral to Celati’s affectionate and vivacious if also candid and unsweetened engagement with the surrounding world in his overlapping guises of storyteller, essayist, translator, editor, and filmmaker. He rejects the notion of an isolated individual author and demonstrates how reading and writing texts—whether books, films, photographs, or landscapes—constantly overlap. Regardless of the genre or medium in which he works, Celati shows how all writing can be viewed as a form of translation understood as a process of surrendering, transforming, and delivering—with the translator a part of the rewritten and interpreted text. In his rewriting of his own texts and those of other authors,

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he is thus also rewriting himself, and in the process, encouraging readers to also rewrite themselves and other texts. This embrace of a collective interchange of story-making relies on what he calls in his preface to Narratori delle riserve (Narrators of the Reserves), “ways to rediscover reserves of things to read by way of writing, always with the sense of something already experienced or felt, or in other words, not revealed for the first time” (1992, 10). Celati’s first books, beginning with Comiche in 1971 and running through the rest of the decade—including the comic trilogy Le avventure di Guizzardi, La banda dei sospiri (The Gang of Sighs, 1976), and Lunario del paradiso (Almanac of Paradise, 1978)—share a focus on marginalized characters, exuberant, unruly language, and disaffection from social norms. They also call attention to fictions that underlie shifting mixes of personal and societal beliefs, stories that we habitually fabricate in order to survive. If in his early writings Celati is drawn to the interior worlds of characters and their immediate surroundings, in his later work he expands his attention outward to include the multifarious aspects of teeming, common, close-at-hand land-

Figure 0.1. Ritratto di Gianni Celati, 1984 (Portrait of Gianni Celati, 1984), by Luigi Ghirri. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

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scapes. In his essay “Il bazar archeologico” (The Archeological Bazaar), he emphasizes the importance of the periphery or margin, and proposes “a spatial form of historical recognition” and a “wandering quête [search], spatialization, and flânerie [sauntering], an uninterrupted encounter with the molecular places of a heterotopic city where residues of externality float to infinity” (1975, 219). Later he adds that “there is no reason to make of History a temporal field rather than a spatial one, when the search for individual identity is substituted with the recognition of pure exteriority in relation to ourselves and our origins. It is exactly in those spaces—marginalized or simply ignored by memory-tradition—that there resides the difference without which history is tautology” (221). In Celati’s earlier books these and related ideas are manifested in characters who incessantly wander, but who are still more directed towards individual identity than exteriority. In later work there emerges, as Luigi Ghirri (1985) describes it, a rare “attention, neither fragmentary nor superficial, for images of the external world,” containing “a singular extremely personal synthesis of seeing and listening” (24). As Celati (1998) puts it, “one of the transitions, or changes, was that of shifting myself to the external, towards exteriority, and of becoming used to small, scattered attentions: in this way there was also the substitution of one form of listening with another, in which there also entered seeing, no longer disconnected from listening” (33). This emphasis in Celati’s writing on the external world, while detectable in earlier work such as Finzioni occidentali (Western Fictions, 1975), became more noticeable starting with a number of journeys that he took in the early 1980s across the Po Valley with Ghirri and other photographers on a project that resulted in the book Viaggio in Italia (Journey in Italy, 1984)—a collection of photographs of everyday Italian landscapes with an introduction by art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and an account by Celati called “Verso la foce: reportage per un amico fotografo” (Towards the River’s Mouth: Reportage for a Photographer Friend). This piece, one of the first examples of Celati’s blurring of essay and fiction in a form of documentaristic musing on the external world, provided the basis for what was to eventually become Verso la foce, a contemplative travelogue of “stories of observation” that recount slow journeys across the Po River Valley. Intentionally wavering between objectivity and subjectivity, Celati seeks in Verso la foce and related work a form of writing that has the potential, as West (2000) puts it, to “activate new perceptual and meditative possibilities for others” (103). As Celati (1989a) states in “Fictions to Believe in, An Example,” an essay published in the same year as Verso la foce in Paesaggio Italiano (Italian landscape), a collection of photographs and essays edited by Ghirri, [w]e believe that everything that people do from morning to night is an effort to come up with a credible account of the outside world, one that will make it

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Figure 0.2. Italia (Italy) (Corbetta, n.d.). Map from the mid-1800s that highlights the immense Po Valley watershed and the mountains that define it. The arcuate (fan-shaped) Po Delta is located between Comacchio and Venice, just to the right of the ships at the northern end of the Adriatic.

bearable at least to some extent. We also think that this is a fiction, but a fiction in which it is necessary to believe. There are whole worlds of narrative at every point of space, appearances that alter at every blink of the eyes: they require above all a way of thinking and imagining that is not paralyzed by contempt for everything around us. (33)

At the core of both Celati’s and Ghirri’s similar philosophical approaches to describing the landscape—whether through writing or photography—is a deep affection for the external world and a renewed sense of simultaneous perceptual awakening and immanent dying, as if one were seeing the landscape, as Ghirri (1989) states, for “the first and last time” (18). This is combined with a heightened awareness for the “fantastic,” a term that Ghirri adapts from Roger Caillois, referring to “apparitions,” or the sudden, fleeting appearances of a “fabulous” or “marvelous world” “in the heart of a thoroughly investigated universe from which it was believed that mystery had been banished forever” (17). Many of Ghirri’s photographs are of ordinary, undramatic landscapes, often with human figures who face the background. These figures provide scale, direct attention outward, across and into the image, and, as Ghirri puts it, give “back a sense of space” (20). Ghirri’s

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Figure 0.3. Detail of map of northern Italy (Northern Italy, n.d.), circa mid- to late 1800s, showing many of the towns and areas of the Po River Valley described in Verso la foce, including the once-extensive Valli di Comacchio (Comacchio lowlands), an area of brackish lagoons just south of the delta, most of which, as Celati describes it, was channeled and filled in over the centuries, especially during fascist-era reclamation projects.

subjects vary from aging farm buildings, roadside bars, and nondescript beach houses to, as Celati (1989a) notes, stereotyped villas which would never have attracted a normal photographer’s attention, in that we see them as boring, as representing a world without interest. . . . In these monotonous little houses Ghirri has discovered a regularity of lines, symmetries, and colors that people have used in an attempt to decorate the everyday void as best they can. He has discovered that, when observed head on, they can stimulate the mind and the imagination just as much as a famous monument. (32)

Celati similarly chooses in Verso la foce to focus on ordinary places and human artifacts, finding in their minute yet usually overlooked details an endless source of interest and meaning—remaining aware of the need not to try to grasp onto images as if they were something to gather and store away somewhere. As he notes in an interview with Manuela Teatini, in which he discusses a unifying, collective sense of space, images are only appearances—that is, phenomena of light, nothing of substance. All that we are able to ask of images is to leave things and people in their space, to make us feel their distance. This is the sentiment of space. Space

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Figure 0.4. Contarina (Verso la foce del Po) (Contarina [Towards the Mouth of the Po]), by Luigi Ghirri, 1988. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

has a unitary sense, an affective tonality, because it is the tone of nearby things and distant things, and it is in this way that we orient ourselves in the world. When you lose this sense of distance, images take on the sense of things to capture, and are used to annihilate the space around things and people. (1991, 27)

In a related comment on Ghirri’s photographs that helps to explain his own approach to describing the landscape in writing, Celati (1989a) states that by lowering “the threshold of his account to the point where he is able to eliminate any reference to the unusual and to the topical,” Ghirri is able to “give much more emphasis to the slightest variations in color, to the barest nuances, to the outlines of things, and above all to his extraordinary way of conceiving the picturing of the external world” (33). Both Ghirri’s images and Celati’s accounts, which initially may seem to describe very little, soon surprise with a multiplicity of subtle traces and patterns that underlie basic tenets of humanity in close relation to place. An expression that Ghirri uses to characterize Celati’s work is apt in describing both Celati’s stories and Ghirri’s own photographs: “carezze al mondo” (caresses given to the world). Their art is affectionate, helping viewers to better appreciate their own surroundings, opening up places so that they become familiar and multidimensional. Akin to this affection is what Celati (2008) refers to in an interview with Rebecca West as allegria (vivaciousness), a kind of exuberance that can be mixed with pain, desperation, dreariness, even thoughts of death. The circus clowns Fellini filmed show that allegria in its mature form goes hand in hand with the acutest melancholy. Allegria is an expansive urge that does away with the gray indifference of the world, and few phenomena show so clearly the tendency of the individual human to project oneself beyond the self. In other words: allegria is a vital and basic way to go beyond the self, towards an exteriority of everything that we aren’t: things,

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Verso la foce asks us to carefully and affectionately, indeed vivaciously, examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space—in particular iterations of what Celati termed the “new Italian landscape” in which divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” (1). 2 In the nearly thirty years since Verso la foce was first published, this phenomenon of what geographer Eugenio Turri (2004) calls “space built on a diffuse urban fabric” has become even more common, symptomatic of the immense “megalopolis” that sprawls over vast portions of the Po Valley, growing in intensity near larger urban centers, which are connected by often unbroken strips of urban growth along major roads (20). Stretching over 400 miles across northern Italy, the Po Valley contains nearly one third of the country’s total human population, many industries, and some of the most intensively cultivated land in Europe. Water and air pollution continue to plague the area, millions of cubic yards of sand and gravel are dredged often illegally from the riverbed, long stretches of the river’s banks are dominated by geometric plantations of poplars harvested for cellulose, and countless former small farms have been abandoned as large-scale industrial agricultural holdings have proliferated. Verso la foce traverses the valley in four narrative sections beginning with journeys taken in the days following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and then—stepping back and forth in time—wanders downstream along levees, in and out of towns, through areas of reclaimed land, then ends in the delta. The book resists formal literary narrative structures, bringing together moments of perception, observation, and reflection with situated writing in order to render a sense of space as “multiplicity always unraveled, always unraveling” (Celati 2006, 120). The book’s various “stories of observation,” as Nunzia Palmieri (2016) describes them, “reflect the wandering gait of walking without predetermined destinations, with a slowness that allows us to focus on things we are normally not used to looking at, leaving space for the voices of others, for sounds and for silences that allow thought to move freely within a narrative fabric” (1767). As much an exploration of perception and memory as it is of place and space, Verso la foce is a series of carefully selected, often filmic observations of riverine landscapes at turns depressingly degraded and at others unexpectedly welcoming in their palimpsest entanglements of human and nonhuman presence. In Verso la foce and related work, Celati aspires to qualities, stemming from a heightened yet estranged perceptive ability, evident in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which he describes as “written and thought” with a

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Figure 0.5. Grandi Valli Veronesi, by Luigi Ghirri. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

detached gaze, in a sort of abnormal lucidity, through the precise and somewhat catatonic descriptions of the protagonist. This is the lucidity of someone not immersed in the perceptive habits of a place, the lucidity of an outsider who reconstructs everything from afar and in isolation from his contemporaries. . . . This detached gaze catapults us into a state of complete estrangement, in which the most normal things, the most ordinary habits, become new and surprising objects of study. (1997, xix)

Celati’s observational gaze indeed treats every scene as something at once immediately encountered yet also countlessly remembered. He looks for meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he writes in his introductory note to Verso la foce, “needs to liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost” (2). In his attempt to give voice to the nearly ineffable, Celati gives us a method for re-perceiving the world, for listening to its stories more closely. If we pause to intensely observe wherever we happen to be, distinctions and certainties begin to waver, from where one place ends and another begins, to where what we perceive overlaps with our perceptions, our bodies and selves. Pushed to this edge, language falters as it is also

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spurred on. As Celati (2011) puts it, “encounters with places are always unpredictable, attracting us to something we don’t know, to something we don’t know what to call” (8). In a letter to Franco Arminio, whose work also appears in this book, Celati writes of observing discrete objects of the external world as if everything had already been lost, from the point of view of someone who is an outsider everywhere, and who has given up the consoling idea of belonging to a place (2003, 7). This intense perception of the overlooked minutiae of our everyday surroundings pervades the work of both Arminio, a writer and filmmaker immersed in the infinite complexities of small settlements and their surrounding landscapes alike, as well as the work of Celati, who is similarly engrossed with what he refers to as “the infinite unraveling of things and of the world, in the thin air where everything mutates, continually taking new forms” (8). Verso la foce is in essence a series of journeys towards the Po River Delta, a place where the land falls into the sea. Not only in its descriptions of the delta, but throughout the book, myriad transitory separations dissolve into this sense of an “infinite unraveling” in which the

Figure 0.6. Ostiglia, Centrale eletrica (Ostiglia, electric power plant), by Luigi Ghirri. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

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observations of the individual melt into the overheard accounts of an encompassing immaginario (collective imagination). I first encountered Celati’s work in the mid-1990s while living in the town of Ferrara in northern Emilia Romagna where I worked as a teacher. I often biked out from the city walls across an expanse of flat land on dirt roads, past the city campground, a dump, and an animal shelter, through corn fields and along narrow murky canals, to the southern levee bordering the Po near Pontelagoscuro, where I would pedal along the river, poplar tree plantations, and scattered small settlements. The trips had no particular destination, at times in the direction of Occhiobello and others towards Fossa d’Albero, but often included a stop at a small roadside bar where I could sit and observe. When I began to read Verso la foce, memories of these wanderings came back to me, both sharpened and transmuted by Celati’s descriptions. More recent trips along the Po have been rendered similarly more intense, layered with kindred memories not wholly my own and from more distant pasts. I would like to think that my familiarity with the area, however sporadic, has helped to make this translation not only physically and mentally closer to the places the book traverses, but in some way part of the ever-evolving, surrounding immaginario with which Verso la foce is so engaged. At least this has been my intention, keeping in mind the expansive vivaciousness that Celati ([1977] 2007) describes in his introduction to Alice disambientata: materiali collettivi su Alice per un manuale di sopravvivenza (Displaced Alice: Collective Materials on Alice for a Survival Manual): Psychological explanations always speak of the individual closed within the sancta sanctorum of the self. Instead, physical and mental automatisms cause external movements that we share with others. . . . And it is exactly this exteriority when combined with allegria that causes an expansive movement that makes evident a commonality with others. It is important that this exteriority materializes as a bodily impulse, surging with desire, without the hindrance of psychology, without vigilant states of consciousness, which always have an inhibitory effect on the automatisms of the body and the mind. (10-11)

I am particularly grateful to have been able to include in this volume the illuminating essays of a number of scholars and writers, many of whom have been engaged with Celati’s work for years. Their various insights, some focused on Verso la foce, and others discussing it alongside other books and films by Celati or the work of other writers, open up myriad interpretative possibilities along welcome, often interconnecting paths. Marina Spunta’s contribution, “Gianni Celati’s Towards the River’s Mouth: The Experience of Place between Writing and Photography,” not only clarifies how Celati uses photography to call into question the often assumed objectivity of reportage and to “expose the multiplicity and contingency of our sensorial perception and our experience of the exterior” (78), but also provides a clear

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Figure 0.7. Casinalbo, by Luigi Ghirri. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

overview of the complex series of rewritings, beginning in the early 1980s, that eventually led to Verso la foce. Monica Seger’s “Sight, Language, Time: To be Surrounded by the World” also addresses visual aspects of Celati’s work, in particular his interest in how sight relates to language, time, and space. Drawing helpful parallels to the work of John Berger, one of Celati’s longtime friends and collaborators, Seger explains how Celati returns time and again, in both Verso la foce as well as other books and films, to “how the act of seeing helps us to make sense of the world and our place in it, as well as how language might then communicate that sense to others” (89). Rebecca West’s “Gianni Celati’s Strada provinciale delle anime: A ‘Silent’ Film About ‘Nothing’” discusses Celati’s first film, a project closely related to Verso la foce and made a few years after the book was published. West argues that Celati’s turn to filmmaking came about as a part of his search for a parallel art form suited to the elaboration of his narrative visions, and for ways in which we might “respond to the external appearances of things and places with full respect for their separate beingness” (113). In “The Posthuman Imagination of Gianni Celati’s Cinema,” an essay that analogously examines Celati’s respectful narrative and filmic engagement with our human and nonhuman surroundings, Matteo Gilebbi illuminates Celati’s ability to look at the world from an object-oriented, ecological perspective,

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and how his films are permeated with a posthuman ontological and ethical awareness. With parallels to West’s and Gilebbi’s attention to Celati’s visionary regard for the external world, and drawing on the work of thinkers such Gregory Bateson, Gaston Bachelard, and David Abram to elaborate what she terms “place imagination as an ecology of mind” (131), Serenella Iovino discusses in “Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley” how writers such as Celati and Ermanno Rea are capable of bringing back to life an imaginative engagement within watersheds reenvisioned as bioregions. Michele Ronchi Stefanati offers a related reading of Celati’s work, arguing in “Forms of impegno in Verso la foce” that a key to the book is its implicit impegno, or ethical and political commitment, in opposition to the negative effects of consumerism on the myriad human and nonhuman relationships within the landscape. Damiano Benvegnù’s “Witnessing the Po River: Disorientation and Estrangement in Primo Levi and Gianni Celati” also emphasizes underlying ethical and political commitment, focusing on how apparent differences between Levi’s and Celati’s explorations of the Po River Valley in various writings, upon closer inspection instead reveal testimonial narratives that encourage the development of “a more co-responsible engagement with the

Figure 0.8. Argine Agosta, by Luigi Ghirri. Copyright © Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

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environmental history of the Po River and its landscape ecology” (155). In “A Tale of Two Giannis: Nihilism, Appearances, and Writing as Rememoration,” another comparative reading, Thomas Harrison offers an extended critique of Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Appearances), a book closely related to (and written in part contemporaneously with) Verso la foce, in light of philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s articulations of pensiero debole (weak thought), part of the larger intellectual riflusso (reflux) of the 1980s. One element common to both Vattimo’s and Celati’s work at this time, Harrison argues, is the potential recuperation of “compassion for the passing on and away of things, along with a new task for the intellect: recollective, or ‘rememorative,’ thinking” (169). The reverberations of such rememorative thinking, “tracing circuits of appeal that are heard and then voiced again” (181), as Harrison puts it, are richly apparent in Massimo Rizzante’s ruminative “Walking in the Open Enchanted by the Overheard: Two Reflections on Towards the River’s Mouth.” Calling upon the work of various writers whose ideas often resonate with Celati’s—from Robert Walser and Henry Thoreau to Friedrich Hölderlin and Louis-Ferdinand Céline—Rizzante delves into two overlapping central passions in Celati’s work: an “enchantment with the infinite fullness of every thing” and a “celebration of words that pass from mouth to mouth” (188, 192). To close out the selection of essays is Franco Arminio’s “Introduction to Paesology” from Journey into the Crater, a book kindred in spirit to Verso la foce, especially in what Arminio terms “a delirious observation” (200). As in Celati’s work, “There’s no need to ask these difficult places anything. Only watching and walking are possible. These are the things that keep the mind open, that let you breathe” (200). NOTE 1. This introductory essay draws in part from a number of articles and shorter pieces that I have published on Celati’s work over the past fourteen years, including “Gianni Celati’s Verso la foce: ‘An Intense Observation of the World.’” Forum Italicum 2 (Fall, 2005): 481–97; “Gianni Celati’s Poetic Prose: Physical, Marginal, Spatial.” Italica 84.2–3 (Summer-Autumn, 2007): 323–44; and “Gianni Celati’s Voicing of Unpredictable Places.” Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Eds. Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 17–27. 2. This and all subsequent references to Towards the River’s Mouth refer to the translation in the present volume.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailey, Paul. 1989. “Other Ways of Seeing.” The Observer (Aug 6): 40.

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Belpoliti, Marco. 2016. “Gianni Celati: La letteratura in bilico sull’abisso.” In Romanzi, cronoche e racconti, by Gianni Celati and edited by Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri, xilxx. Milan: Mondadori. Calvino, Italo. (1971) 2008. “Nota a Comiche.” In Riga 28: Gianni Celati, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 168-169. Milano: Marcos y Marcos. Celati, Gianni. 1975. Finzioni occidentali: Fabulazione, comicità e scrittura. Turin: Einaudi. ———. (1977) 2007. Alice disambientata: Materiali collettivi (su Alice) per un manuale di sopravvivenza. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1989a. “Finzioni a cui credere, un esempio.” In Paessagio italiano, edited by Luigi Ghirri, 32-33. Milan: Electa. ———. 1989b. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1990. “The Novella and the New Italian Landscape: An Interview with Gianni Celati” (with Robert Lumley). Edinburgh Review 83: 40-51. ———. 1991. “Il sentimento dello spazio: Conversazione con Gianni Celati” (An interview with Manuela Teatini). Cinema & Cinema 18.62: 25-28. ———. 1992. “Note d’avvio.” In Narratori delle riserve, edited by Gianni Celati, 9-10. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1997. “Introduzione.” In I viaggi di Gulliver, by Jonathan Swift and translated by Gianni Celati, vii-xxxiii. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1998. “Il narrare come attività pratica.” In Seminario sul racconto, edited by Luigi Rustichelli, 15-33. West Lafayette: Bordighera. ———. 2006. Interview with Maria Spunta. In Il romanzo contemporaneo: Voci italiane, edited by Franca Pellegrini and Elisabetta Tarantino, 117–131. Leicester, UK: Troubador. ———. 2008. “Memorie su certe letture—Conversazione con Rebecca West.” Riga 28: Gianni Celati, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 38-44. Milano: Marcos y Marcos. ———. 2011. Interview with Fabrizio Grosoli. In Documentari imprevedibili come i sogni: Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 7–16. Rome: Fandango. Corbetta, F. Italia. [S.l., 18--] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/99466770/. Ghirri, Luigi. 1985. “Una carezza al mondo.” Review of Narratori delle pianure, by Gianni Celati. Panorama (30 June): 24-5. ———, ed. 1989. Paessagio italiano. Milan: Electa. Northern Italy. [S.l.: s.n., 18--] Map. https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/ 4166940?image_id=15489932. Palmieri, Nunzia. 2011. “Gianni Celati: Due o tre cose che so di lui (e dei suoi film).” In Documentari imprevedibili come i sogni: Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 86-123. Rome: Fandango. ———. 2016. “Notizie sui testi: Verso la foce.” In Romanzi, cronoche e racconti, by Gianni Celati and edited by Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri, 1763-1773. Milan: Mondadori. Seger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes In Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Turri, Eugenio. 2004. La megalopoli padana. Venice: Marsilio. Verdicchio, Pasquale. 2015. “Authoring Images: Italo Calvino, Gianni Celati, and Photography as Literary Art.” In Enlightening Encounters: Photography in Italian Literature, edited by Giorgia Alù and Nancy Pedri, 51-69. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Towards the River’s Mouth Gianni Celati

“The open day shines on the man with images.” Hölderlin, Aussicht, circa 1842

NOTE These four travel journals were born while working with a group of photographers dedicated to describing the new Italian landscape, including my friend Luigi Ghirri. I would call them as they now appear, after having been rewritten and made legible, stories of observation. It is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside. More than the polluted Po River, the sickened trees, the industrial stenches, the abandoned state of everything not connected to making a profit, and a method of construction devised for interchangeable residents with neither origin nor destination—more than all this, what is surprising is a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude. The four journeys here presented thus recount the crossing of a type of desert of solitude, which is however also everyday normal life. If they have some meaning, at least for the writer, depends on the fact that an intense observation of the external world makes us less apathetic (dafter or wiser, more cheerful or more desperate). The first recounts a walk across the countryside surrounding Cremona in the days immediately following the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The second is a careful exploration of the banks of the Po River, with encounters that may seem improbable. The third is a visit to the areas of reclaimed land near Ferrara, which ends fairly well, it seems to me. The fourth is a journey full of uncertainties to the mouth of the Po, in search of the limit of the land, a group 1

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of German ethologists, and perhaps of other things (at the moment of the journey not clear). Which things? Every observation needs to liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost. As a natural tendency that absorbs us, every intense observation of the external world carries us closer to our death—and perhaps also lessens our separation from ourselves.

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LANDSCAPE WITH NUCLEAR POWER PLANT 9 May 1986 The day cool upon awakening, a veil of fog barely perceptible over the countryside. While walking around I saw a few old villas, the sort with tower-like loggias common in this area, and further in the distance a highway overpass. Car broken down with a burned-out clutch on my way back from the Maremma. Stranded here, I write. In the afternoon there is a bus for Parma. The place where I have taken a room, the old Albergo della Posta, once a carriage station where horses were changed en route between Fornovo and Parma, has a spacious interior courtyard entered by way of a large square door. Inside the courtyard, along the second-floor cloister that runs along the sides, are the hotel’s rooms, no longer used, and I am the only guest. By now this place is run only as a restaurant, and under my room is the kitchen where passing by I see women in white aprons preparing the pasta. From my room I can hear them speaking in loud voices, in dialect, and they seem cheerful. Thoughts from these days: news of the Chernobyl meltdown, the spreading atomic cloud, and other ruminations. Franco Occhetto died in April and was buried in an incongruous cemetery in Lambrate, with an excavator and another self-propelled machine that set the scene for the ceremony. 1 Now he’s there, in that cemetery that seems a trade fair. A short while ago I went down to the restaurant in search of a train schedule. The owner couldn’t find it, so he sent me to his wife to look for it in their apartment. A dim corridor passed by the kitchen then led to a dining room, with armchairs covered in lace, mirrors, knick-knacks, and the look of never being used: from there I went into another room, where the woman was seated at a table doing the books, along with her father reading the paper. Upon hearing her husband’s message regarding the train schedule that he couldn’t find, the woman began to say, “That man is incapable of finding anything. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t even be able to find his own pants.” Confident in her right to be in this world, she clearly felt no need to charm others in order to be accepted. I stood there fascinated with her brusque manner, enjoying the half-smile with which she dramatized the situation. I would have liked to continue talking with her, but she stood up and went to get the schedule, which unsurprisingly was back in the restaurant. I stayed there talking with her father, who it turned out was an old ice cream maker left to his thoughts about the ’20s or ’30s (he was unclear about the years) when he did his military service in Bologna. He spoke to me about Bologna as a pleasure city, because he said that at the time it was like Paris. Initially I tried to describe the current, altered state of the city, but then

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understood that he wasn’t interested in updates, and justifiably so. He was interested only in telling me about his pleasure city, as if he were reciting a poem, while his daughter was away. As soon as she came back she told him to quit, and the old man at once fell silent. A meal in the restaurant below, and notes on this period I want to relate. In April I try my hand at the art of screenplay writing, as Sironi and I have to write a film about the life of Fausto Coppi. 2 In Rome we talk with Tonino Guerra, who has written celebrated films with Antonioni and Fellini, and I feel honored. Sitting in an armchair, Guerra tells us stories all afternoon. He opens his mouth only to evoke images. We take in many suggestions and then return to the Maremma to rewrite the synopsis and treatment before beginning the screenplay. The producers weren’t very satisfied with our initial draft in which Coppi doesn’t come across as a big winner in life, despite being a champion cyclist; we spoke too much of his misfortunes. We arrived back in the Maremma, in the town of Capalbio, just as the atomic cloud was on its way and the TV spread news of initial safety measures suggested by the experts: the sale of leafy vegetables was forbidden and no fresh milk for children. In the little stores of Capalbio Scalo there’s a feeling of wartime. There’s talk about security measures, and shoppers linger in doubt repeating lines from newspapers, while meanwhile the prices of canned vegetables, condensed milk, frozen food, potatoes, non-leafy vegetables, and even bottled water, fluctuate according to the news. That evening in a little bar-restaurant in town, where workers from the Montalto di Castro nuclear power plant meet for dinner, there’s constant talk of the explosion in Russia. One evening somebody comes up with this idea: when a nuclear power plant blows up and a mushroom cloud rises into the sky, the only place safe from the radioactive dust scattered by the wind would be right under the mushroom, since it would act like an umbrella. Sironi retold me this fantasy with a flabbergasted look on his face, but all you heard around town were fantasies of this sort. Because the wind carried from faraway lands a danger that no one can perceive, with only newspapers to rely upon, everyone fills in the information void with wild notions that come to mind. The calamity is elsewhere, and here we have only newsflashes and premade phrases, not unlike sports talk. The lingering aftertaste of uncertainty and sense of rashness surrounding the disaster are made worse when events are filtered by the cold language of the news. While shopping in Orbetello a few days ago, I heard a woman exclaiming in a wretched voice that the danger was in the “nano curies” that rained down from the sky (the rise in radiation is indeed measured in “nano curies,” but no one knows what they are). At the fish stall a shopper claimed, with the air of someone very informed, that fish were “all contaminated

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80%.” An old woman calmly replied that “all you need to do is cook them well with garlic to take away the danger.” The only moment when the news seemed somewhat practical to me was when Sironi went in search of condensed milk for his children. In the nearby countryside we passed by a dairy where they were advertising large quantities of UHT milk for sale, probably leftover stock, with this sign: PACKAGED BEFORE CHERNOBYL. Evening, on a train, boarded in Parma and heading to Piacenza. I am reading Il Viaggio, a book that Tonino Guerra gave me, one of his dialect verse narratives about his native countryside. An old married couple who live not too far from the sea, but who have never seen it, decide one day to make the journey by walking. Along the way everything becomes memorable in external space, as when we see things for the first time, coming into contact with their appearances. With words rediscovered under layers of adult speech, here every sentence subtly vibrates, carrying an image. The other day, having just finished rewriting the Coppi screenplay, I set off by car on a trip by way of Orbetello-La Spezia-Pontremoli-FornovoParma. But before reaching Fornovo the car broke down and I had to walk along the highway to a roadside diner and call a tow truck. In the diner there were piles of books for sale, celebrity autobiographies, books by famous journalists and television personalities, bestselling international novels. As I left I fell into a bad mood. I started to think about the face of a famous television newscaster on the cover of one of his books, a face that seemed a distillation of the essence of the so-called “real world.” Its expression, its mien, gave the sense of the world as evidence without mystery, cold factual information on daily events and nothing else. In such harmony with the so-called “real world,” the cover spurred the acceptance and enjoyment of a mass of readymade phrases— much as would inspire an idol from another form of superstition. And that is how I fell into a bad mood. But it is useless, dear me, to get upset about superstitions. You are hardly the keeper of a “better” vision of the world, you are not the keeper of anything, and you are not the unassailable fortress against which events have no hold. You are exposed to the air like other animals, and your words are those of others, emissions of breath. It is better to listen carefully to others: the sound of voices that come to the ear, all these emissions of breath that rise up to the sky. 10 May 1986 (Piacenza) At Leda’s house I found copies of the newspaper La Libertà, full of headlines about the disaster. Today’s news is that the Chernobyl reactor has

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stopped burning, bringing to an end the danger of catastrophe. The dread entrusted to the experts and journalists becomes a trifle that once employed suddenly becomes useless: it can’t become memory, and at most reappears as minor calls for calm and caution. I met someone who explained things to me. He said that the Caorso reactor needed to be closed immediately, where radioactivity had increased by 20 percent. It seemed a war bulletin. He told me that there was going to be a demonstration, with a tone of someone who assumes that you are aware of the tacit political undertone (the world must change). After this he had nothing left to say, having already recited his rosary of propaganda. No dismay over what had happened, only a war bulletin with the uncompromising mirage of a “safe solution”: it was all so false that he avoided looking me in the face, he too perhaps tired of having to fake so much seriousness over an event that had nothing to say to his imagination. In Leda’s car en route to Caorso to see how a nuclear power plant works. Outside of town a long, wide, seemingly military road, perfectly straight with gates and military-like signs, as if it led to a secret base. At the end on the left a building where visitors are met, with birds in cages and a little duck pond by the entrance. Inside is a large room with a square well in the center. All around are diagrams and little models meant to explain how a nuclear power plant is made. On a table are piles of explanatory documents, and a woman gives me a stack of them: “Do I need to read all of them?” “If you want to be informed.” In the documents everything is well explained, but it would take perhaps a month to study them, and I am not even sure that I would be able without the help of someone. Definitions and graphic diagrams, an entire system of knowledge that would answer any question. As I step outside I lose the desire to understand how a nuclear power plant works. Besides, I don’t even know where the plant might be. With my stack of explanatory documents I linger to look at the birds in cages, a small planted area to show that flowers still grow, the pool with ducks to show that the plant’s wastewater doesn’t kill. There were other visitors, but they seemed as disappointed as me, because the muteness of objectivity makes you feel separate from the things of the world. And so many like me looked at the birds, the flowers, and the ducks, and then left with their stacks of explanatory documents. Returning in the direction of Piacenza I followed the levee, then stopped in San Nazario to eat in a restaurant at the edge of the Po. Along the river, willows and poplars and many birds, and far off on the other side the reactor’s dome is visible, atop what looks like a giant cinderblock. In the restaurant fishermen and truck drivers don’t speak of the disaster. Earlier on the radio there was a transmission about indigenous Amazonian tribes.

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Back on the levee, I see many afternoon fishermen along the riverbank. After catching a bunch of carp, the fishermen throw the smaller ones aside. In this way there’s always a lot of carp caught for nothing and left to die in the grass. A man with a crewcut who has caught about fifteen keeps only two big ones. He then takes off his rubber boots and fishing vest, puts on shoes, shirt, tie, and jacket, then leaves in a big car. I walk further along the levee to a place where a lot of junk has been dumped into the river. COKE and FANTA cans, smashed bricks, a broken coat stand, a ripped-open bag of concrete. Then a can of FLASH synthetic motor oil, one of APIGREASE, one of AREXOUS, a solvent for rust. The sun, still high, reflects off the garbage, rendering it luminous. A man rides up on a motor scooter and begins to rummage around in the garbage with a stick. When he doesn’t find anything interesting, he grumbles to himself, “Che ti venga un accidente, Dio cane.” About 30, he is wearing a tank top shirt under a tight-fitting leather jacket, with a snake tattoo popping out from under one of his too-short sleeves. Another side trip before reaching Piacenza. I pass a cemetery with the inscription: DE MORTE TRANSITURI AD VITAM. There is no one inside except for a woman changing the flowers on a tomb, and all of those forgotten dead. Before entering the beltway, I pull off, turn around and look at the city. The terracotta tiled roofs, bell towers, the dome of a baptistery, emerge from above the city walls. At 6pm, in a bar. Walking down streets in the city, I see no trace of calamity or danger. On a packed boulevard a bus struggles by, and people walk between two uninterrupted rows of shops, for the most part selling clothes displayed in sophisticated contemporary storefronts. Almost everyone passes by looking at the reflections of storefronts in search of their own images, almost everyone dressed in contemporary clothes just like the ones displayed in the storefronts, with flashy tags and names written in English meant to be sauntered about. Almost everyone gives the impression of moving at ease along the boulevard full of signs and lights, walking couples or scattered groups, many exchanging greetings and spirited jokes. I didn’t seem to see anyone ill at ease, no one who felt unattractive, ugly or unkempt, or obese, in that evening promenade. But at the end of the street, in the piazza with its horse statues, are scruffy teenagers mustered in little groups, with secondhand clothes, leather jackets, black overcoats, studded belts, or ponytails. Clustered to smoke in poses that seem lost rather than hostile, they don’t take part in the nightly ascribing of identity, in the exchange of glances and greetings along the boulevard.

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Different still is the gathering of bourgeois teenagers under the arcades of the big department stores. Taking up even the sidewalk with their parked motor scooters, they linger to talk in the moderated tones of a social gathering, mainly about trips and vacations. Under the square concrete arcades, enveloped in the ashen neon light of the storefronts, at first I heard them talk about trips to Tahiti and Barbados. An older woman carrying shopping bags had to pass through them and seemed very embarrassed to be there, as if she had no right. At the end of the boulevard in perspective two rows of streetlights have just turned on, while at a traffic light there is a bottleneck of cars. On the sidewalk in front of a store selling WRANGLER clothes, some teenagers turn to look at a woman passing by, a girl shouts so that others will listen to her, a man talks so that others will approve of him. Three soldiers loiter before entering a pizzeria. A tall thin man walks by who seems to be leading a meek little woman, meekly dressed, who drudges along behind him. Tomorrow I leave for Cremona, and from there head to the countryside. 11 May 1986 (Sunday) Minister Craxi declares all the alarmism unwarranted, the radiation in the air diminishes, but the level of contamination in vegetables rises. On a train in the direction of Cremona: many industrial buildings here and very flat fields, as we pass by trees and utility poles that spring up all of a sudden from the flatness with surprising verticality. The mathematics teacher comes to pick me up in Pizzighettone because he wants to introduce me to an expert on life in the Po River Valley. He says that it will be useful if I want to write about these places. For a year he has thought about this meeting and must have called a few hundred times, looking for me everywhere, trying to organize the meeting. Thinking about the mathematics teacher. There are many others like him who seem stalled at a special year of their lives, in ’56, in ’68, or the Movement of 1977. 3 From their way of talking, thinking, dressing, you can guess something of what was current in those years. But other layers overlay and hide most of what in them that has been “left behind.” The defining cover-up is made of readymade phrases about recent events, which are needed to make the impression on others of being up-to-date. The way the mathematics teacher masked himself (however kind and friendly, good) seemed to me his unrestrained passion for the “new Italian writers.” The most insignificant seeming stories or essays by his favorite writers, no matter where they appeared, never escaped him. When I suggested he read Ariosto, he seemed perplexed, as if Ariosto didn’t match the clothes he was wearing. He seemed to feel exposed, with the fear reappearing

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of being “left behind”—a lapse that his mind couldn’t tolerate, at least so it seemed to me. The expert was a short elderly man on vacation at his daughter’s house. He met us in a former cheese factory with white walls, opaque doors and windows, and old tubs once used to make cheese by hand. When the teacher introduced him to me, the expert quickly indicated that he knew me, that he had read my work. He then proceeded to list a series of names and books, and in so doing gave me the impression that there was an infinite number of names to remember, a frightening number of books to read. He tried to recall my own name but wasn’t able. I had to suggest it to him, and he said: “Exactly.” Sitting in a little room inside the house, he talked to us about his work as an expert. There had been a big conference on the relationship between humans and the environment, where he had gone to recount stories of his childhood. A committee working on improving touristic areas along the Po asked him to write something, but he said he that didn’t have the time. He would like to write a historical novel, but he doesn’t have a plot in mind (the teacher asked me if I had one to suggest). He says he has no interest whatsoever in places and landscapes, even if he always has to talk about them in his role as an expert. He prefers to stay at home instead of constantly having to attend conferences and symposiums, which are a big waste of time and money that people don’t know how to spend. In traveling around alone he came to the conclusion that there is nothing to see and that one place is worth any other. He explained to me: “On trips we see old churches and old city walls, which without doubt are works of art, but if you’re by yourself you realize that these things have nothing to say to anyone. If you go to see them with your wife and kids, sure, you need to show that you’re interested in something, and so we end up having to take pictures and say something interesting. Towns and cities have now become so boring that they have nothing to say to anyone. But not many have the courage to admit it!” He didn’t mind that I was taking notes. When he found out that I wanted to cross the countryside around Cremona in order to observe the little geometric houses 4 that seemed mysterious to me, he made an ugly face. He gave me this advice: “There’s no use in going around to see places that by now are all the same everywhere. If you have to write something, cite some books or statistics, and you’ll see that it always works, trust me.” Before leaving we talked about the fact that there are no longer fountains along country roads. The expert commented: “It’s understandable! This way people who are thirsty need to go somewhere to pay to drink.” I asked what

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would happen if, while crossing the nearby countryside, I were to stop at a house and ask for a glass of water. He responded: “Well, don’t you know that they won’t give you any? They’ll think to themselves: but why is this guy bothering us in our home? If someone in this area goes around asking for something without a business angle of some sort, he’ll seem a bum. And when people have to look a bum in the face it doesn’t make them happy. Here people can put up with just about anything, but not having to look a bum in the face.” While we drove to Cremona the mathematics teacher asked me if I really wanted to go traveling around to look at those houses. He mentioned the danger of radioactive dust on the roads, showed his distaste for the little geometric houses, and seemed rather disappointed in me. In a senior citizen center on the banks of the Po I spoke with a couple of spry old men who had their own ideas about nuclear power plants: people keep the lights on too long just to stay awake after dark. According to them this was the problem. Here too the teacher was ill at ease, and not wanting to listen to the old men, went off on a walk by himself. He would have preferred to talk with me only about literature, meaning “the new Italian writers,” and couldn’t put up with everyday banality. At a certain point a large group of children appeared, running across the field under tall trees, and in the sky you could see Venus shining. 12 May 1986 On the highway, long lines of trucks coming from Cremona creep through the city outskirts. A few last colorful signs, little dimly lit shops, women biking by with their shopping, others stopped along the sidewalk to chat. Buses let people off near the end of the line, and beyond is a series of gas stations with bright multicolored plastic overhangs. In the distance billboards line the edge of the road, and above the patched asphalt the light ripples in exhaust fumes. 9:30am. In a small bar-pizzeria in Gadesco with industrial wooden paneling on the walls, industrial red plastic lamps hung over the tables, and a pile of industrial pizza covered in plastic wrap on the counter. The place is called SNACK NIRVANA and no one is there. Passing trucks cause the windows to constantly vibrate. Today the nuclear power plant in Caorso is shutting down “for maintenance.” There is no more danger in the air, but the atomic particles have fallen to earth. A bus takes me as far as a supermarket ten or so miles from Cremona. From the road I see two enormous pink warehouses with signs everywhere that say “MEGAMARKET.” I haven’t been this way for five years, and everything seems different.

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In the parking lot a loudspeaker announces unbeatable prices as entire families exit their cars, looking around as if they were in an amusement park. When they begin walking towards the supermarket, the women lead while the men fall to the back like laggards. At the entrance, a giant inflatable tent in the shape of a bottle made of shiny white plastic is stretched out on its side. Shoppers are asked to walk through the plastic bottle and fill out an entry form. There is a prize drawing for the shoppers who pass through. Three older women are sent into the bottle all holding one another by the arms and laughing, as the voice on the loudspeaker talks of hundreds of prizes to be won in the bottle contest. The voice is abruptly cut off. Something’s happened. A woman’s just won a grocery gift card, and the voice rejoices, “Congratulations, shopper!” Three clerks in green aprons walk across the parking lot between the cars, cheerfully laughing, and I begin to feel better. The countryside is just beyond, unknown to me like everything else. Here my walk begins along the highway. High altitude whitish cirrus, strands of clouds motionless due to lack of wind. Along the highway, truck after truck blasts past me with violent gusts as I walk by myriad billboards: BRIO FAUCETS, ABC KITCHENS, IL PORCELLINO FRESH HAM, CASITALIA PREFAB HOUSES, ALFIERI DANIELE FIREPLACES AND VENEERS. Distant bell towers of a sort I would call gothic-Lombard, but so far off that they seem aligned with me as I walk for a good stretch through the motionless space of this flat countryside. As if I were moving forward a few centimeters an hour, a tiny shadowless ant. Total lack of birds in the sky. At the Cicognolo roundabout I feel lost, because five years ago there wasn’t a roundabout. I take the secondary highway for San Daniele Po, to the right, finally leaving the larger road where I feel too exposed. Just after turning, I stop to look at a large farming estate (or fortified holding) surrounded by a crenellated wall and a handsome white campanile with wheeled bells. After leaving Cicognolo behind, the highway makes a wide turn and few cars pass by. On the left an athletic center with a pool, grassy fields, and tennis courts with an instructor holding his arm in the air showing a move to a student. All around is flat: sunken, longitudinal fields, rows of still-green wheat, and distant canals. Finally a bird. In the air is the smell of pork; it comes over me like a putrid wave, not only nauseating but seemingly warm, and invades everything. Surprised while writing and almost arrested by two policemen who asked me if I had a legal address or a job and what I was doing here, then made me

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sign a written statement: “You know, we believe you, but this morning a car was stolen.” “But I’m on foot!” When they read on my identity card that I was a teacher: “Why aren’t you in school?” “I’m on leave.” “Because you’re sick?” They must have had the impression that I was a teacher gone mad, but when they asked if I wrote for a newspaper and I suddenly said yes, lying terribly, I became normal again to their eyes. Since I was a journalist, they offered me a ride in their van. Along the road a huge feedstuff factory with vertical metal siding, a steeply pitched roof like a Methodist church, and a central turret a bit like a bell tower—the place looming in the midst of this area choked with the smell of burnt pig. Around 1pm I arrive on foot in Pieve San Giacomo. A giant unending flat plain crossed by a completely straight two-lane highway that leads to San Daniele and then to Casalmaggiore. In the distance a highway entrance ramp and a few scattered farmhouses in a countryside without trees, meadows, birds. While on the overpass above Pieve San Giacomo’s little train station, instead of scattered farmhouses I see pig slaughterhouses, large industrial buildings each with its own silos, and often small adjacent farm houses. Inside hundreds of thousands of pigs await slaughter, and the smell of their burnt flesh spreads for miles around (Paola explained to me that when they need to burn pigs sick with foot-and-mouth disease, they chain them together in clusters and with a crane simply drop them into a furnace). Along the station road are many little geometric villas, some with gardens up against the tracks, all surrounded by little gated walls built only to make an impression. The center of Pieve San Giacomo is an oblong little piazza where there rises a stumpy medieval bell tower with external wheeled bells, of the sort you might see in Lombardy. Sitting in a bar I listen to the regulars talk in dialect about events and the nuclear disaster. Up comes a man by bike who’s asked, “Ehi, Guarner, at a lavrar ogi, co la nube atomica?” And Guarner responds: “Figa!” (which means: of course). Then a young man dressed in painting overalls who has been watching me write suddenly begins to sing this strange song: “Quela vaca che t’a cagà, i Caraibi e Cernobyl. . .” He carries on till the barman brings me my sandwich and beer, leaving me to eat while the men, very intent, watch me in silence. This part of the town is different, completely silent. A sign greets you: LOTS FOR SALE ZONED FOR SMALL VILLAS. A visit to a narrow road lined with model-like little houses, brightly painted or sided with fake stone, ashlar, or tile, all boxy and more or less

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alike, two floors, with plastic rolling shutters and narrowly pitched roofs. The surrounding yards with reclining chairs or benches on lawns, fake plaster wells, overly bright or too tall flower beds, and often Walt Disney dwarves to the sides of the front doors. In one of the yards there was a Sicilian donkey cart full of flower pots, in another two plaster geese on the lawn, and in another a statue of the Madonna in a magnolia bush. And when on that little deserted street (it was lunchtime and I could hear pots banging, the buzz of radios and TVs) a man came out and jumped into his car, the sense of being an outsider became so strong that I felt compelled to escape. In this area the other time the idea of a residential silence came to me, a silence completely different from the silence of open spaces. Even the houses don’t seem houses, but rather the demonstration of an idea of a house, in contrast to the horizon burdened with trucks and pigs. Something that I can’t explain attracts me to these little enchanted houses, a suspension, a dissolution of all that which rises up in my throat. Passing by pig and chicken slaughterhouses, and industrial cattle feedlots, I reach San Daniele Po. Stopping at the central bar I call the friends of the mathematics teacher to tell them that I will be there soon. But it’s only 4:30pm, and I would like to be by myself. Outside there’s a little piazza with stunted trees and a closed gas station. To the right is the “CINEMA SPLENDOR” in a little rundown building with a stepped façade (open Thursdays), and immediately to the left the other bar in town with teenagers slouching outside in chairs. Next to me a very overweight punk girl in ripped jeans and leather jacket is drinking a can of Coke; an old farmer with rosy cheeks gazes at her; a boy, also overweight, sucks on an ice cream bar by himself; the bartender, young and mustachioed, comes out with a t-shirt that says: FROM THE EAST COAST OF AMERIKA. All around a great torpor envelops neighborhoods of little model-like villas, a church with a neo-gothic façade built perhaps during the fascist era, and the two main roads with sparse traffic. There’s a torpor in the irrigation ditches and the banks overgrown with nettles, in the trees covered with climbing bindweed, in a forgotten cemetery I passed by, and even in the decals stuck to the windows of this bar, with the faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, David Bowie. I leafed through a local newspaper left on a table: no stories, only listings of births, deaths, baptisms, weddings, auctions. I was curious to understand what sorts of readers this newspaper had, and turning saw people sitting quietly in a country bar waiting for time to pass.

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13 May 1986 Departure at dawn. Appearances out there in the half light, and a little discourse on how to discover the world. Some friends of the teacher put me up in their old farmhouse, every rustic detail of which they’ve preserved, including the wobbly cane chairs, the cobwebs stuck to the ceiling beams, the postcards slipped behind the glass door of the credenza. They were also teachers, but had changed career to become farmers, and last night fell to talking about literature from California. In the barn are two cows and a horse who is so lame he can’t move around anymore. One might say that the three friends seem somehow liberated, judging from their opinions on just about everything, from how to eat, to American political party funding, and of course also nuclear power plants, which need to be shut down all over the world. I asked: “How?”—“We need to build a strong shift of opinion.” Up on the zonal levee in the direction of Pieve d’Olmi, from the elevated roadbed, I see many old abandoned farm complexes. Clusters of squareshaped buildings with internal courtyards and arched entrances, their roofs sometimes leading to the spires of little churches built into the quadrilateral structures. I wandered around a couple of these courtyards, where there were pieces of farming equipment and straw on the ground. The inhabitants had all gone to live in those little geometric houses scattered around the countryside, and the animals had been moved to large industrial buildings. The Po still far off, perhaps a few miles. In the countryside in front of me are many of those large industrial buildings—cattle and pig feedlots. After a village called Ca’ dei Gatti, doubling back to the east, I came upon a cattle feedlot. Endless covered stalls, silos full of feed distributed in mechanized feed troughs, and piles of manure in the corral where the cows are released for a few hours each day like prisoners. A man next to the corral told me that the sadness of those cows is contagious, that some nights he returns home depressed without knowing why. They stand there in the corral with lowered eyes, no longer curious to look at everything that moves. If they look up, you can tell that they have lost their powerful animal gaze. In the direction of Isola Pescarola. Below the zonal levee a large abandoned farm complex, doors wide open and falling off their hinges, crumbling walls, wild plants growing everywhere. From where I came another abandoned complex, very beautiful with little pink crenellated towers that seemed Arabic in design. In its abandoned courtyard, full of invasive plants, a dog sniffed around. This morning a veil across the sky, bluish altostratus beginning to break up. More abandoned farmhouses, a cemetery of deserted farmhouses.

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There’s a strong wind that at times shakes the bushes along the edge of the road, forcing out siskins who fly away. As if waves of forgetfulness sweep through the plain, leaving you stripped of memory, taken aback at the too many things that pass away. Beneath a highway overpass between Casalmaggiore and Parma, I finally see the Po. A burned-out boat covered with straw enveloped by the jagged white fringe of its charred plastic cladding. Here the Po has wide sandy beaches, and near the shore is one of those red and white rhomboidal navigational signals; no one around, complete silence, on the other bank a bird with large wings seems to have lost its way. Back near Isola Pescarola, I started to feel a blister on my foot; perhaps yesterday my sock bunched up inside my shoe, causing it to form. I hobble up to the highway, where no cars stop to pick me up. Fields of wheat and beets, an endless series of billboards. Rows of mulberry trees often planted lengthwise along the fields. And poppies by the edge of the road, the first I have seen. I walk on my heel as far as Motta Baluffi, rows of small houses and larger buildings, SALUMIFICIO GANDOLFI ENEA. In a bakery there were many women, some of whom had come by car. One was saying: “But it isn’t still dangerous to eat bread?” I asked if one of them would be able to give me a ride towards Gussola, because of the blister on my foot. Perplexed silence fell over the women who looked at each other, one saying that she lived in another direction, and another saying that she had come by bike, but without addressing me directly. After this they pretended that I wasn’t there anymore, and so I walked out to the piazza. Almost at once one of the women came out and started talking to a young woman behind the wheel of a little car. She beckoned to me to come over, and in a gruff voice told me: “This is my niece, talk with her. It’s not my concern—I’m not interested in other people’s business. Anything could happen. You have to be careful.” The young woman graciously gave me a lift. When I was in the car, however, it turned out that she wasn’t going to Gussola, but instead to Torricella di Pizzo, away from the main highway to Casalmaggiore. She was short, blond, and wearing jeans, and after mentioning that she was studying to become a nurse, offered to give me a bandage for my foot. Because I was taking notes in the car, she asked me if I was a writer. I was about to say no, but then decided to be clear: “I’m someone who writes.” While talking we suddenly turned onto Torricella di Pizzo’s narrow main street lined with low houses. Here the young woman disappeared into a house, then reappeared carrying gauze, alcohol, and cotton. I sat down on a step and was about to take off my shoe, when she asked me if I was going to

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put what I saw in the area into a book. I answered that I would like to write a travel book about the Po, but that I still didn’t know how: if I manage, I’ll probably use these notes. Perhaps it was for this reason that she invited me into the house, through a dim little room that functioned as an entry hall, and introduced me to her mother, afterwards helping me with my foot. Later she gave me directions on how “to reach the Po and see it in its full breadth,” beyond the town and crossing the area between the zonal and main levees, and back to where I am now. On a meander of the river to the west is an island full of poplars that seems flooded, a few birds fly close to the water’s surface, and it looks like it might rain. Along the river’s edge spire-shaped poplars screen swollen white clouds. On the other bank from far off a cuckoo sings. Now it’s raining and I’ve come back to the levee, the light refracted in shades of pink, and the water in the river seems a motionless mirror. Vapor wafts up from the asphalt, all at once the rain stops, and a boy passes by on a motor scooter. 3pm. Back on the main highway limping a bit. It’s about four miles from the turnoff for Torricella di Pizzo to Gussola, and as I enter Gussola numerous brightly painted little houses emerge with aluminum frame windows and doors, and little cinderblock walls. One of the little houses is covered by fake stones sticking out of white tiles. Shaded by a little Lebanon cedar, the frontal view seems a rustic image from some dream of forgetfulness. The tiles with fake stones are also scattered around the yard to look like rural paths, while the lawn is full of little daisies not yet opened up and the front door is decorated with brightly colored flowers that seem plastic. On either side of the door stand little clay Walt Disney dwarves: they too act to blot out any memory of a “life full of pain,” as this seems the one and final objective of the little enchanted houses, if I understand them right. On the other side of the road, from another of these little houses an elderly woman was looking out over a balcony. It surprised me to see that her nightgown was almost open, her bra sticking out. I don’t know what sort of expression I had when I raised my eyes from my notebook. What happened is that she brusquely closed her nightgown, closed the window, lowered the rolling shutter, and then lowered all the other rolling shutters: a declaration of war on the external world that peeks too long at private property. Gussola’s central piazza is covered with an empty asphalt parking lot, with a white baroque church at one end and at the other a communist club. 5 Outside the club were men, all in white berets (a local custom?) with hands in their pockets, milling about and talking, without ever making eye contact.

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Along the road an old woman passed by, her head covered with a black scarf and wearing a purple cloak, woolen stockings and low worn-out shoes. She slowly made her way to a large old door then pulled a giant key out of a plastic bag. As soon as she had entered I realized that the building resembled her: a crumbling ornate palazzo with plants growing on a balcony held up by an eroded sandstone Medusa, a nearly featureless deity erased by time (I didn’t take notes on all the forgotten deities that I saw, threshold deities, images of the sun on door arches, and even an Athena somewhere, a goddess by now nearly completely forgotten). Directly under the balcony with the head of the deity erased by time was a bus stop where a teenage girl was listening to music on a Walkman. Heavily limping as far as Martignana Po. A wide country road lined on both sides with many of the little geometric houses, and linden trees pollarded to keep down the pollen and the humans from sneezing. And yet all of a sudden a pollen cloud descended from all the nearby poplars, causing car drivers to turn on their windshield wipers, and all the billboards were rendered invisible for ten seconds. Ten seconds of mass opacity, during which everything disappeared, even the image of the world that we carry in our heads. That it was really pollen from the poplars I’m not sure, as it doesn’t seem late enough in the spring; but the blackout of all the advertising images was pleasant. More rows of little houses in various styles, many built on raised ground with little front yards. One completely covered by hospital tiles, with roses large as sunflowers in the yard, and a man watering an ornamental laurel bush. A huge effort to keep going, every moment ahead is empty space, empty time to fill. At least there aren’t all those billboards, an endless number of depressing words. 9pm. In the main piazza of Casalmaggiore after dinner resting outside a bar. Almost all mention of the disaster has vanished from the newspaper headlines; by now there’s nothing left to say. A large piazza in the shape of an oval bowl whose upper boundary is formed by the city hall, a nineteenth-century medieval-styled palazzo. The center of the piazza is decorated with travertine bollards, and an entire side is filled with outdoor bar seating. Young men roam about, already dressed for summer, evening trysts with young women in the light of streetlamps. Depression with tiredness from thinking. Luckily I found a good hotel and a friendly host who told me how the center of Casalmaggiore has remained more or less the same from the time of Stendhal. She recalled the chapter in The Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrizio lands in Casalmaggiore with a false passport.

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14 May 1986 News of the day: Chernobyl a concrete tomb. The reactor, now shut down, will be encased with a mixture of sand, lime, and lead. The sky is fairly cloudy. This morning while walking out through Casalmaggiore, I passed through a neighborhood of elegant little 1930s-era bourgeois apartment blocks. In attempting to retrace my path, I see streets that wander among old scabby palaces and doorways, eventually leading to narrower streets behind the town hall, and from there to the central piazza. Incidentally, in a bar on the piazza a barkeeper joking with a client said: “Now watch out, if you don’t behave yourself I’ll give you contaminated milk, OK?” From the piazza, heading back gently uphill along little streets behind the town hall brings me to the bank of the Po. Next to an old city door, an uneven row of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palazzi, each with a different façade, shape, and height—movements of lines, devoid of heavy right-angles, that follow the sinuous flow of the levee and the river, which widens in perspective. In that place, even if you can feel that the hush of oblivion has fallen on those beautiful palazzi, there’s also the flowing river that causes the oblivion to seem a magnanimous flux. Leaving from here and walking back through the town to the east to reach the main highway leading to Parma, I find only meandering streets. Not the grid plan road systems of modern cities, but an entire grafting of sinuous movements over other sinuous lines with deviations everywhere that bring to mind what a miracle of animal life a city is. Then the impression that along all these streets and side streets the numbering of the houses and official ordering of roads must have at first seemed incomprehensible, in a place held in the mind differently: with the imagination of the body that moves in a space of affection. Exit from Casalmaggiore, TALBOT PEUGEOT AUTOMARKET, full of little flags. A huge bridge over the Po, and under it to the left those halfmoon isthmuses where sediment carried downstream is deposited. On a bus to Colorno, six miles from Casalmaggiore. Signs along the road: MERLI COLORNO INTERIORS, CATFISH FOR SALE, ASTREA ADVERTISING, STENDHAL RESTAURANT. Bought an elastic bandage and wrapped it and some cotton around the blistered parts of my foot. I’m limping a bit, but in Colorno I like everything I see. I walked around the wall that encircles the park of the ducal mansion, or palace of the dukes of Parma. A true palace, it seemed as if I were in a state of subjection in the vast park full of trees, or in front of its façade reflected in

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the water of a canal. In other epochs the local inhabitants must have felt themselves in a state of subjection as I did, facing so much magnificence. Passing along the boulevard bypass, I pay a visit to the cemetery and salute the dead. Then a visit to the little station so cheerful up high above the road with its unusual little imperial staircase (unusual for a train station). 6 My morning walk comes to an end at the piazza in front of the ducal palace, where there are the tables and chairs of two outdoor bars. Noon. The façade of the palace is held in balance by two large bell towers at its sides, with statues up high along the cornice who look down as if they were deities in the sky. It strikes me that the distance between the windows is everywhere irregular, without an obvious plan, but I sense a rhythm running through the entire façade. Conceit of an elegance that never reveals its plans, because it knows that perfection can never be showy, and that rhythm is something that emerges beyond normal measure. Nothing could be further from the need to box in everything with recognizable plans and fixed measurements that give form to the little geometric houses of the countryside. In the bar old men with walking sticks listen to someone who must have been released from an insane asylum. They don’t make fun of him, but rather listen solemnly. He’s saying something I can’t understand, and then one replies: “Ah, ma la ’n ghe mie la radioativitè chi!” Afterwards, in the courtyard of the palace, which I’ve finally entered, I tried to imagine what the palace will look like when repainted with industrial colors, the only ones on the market. A bit more akin to the little houses I’ve seen, its façade flatter and normalized by modern uniform colors (as in a salesman’s paint chips) and its seemly long-lasting elegance less magnificent. I have seen many old buildings meet this fate, one this palace too will eventually come to share. End of the visit to Colorno. There’s a bus from Colorno to Mezzani, heading east, in the direction of Brescello and Guastalla. Nothing to note during the short trip, apart from that when I arrived I heard in the air Arabic music, real malouf, rhythms repeating endlessly. 7 Description of the place: a narrow main road zigzagging through a flat countryside, a few old farmhouses, but mainly little houses, here completely unadorned, with gardens full of flowers. At the town entrance trees line the sidewalk, a deep silence around the houses, few cars in motion. Children were playing in the middle of the road with large nylon bags, running to fill them with air and then jumping and trying to fly. The music was coming from the right where a little side road leads through the fields. As I walk past an old farmhouse, a woman dressed in black at the door asks me: “Anything to sell?” (because of my backpack?) I say no and keep walking in the direction of the music, and she says: “Are

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they your friends?” (reconstructing: she took me to be an itinerant salesman, and so I might be a friend of Arabs who are also itinerant salesmen). The side road curves and comes to the edge of an abandoned farm. The farmhouse is all locked up, but the barn door is open, the source of the music. A boy appears at the threshold, about fifteen years old. The music stops, and two others appear, a bit older, with little moustaches. They just stand there and stare at me, looking older than they are. One speaks to me in broken Italian, telling me that the barn was abandoned and: “We weren’t doing any harm.” I think they’ve taken me to be a snoop, and it suddenly comes to me to say: “Men ain atait?” He then starts to talk in Arabic, telling me that they’re Tunisians and other things that I don’t understand. I keep listening without understanding anything until he’s finished, then find a solution to what to say: “Maktub.” And he to me: “Maktub inshallah.” And so I went on my way. I find the road along the levee and realize that it’s almost full spring, fields coursing with masses of red poppies. On the river where boats dredge the bottom digging up gravel, a boatman bellows, calling someone, but his voice is left without a response. High and low, east and west, wide and narrow, and many other such things recede on the water’s surface, where sparse gleaming sunlight flickers, causing my eyes to faintly roll. From the bridge in Cogozzo to Brescello it’s only six miles. A dachshund starts to follow me, looking intently at the ground, never trusting me. To the right is the brick spillway 8 of the BENTIVOGLIO RECLAMATION. Here the farm complexes are very different from those near Cremona, no longer built in a quadrangle, but with the farmhouse, stall, and hay barn all in a row, or with a yard between the house and barn for threshing wheat. The little dachshund is a very serious character, always looking askance, constantly sniffing about, very busy. The levee is stepped with grassy terraces. I walk along their top and the dog follows me on a lower track. And yet, if I stop and whistle at him, he turns around to look at the landscape. My foot has started to bleed, cotton and sock stuck together in a mass. In a field of high grass where a sign reads 45th PARALLEL, I pass from one world region into another; far off I see the bridge to Viadana and wish halfheartedly that I were already there. At last I see the rounded cupola of Brescello’s main church. The thoroughfare beneath the levee is heavy with traffic, the sound of things passing, the air that vibrates. Outskirts with snaking roads as in Casalmaggiore, and old palazzi that look inviting. Already so close to Brescello!

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Soon I’ll be there. I see Boretto and the rounded cupola of its basilica, a miniature version of Saint Peter’s. From the levee where the speedboat racing world championship is set up, all that’s left is to cross road and descend the staircase leading to the back of the church, and from there proceed in the direction of the area of new apartment blocks, and then at last the tree-lined station avenue with its blessed Albergo del Bersagliere. 9 A final pause to smoke and air out my feet. Behind me the ViadanaMantova bridge is a sea of traffic, and in every direction the countryside that doesn’t seem countryside is crowded with industries, from here to Guastalla, and on the other side, as far as Cogozzo and Casalmaggiore. I’ve seen few birds about, but wild plants are rampant, occupying vague wastelands everywhere. Where there are no industrial holding tanks or dirt roads leading to gravel pits, all along the levee in this area are massed colonies of plants, some warlike and hostile like thistles, others disconcerting like horsetails, others annoying like nettles. Grasses growing on nitrogen-poor ground, bushes sprouting from factory waste, vines creeping up trees dying from acid rain. Next to me they have invaded a sloughed-off load of concrete spread along the levee, growing here as rigorously as ever. There was a battle among the clouds, then gusts of wind scattered them, leaving shreds of cirrus to float about over the tops of the poplars beyond the edge of the river. When I was young I was always reading, afraid that I would miss something, and now have the idea that what is lost and what is found travel the same path. Perhaps the one thing to understand is how remote from and unfit we are for a “life full of pain,” the only one there is (misfortune, pain, death). And how everything brings about a general amnesia, helping us to put up levees, to be able to say “there’s a good side to everything,” to put Walt Disney dwarves outside our front doors; in other words, to always say and show everywhere that something is completely different from what it is. 16 May 1986 The owner of the Albergo del Bersagliere tells me that her father bought the hotel in 1917, when Boretto was a relatively important center thanks to the through traffic between Parma or Reggio Emilia and the other side of the river. The hotel is still open, now frequented by truck drivers who during dinner swap stories, table to table, while the owner treats them as if they were friends come to pay her a visit. Immediate impression of being in the house of someone, not an anonymous place of transit; the large guest rooms give the sense of being in an old house in the countryside. Yesterday Sironi met me to talk about the film screenplay. The producers weren’t very happy with us, because also in the new treatment there are too

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many things about Fausto Coppi that no one wants to hear (misfortune, pain, death). I have the impression that the film won’t be made. My foot still in pain despite the treatment recommended by a pharmacist who also gave me some general advice about life. I read in the newspaper that in many cities asphalt surfaces are being washed to remove residual traces of radioactivity; the highest levels of recorded radioactivity officially confirmed in this area, between Parma and Piacenza. In the afternoon I showed Sironi around the area along the Po by Guastalla and then Pomponesco. There’s a tree-lined road that leads from Guastella to a beach along the Po and the Ristorante del Faro with an extensive view of the river: elderly couples seated on benches look at the water, a lone young man next to the cement boardwalk talks by himself into a recorder. Then came Adriano Celentano songs to disturb the calm, played at high volume in the restaurant, seeming false and out of place. We followed the trail along the river behind the restaurant where we found some little summer cabins built of wood. One of these was surrounded by a meticulously kept flower garden and a fence with a little green gate. On the gate the owner had hung this sign: MAY WHOEVER STEALS FLOWERS BE STRICKEN WITH RADIATION. From this point all you can see are poplar groves on either side of the river. To understand how this area is a countryside invaded by industries, cross the Po and go from Viadana to Pomponesco. Other times I’ve tried to describe it but wasn’t able, an immense mazelike industrial area scattered with signposts listing myriad factory names, as if it were the outskirts of a metropolis. Here I want to speak about Pomponesco. From Viadana, leaving the main thoroughfare and turning down a side road in the direction of the Po, by the time you arrive in town it seems an entirely different era. Pomponesco is made up of straight roads with perpendicular intersections, like Guastella and Ferrara, all with street networks laid out in the Renaissance based on the model of a Roman fortress. Few inhabitants about, and on some Sunday mornings, along those straight quiet streets, the sense arises of being in some distant frontier outpost. The town extends out from around the marvelous rectangular piazza, not humiliated by concrete and the new. The perspective down the piazza is delimited by two columns just below the levee, the narrowed end of a quiet street with beautiful old houses, and carries the eye towards open space. There at the end, the open space arises from behind a horizon, causing a sensation of indistinct distance that gives a sense of our spatial relatedness. The piazza almost always empty, where the emptiness reveals itself as welcoming—where welcomed, we were able to notice other welcomed passersby, without the usual sensation of unease.

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I took Sironi on a walk along the levee at the end of the piazza, down trails in the poplar grove, thinking that we could easily reach the Po. Instead we became lost among the poplars, which spread out in all directions. In a clearing there was a sea of invasive plants that I had never seen before, each sprouting a single giant distended leaf with a very bright, luminescent surface that seemed artificially green. Those plants indeed seemed artificial, due to their excessive brightness, the contour of their leaves resembling water lilies, but swollen: as if made of a faintly monstrous plastic material that in some unknown manner has taken on a shape of nature, by now indistinguishable from nature. Those plants brought to mind the forest undergrowth in a Walt Disney film, or the undergrowth of some distant planet, a world rather resembling that of the enchanted houses I’ve seen in these days. In the clearing, having lost our way, Sironi and I thought that the sea of plants could have sprouted following radioactive fallout, much like many species of invasive plants that colonize and spread thanks to acid rain, taking over weaker species. Tomorrow we return to the big cities, other colonies of inhabitants growing on sterile terrain. 17 May 1986 Just out of bed, still in Boretto, I’m on the levee where they’ve set up the world speedboat racing championship, with a large white towrope for hauling in boats. A speedboat veers to the side under the bridge to Viadana, then comes back leaping over the water as if trying to fly. I came to the levee to write a conclusion to this journal, but haven’t yet found it. The other day Sironi and I drove to Torlona and then to Castellania to find Livio Coppi, Fausto’s brother. A hilly and very green area, still intact, without invasive industries, though the extensive forests have vanished that surrounded Castellania when Fausto was a boy. At the highest point of the town of eight or ten houses they’ve built a sort of sanctuary in concrete to his memory, decorated with mementos of his cycling victories: but so ugly, so grey and miserable, with a statue of Fausto so horrendous, that it makes Livio depressed just thinking about it. On the way back Sironi brooded over his film gone awry, and grumbled. We passed through Dosolo, where there’s a closed cinema, with display cases without posters and a sad marquee without a sign. Sironi made this comment: “Cinemas used to be beautiful, especially in little country towns, where they really made you think and wonder. Now all the little town cinemas are closing, wonder gone, party over.” Later along the main street in Guastalla, we looked at the façades of stately houses disfigured by the modern aluminum overdoor of a fancy perfumery, the vivid sign of a clothes store, or the advert for a brand of televi-

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sions. So many façades ruined for nothing, in Guastella, and Sironi kept on grumbling. That evening at a bar in Brescello’s main piazza we watched a television debate between experts discussing the Chernobyl meltdown. No one is able to say what the effects the radioactive material fallen from the sky will have on the grass, trees, animals, and humans; no one is able to say if the same thing might happen again one day, here or elsewhere; no one can say with certainty that if one day all nuclear power plants are closed we’ll be safe from future uncertainties and dangers. And yet all the experts never relented from presenting an absolutely confident understanding of what had happened and what will happen. I walked for three days in order to observe something, but am already confused about what I observed, unsure of what I thought, with only uncertainty for what will come. I believe that in a short while almost everyone will have forgotten the news that only a few days ago seemed so shocking; it will become wilted and bit obscure, producing the effect some dusty shutters had on me in an abandoned house in Orbetello. Rapid perishability of the so-called “real world,” hard to distinguish from a mirage. No wonder intelligence is always late in getting here: it simply isn’t capable of making sense of all this loss and passing into uncertainty, the forgetfulness that everywhere envelops and carries us away.

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EXPLORATIONS ALONG THE LEVEES 20 May 1983 Awake early in the morning, outside Bologna in search of secondary roads leading to the Po. Here an agglomeration of apartment buildings stretches for half a mile, all the same height and length, all with identical rolling shutters. We are no longer sure where cities end: district after district, one-way streets and stoplights, braking and accelerating with the traffic. Where a city ends is no longer a territorial boundary, but a shift in the movements of cars, awaiting to be transported to our destinations. After Castelmaggiore, the tracks at a railroad grade crossing at the edge of a group of houses bring something to mind; once there existed precise points where open space and the profile of the horizon began, beyond which bell towers served as points of orientation. Here after roadside billboards, INTERIORS and CARS FOR SALE, wheatfields along the bypass and then a country school down a side road. Along the side road a row of townhouses; boxy concrete cocoons with little walls that divide identical properties, each of which has on its roof an array of solar panels that shine in the sun. Checkerboard roads intersect over the plain as they travel dead straight for twenty or thirty miles; paths go up and down the banks of the canals that we skirt, giving the sense that we’re moving down a crease of the earth. In these areas so flat and uniform that everything seems at eye level and horizonless, there arises a yearning for a little upraised point in order to look around. So much so that Luciano suddenly turned onto a side road that went up a levee, and we found ourselves above a farmyard. A man and a woman in the middle of the yard looked at us without expression. At a rural store that is also a bar with all sorts of items for sale, with the feel of an outpost, we stop to buy some food. Entering the dark interior, I remembered that once people’s eyes had different habits than ours, and didn’t feel the need for full illumination. Display cases with pasta and potatoes, dolls and perfumes, boxed games and plastic puppets, games with the image of a TV personality. From the ceiling hung salamis and hams, making the space feel even more cramped. In the darkness two old men, a woman and two children were looking at the light on the asphalt through the door screened with strips of raffia. Up against the sky on a levee, poppies blurred by the wind, and the sky very dark, very heavy. Empty stretches of countryside. All this spurs me to write, as if the words were following something outside me. If I look into the

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distance, a large opening in external space arises first, the void that gathers all things: after this the aperture restricts in order to focus on something that calls out, as when in a John Ford film a lone figure emerges on the horizon. We are guided by that which calls us and we understand only that; the space that gathers all things together cannot be understood if not confusedly. Ideas that I carry along on this trip, gleaned from Leopardi (August 1821). It’s still early, the sun is rising very slowly over these plains, and we need to wait for midday because the shadows are too long. Stopped along the banks of an almost dry stream, we are somewhere between the provinces of Modena and Ferrara. Luciano Capelli is photographing a little cement bridge with a rusty railing, poppies along the edge of the bridge, and in the background white clouds. Having come with me to photograph this landscape of levees, as far as the Po Delta (if we get there), Luciano reassures me with his patience and willing demeanor. Down below, the water in the stream is stagnant and reddish, the mire of the bank all cracked from months of drought. Wooly pollen from poplar trees has fallen everywhere, even on a clump of tar. Chamomile has sprouted by chance in a ditch full of debris, where a shredded tire marks the limit of something unclear to me. 10am. At a fork in the road near Suzzara, military policemen with bulletproof vests and machineguns held at eye level stop cars and point their machine guns at the car windows. Then I saw them become smaller and smaller, left behind in the plain together with bales of hay in the fields. In planted fields, rotating spurts of water cover great distances, and we stop to look at the green of growing chard, a grain storehouse with a tall silo, and in the background a row of little houses a strange azure cloud color. Pointing out a wide blotch on the ground, a man on a bike told us that a tank of herbicide spilled there, and that it will take years for anything to grow. All the same, on the far side of the Po it’s only worse, he says, because the land there is sandy, and herbicides quickly filter into the aquifer, contaminating all the water. The old man rode away on his bike saying, “Well, who knows what’ll happen to us next!” At the Po at last. The iron bridge over the big river vibrates along the joints in its decking each time a truck goes by—causing the earth beneath our feet to shudder as we watch the overflowing Po that has invaded the alluvial margins between the two banks. Islands of trees rise up from the water, and under the bridge is a gravel pit with carts and excavator buckets, a little boat moored along the shore. A sign at the end of the bridge has this written on it: BORGOFORTE. In the sky are huge indigo-azure clouds that turn a soft white along their edges.

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Beyond the bridge beneath the levee are fields with long regular rows of wheat as far as you can see. Crows fly over the fields and flocks of starlings over us, the sun at its zenith. A two-wheeled cart passes along the top of the levee pulled by an ancient horse; a man standing up in the cart eating an apple waves to us as he swallows a mouthful. Earlier, while wandering at random, we stumbled upon an arterial road outside Borgoforte lined with tall plane trees that formed a dense archway. There was an elementary school with the name of a poet, the sounds of a distant radio, not a single car by some miracle, and children playing with a hoop in the road. Along these secondary roads at the edges of towns there arises the impression of being able to perceive, thanks to the diffuse silence, a simultaneity of habitually repeated gestures of the inhabitants of a place, like entering someone else’s house and feeling an easy flow of routines. 1:30pm. In a bar in Borgoforte where we ate. While Luciano played pinball, three kids kept score by loudly shouting out the points. The old bar owner, limping, went over to neaten the braids of the girl, as if to make a good impression on strangers. His wife, a very tall woman, showed me paintings by country artists hung on the walls, citing the names of painters awarded prizes in some contest. She added: “This one was given an award by Minister Aniasi in person.” With intense colors and rapid brush strokes, the paintings show stylized faces of farmers, imaginary villages, views of the Po, magic animals in the sky. The pinball machine in this bar is called AFRICAN QUEEN, and on the lit backglass display is a bare-breasted woman-panther holding her leg over the head of a lion. With few customers about, the owner began telling the story of a countess who married a general of the cuirassiers, “in the time before the first world war,” and coming from Milan, the two had “a terrible car accident” in which he died. Afterward she never wanted to sell the “fruit produce” from her husband’s land; merchants come asking to buy her pears and apples and walnuts, but she chases them away “with even bad words.” If however some children come to steal fruit from the trees, “be assured that if the countess sees them, she hides and watches them without saying a thing, and seems rather happy.” To listen to a voice telling a story does good—it breaks you free from the abstraction of when you are at home with the belief of having understood something “in general.” To follow a voice is like following the banks of a river in which something flows that cannot be understood abstractly. Everywhere routines come to the ear, a flow of appearances as soon as you raise your eyes. Back at the Po. The river is wide and grey, the weather is getting worse, and we haven’t yet decided what to do. Under the big iron bridge floodwaters

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have covered the road that descends to a motorboat repair shop with a slipway on the bank where a crane by the towpath is holding a speedboat in the air. In front is a shack on a dock with a fiber cement roof and a TV antenna. A short man wearing a wool cap approaches Luciano pushing a motor scooter by hand, stops to look at the water a moment, and then begins to talk: “It hasn’t rained for six months, and now when all is said and done, three or six meters of water have come down that isn’t ours. Because this water comes from Valtellina, from downpours up there, and it isn’t ours.” Luciano is good at listening, and the other continues: “a person who’s lived a long life learns all the secrets of a place, unfortunately. But better not to say unfortunately, because you have to live somewhere. If there’s one thing we can agree about it’s water. Just one thing—you can’t get over confident. If you get over confident and take risks, afterwards you better hope to get lucky. Each to his own, OK, but you’ve got to adapt to what’s here.” He looks in the direction of a restaurant along the road leading down to the river: “That restaurant there for example is packed in the summer, pulling in young people and everything. But when news comes in from civil protection that the water level is rising above a certain point, they have to close up in a hurry and run off. Many people are upset because there isn’t anything left to do in town, and they have to go out in the evening in other places. But the river is a menace that gives no quarter, with a power you can’t imagine if you don’t know it. When it comes up on you it’s a good idea to open the doors and windows of a house, so that the water doesn’t overpower the walls, otherwise it’ll crush everything.” He watched me as I was writing, but then quickly looked away, and then: “In the end you have to make do and get by, because you can get by anywhere, if you want. Even in Siberia, even in overpopulated China, you can get by. Not just in Borgoforte.” Aware that I was writing, he later asked Luciano if we were journalists. He recommended that we go to see the boat bridge at Oglio, the last to survive from wartime: “So that you can honestly say that you’ve seen it.” 5pm. The desire to leave in a hurry passed after meeting that talker. We walk along the river levees of the Po before going to see the bridge at Oglio. The levees call to mind stories of boatmen, hunters, gravel diggers, sawyers, wood cutters, and river workers. The narrow road that runs along them gives views of both the river and the fields, and at times other internal levees called “zonal,” which in case of high water serve to isolate the flooded areas. Beneath the levees, on both the side facing the river and the one facing land, are alluvial woodlands that at one time must have been mainly willows. Now everywhere grow poplars arranged in graduated lines (in every direction you

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see diagonal lines of trees) that together form along the levees a spatial order that exists only in these parts. Along this gravel road, farmhouses and courtyards in the style of the Mantova countryside. A large farm complex beneath the levee built of bare bricks with a low-pitched terra cotta roof. We discover the symmetry between the windows and the two wings, echoed in a pattern of jutting-out bricks and a hollow wheel shape centered above the arched doorway. Imposing, these farm buildings beneath the levee, even the square courtyard for threshing wheat. Written above the front door in majolica tiles: CORTE MOTTA. Further along, empty stretches of countryside and many abandoned farmhouses. Beneath the levee tall prairie-like grass, a hunchbacked old woman collecting grass, and in the far distance trucks passing under a leaden sky. We saw a bolt of lighting hit a poplar grove off to the side, and now from the clouds descends a threadlike gyre of deep blue that hangs motionless, connecting the sky and earth. A blast of wind chases off everything, crows fly close to the ground, wood pigeons flock together, starlings swarm and then scatter, and even the old hunchbacked woman takes off toward the wood’s edge. In the midst of all this tumult Luciano stayed out to photograph, then a bolt of lightening lit up the countryside and it began to pour. We arrive at the boat bridge in the middle of the storm. Somewhere in the distance a barking dog, a row of poplars under water, and a channel no longer discernible because it has eaten the bank separating it from the Po. In the middle of the water a row of boats supporting bridge decking, on the decking half-submerged traffic signs, and a darkness that seems almost night. Where it was darkest in the middle of the river, on a section of the bridge that seemed cut off, we thought we saw a hooded figure, hunched motionless over the water’s edge in the rain for long time. It made me think of a lunatic listening to the oracles of the river; but getting out of the car was out of the question, the water had come up almost to the fenders. Later, in the hotel. Before falling asleep Luciano said: “It seems that at this rate we’ll never make it to the delta.” The ideas that I brought along on the trip haven’t been of much use. The ideas that come to mind while moving about are too different from those that accumulate at home—two things that don’t mix. What I mean to stay is that we’re not masters of our thoughts; if anything it’s they who assert rights over us according to the situations in which they arise. Then they even become presumptuous and need to be taken for a walk and some airing out.

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21 May 1983 In Mantova, in a hotel facing the station. I revisited the church of Saint Andrea, designed by Leon Battista Alberti, with its massive system of barrel vaults where light is directed across ceiling coffers, descends down the arcades, then softens and disappears into shadowy corners. Phrased space that rouses the eyes. The light is no longer that glittering sea in which everything is scattered, but the central axis of a pattern of shadows in which the faithful take rest (religion in this way orients us who are lost, scattered). In the main square in the shadow of the clock tower is a market with stands selling fruit, cheese, and household items. A group of schoolchildren are going into the Rotonda di San Lorenzo and seem so tired that I feel compelled to follow them. As soon as we were inside, within the circle of Romanesque columns, the teacher began explaining: “Pay close attention, children. Each section of the cross vault is called a rib vault. Look closely, sleepyheads, or I won’t take you around anymore. Look, each column acts as the base of an arch, and there’s a center stone in each arch called a keystone. This isn’t a very sophisticated church, but it has its own style.” The children were very sleepy. In the piazza of the Palazzo Ducale. Under the porticos, an American mother argues with her little boy, then takes off on her own in the direction of the palazzo entrance while the boy stays behind, leaning against the wall and sulking. Two elderly tourists are sitting in the sun on the piazza’s ancient cobblestones. They’re wearing semi-transparent skirts that show the seams of their underwear. What chagrin for all the clothes that we wear, always something that exposes us in an unfortunate way. The same feeling for the overly tight jeans on a young woman with fat thighs that cause deep creases along her groin. With her is a thin man in a striped t-shirt chewing a match, and I have the impression that she dresses this way for him (I detest that thin man). Families step off of a bus, mixed nationalities. Fathers in sweat suits and Adidas and North Pole tennis shoes. Children and teenagers in t-shirts with the names of American universities. Only the women are wearing somewhat more formal clothes. The women always seem charged with maintaining a measure of decorum while the men enjoy an authorized slovenliness. In the gardens behind the Palazzo Ducale a pair of tourists different from the others, perhaps from eastern Europe—one with Louis Jouvet’s face, long sideburns, baggy pants, and odd high heels, and the other a very thin old woman with blond hair. They saunter about holding hands, and are soon joined by others, now all couples, wandering through the gardens. They’re awaiting the start of the palazzo’s visiting hours: Americans, Japanese, Ger-

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mans, fat and thin, teenagers, all aimlessly mill about in a habitual way without knowing precisely where they’re going. 11:30am. Just outside Mantova, on highway 10 in the direction of Ostiglia. Passing in front of a gate to an old farming estate we read: FREE BARNYARD DANCE. Luciano talks to me while driving: “At times I want to photograph everything, everything I see seems interesting. Then I look into the viewfinder, and everything seems obvious. But it seems obvious for the same reasons that first caused me to want to photograph it. If on the other hand I momentarily forget the need to photograph, at times the opposite happens: something striking stands out to me, and without thinking too much about it I focus and see that I’m able to frame it well. It’s mainly a problem of framing. It’s also a matter of one’s state of mind.” We turn off in the direction of San Benedetto on a road called Romana because it was a route for pilgrims coming from over the Alps on their way to Rome. Undulating fields planted with grain, lettuce, cabbages, alfalfa. There’s wide open space in this landscape, but not unrelenting thanks to the undulations. From behind the profile of a green field pops the curvature of a distant, almost yellow field, run through by a slope the color of clay. In this way the eye is not thrown into the fray, as in the absolutely flat plain, where after a while it becomes hard to distinguish between what is familiar and what is unusual, and everything becomes homogenous and tiring. A levee in perspective forms the profile of the earth, and arrays of highvoltage power lines traverse the cultivated plains. A little while ago we stopped in front of a large tree hit by the windstorm last night; its trunk looked as though it had been chopped by a gigantic hatchet, with a crevice running from top to bottom. Passing drivers stopped by the riven tree to talk about what they had seen when the storm had hit. We cross the iron bridge over the Po; lines of poplars rise up from the current that has flooded everything as far as a sand pit. On the outskirts of San Benedetto is a monumental cemetery built long ago by monks, and a little further on a place selling the little statues you see a bit everywhere in front of little country houses: statues of Snow White, of the seven dwarves, of swans, fake marble tree trunks, imitation plaster wells, imitation doghouses, Madonnas inside grottos, shepherds and shepherdesses. San Benedetto, on the main thoroughfare. It’s as if everyone here takes trips only to nearby destinations instead of long fragmented journeys; they don’t seem to feel the need of going all over the place. The passersby linger, like that old woman pushing a bike by hand looking at me who seems to slow

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down with every step. In this part of town everything seems tolerable: the bicycle racks along the street, the porticos, the people all adult or elderly who move without hurry, the few parked cars. It’s surprising to realize that they don’t carry themselves with an escapelike urgency. They know one another and exchange greetings, they talk from one end of the street to the other, they call out to one another from the bars. They don’t seem to feel this need that we have to always move about in wide space, attempting in this way (in vain) to resolve our inadequacies in life. These people inhabit their place, this small space, and are not occupants that could be anywhere, such as we who don’t have a place of belonging: you can tell by the way they move along the street. Luciano tells me that the far end of the street is completely different. The street is a perspective that leads to the façade of an old villa, and on this end there are little grocery stores, ordinary bars, other basic needs stores, men wearing hats in front of the bars, and women with their hair tied back with scarfs who slowly ride by on bikes. The other end leads to a levee and has a much more modern look. To the left is an arcade with modern stores selling photographic equipment, clothes for young people, and electric appliances. On the corner is a bank with tinted windows, in front of which stands a guard with a holster strapped to his thigh. Two young women pass by on bikes, carrying themselves completely differently from the women with scarfs at the other end of the street. The young women move bouncily, with an escape-like urgency, and with every movement show off their independence. As they pass the guard stationed on the corner by the bank, he waves to them looking as if he were well aware of just how independent they are, almost unapproachable, there on their bikes in the sun. When the Po overflows, the first places it floods are the alluvial flatlands with poplar groves (which not only don’t mind, but grow better, leading to faster profits). Here there is a barrier of briars, reeds, raspberries, and dockweed, beyond which we see the flooded poplar grove. The still water reflects the tops of the trees in such a way that there seems to be an intricate forest under the water where a man on a little boat passes by pushing himself with a pole. After San Benedetto, heading east along the levee, we found a place called LIDO MARTA, a bar with an outdoor dance area on the banks of the Po. In front of the bar is a cage with three little monkeys, another with geese and peacocks, and another with French roosters. It starts to become very hot outside, and over the countryside there seems to hang an immense muggy sigh. Even Luciano sighs while telling me a story about his daughter, who is six years old and often forgotten by the person who should pick her up after school. One day she asked him if it were

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possible to buy a different life, a life she would like to have, with a new family and everything else. We sigh for all the families and relationships gone bad, for all the houses and people that we’ve had to leave behind, and then because we’re still so far from the delta. We go around a sand pit that cuts off the road on the levee. Nearby is a tall mechanical structure with rigging cables next to a pile of abandoned dirt in the middle of a patchy scrubland that covers the levees. Even carts halffull of dirt have been abandoned, and two conical piles of sand are already covered with invasive plants. All around is a vague terrain, a terrain convulsed by the sand or clay pit, which after being abandoned and left to itself (as always happens), becomes a sort of scrubland. In search of abandoned places along the levees, following directions from a woman in a bar. Little towns that aren’t in tour guides, that no one talks about. In one there was only a donkey sniffing grass growing on a sidewalk along a deserted street dedicated to PALMIRO TOGLIATTI, LEADER OF THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY. In another little town there was a huge head of Mussolini stamped on a wall with a warlike inscription underneath, next to a barber shop that was all boarded up. Men in a bar, but no one out on the streets, except for a woman with a child in her arms who went to make a call in a phone booth next to a cornfield. The town was called Mirasole; other names on the road maps: SAN SIRO, QUINGENTOLE. Further along we find a weir, canals that run straight through tall grass as far as the horizon. On the wall of the weir is a row of neoclassic statues, and, underneath, putrid water full of coconut shells. Nearby is an old cemetery with crumbling headstones; while we pause amid the tombs we hear the sound of a distant television. While passing through another town with an air of abandonment we hear a soccer match being broadcast. Looking at the old houses painted with colors no longer for sale (many of an azure color made from the copper sulfate used to spray fruit trees), there doesn’t seem to be the sense of looming poverty, but rather of places where no one wants to live anymore because “nothing happens” there. In San Siro, a mallow-colored little villa stands out from other houses because it’s painted with acrylic paints. A man comes out and we start up a conversation with him. The man said that he was fixing up the little villa, that he had traveled for a long time, that now he was tired of traveling, and that the Christian Democrats were disgusting shitheads that made him sick. He wondered: how was possible that a country of idiots kept voting for them? He can’t stomach it. After San Siro we pass by the Secchia River, full of meanders with fishing huts built on stilts lining both banks. Tired of continually getting lost

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on side roads, we’ve also lost sight of the Po. Around half past five we stumble who knows how upon a town called Pieve di Coriano, and here the landscape of houses is completely different. We’re on a street of little residential villas that look like Swiss chalets; in the yard of one of these little villas is an aviary full of exotic birds making a racket of cries and tweets and trills, as if we were in a tropical jungle. Rusty cars without wheels out in the middle of the grass, a huge meadow full of wrecked buses and trucks, and out front a fee fishing pond with the sign: PESCA RELAX. In the distance are industrial warehouses and scattered villas everywhere, almost all built of bare industrial brick with courtyards surrounded by low walls. All this signals areas of greater wealth. As if in confirmation, there’s the smell in the air of pork or something similar, a smell of fat emitted from some factory, still pungent after spreading for miles. Three red and white smokestacks rise up in the distance over a cluster of red roofs and bell towers, against an almost black sky. The smokestacks are part of the Revere Power Station on the far side of the river, one of many along the Po. From the station buildings run huge pipes mounted on a metal viaduct; underneath are boats moored in the river flowing full of bubbles and foam. Seen from here, the Po is a vast black current covered with refuse, greasy splotches, and frothy bubbles, which descend like a scattered army. The sky is cloudy when we arrive in Sermide, after a day of travel partly wasted, because we weren’t able to follow the levee road. In a piazza with a big tower we go into a bar to make a call. The space inside seems a long, barren warehouse, crowded with men wearing hats bent over card games. The ceiling fans with long blades give a colonial feeling to the huge room. A massing of hundreds of men and only men in the bar, who seem to be for the most part merchants and wealthy farmers. Carrying themselves very differently from the people we saw in San Benedetto Po, these men with hats on their heads seem sunken into themselves like sullen animals. At the back of the bar someone is playing a video game, an old man looks at the rain through the front window, and the barkeeper, the only woman, doesn’t look anyone in the face. At a table four men are playing cards, one stiffened by polio, who every so often freezes up, and the others yell: “Come on, hurry up and play, Dio porco!” Tonight we’re staying at the house of one of Luciano’s friends. Luciano’s friend, Maria, is a friendly and attractive woman, who lives with her young boy and reads many books at night; she likes long novels, Russian ones, for example, so that she can reencounter characters she already knows, and stay up with them until late.

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She says that she reads mostly at night, and often likes to read while walking around the house with a book in her hand; for this reason she’s kept furniture to a minimum, especially in the hallway and living room. She works in the post office and says that she likes her job because she meets many people and every so often can help someone, such as old people coming to collect their pensions who seem lost and afraid of everything. Her husband died two years ago, and now she has a boyfriend who lives in Milan and comes to visit her every two weeks. Her son, who is nine, has given us his room for the night, full of plastic toys, electronic games, action figures, and toy cars scattered everywhere. Before going to bed, he brought us to the balcony to give us a bundle of rosemary, and we helped him to water the flowers. Then the last jokes and laughter, the freshness of the night, the image of the woman and her son. 22 May 1983 Today is Sunday, and good weather has returned. In these days I haven’t read any newspapers, and this morning talking to a gas station attendant I felt as if I had lost track of the flow of history. I feel a bit lightheaded for lack of opinion (as if suddenly I were a deflated ball). Outside Sermide, beyond the electric power plant housing blocks, but before crossing the Po again, we take a side road with mown grass piled up along the edge of the asphalt. An island in the middle of the river is hidden by a dense wood along the meander, while the far bank is marked by fluvial terraces where tree trunks and branches have piled up. Bushes emerge from the water where the current hits higher ground. Carrion crows nesting in a poplar grove cautiously emerge with a few other neighbors, sparrows and siskins, taking flight in that manner of theirs that is never expansive. Seagulls circle on the water constantly squawking, sticking together in a cluster in the cove. Crows fly high with quick wingbeats, but soar when landing; they pass by alone and are often the only moving presence above the poplars. We wanted to see the island in the middle of the river, but couldn’t find a trail along the bank. Here at the river’s edge are poplars, little cypresses, muddy holes, little flies that land on my fingers as I write. A man in rubber waders is checking the level of the water with measuring rods stuck in the bank; he jots down a measurement in a notebook for each rod that he pulls out. He says that many families live between the two levees, that is, the main levee (the one next to the river) and the zonal levee (on the other side of the alluvial woods, or beyond the fields). When floodwaters put houses at risk, there’s the chance that someone might come at night to breach the main levee and let the water out in order to save houses lower in the

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valley. I asked him if this had happened before, and he said yes, but not in this place but further downstream, where one night people woke up with water in their homes. He speaks in a calm tone about the pollution in the river and the fish caught there; he says for him the river hasn’t been the same since the sturgeon disappeared (an effect of industrial dumping). Another man, with a waterproof hat and red cheeks, arrives on a bike and then begins talking with the man in waders and Luciano about factories upstream, in the direction of Casalmaggiore, Pomponesco, Viadana. He grumbles: “Agriculture doesn’t matter at all to them. It could go to hell and never recover.” The things they talk about make me feel an outsider, a tourist. And the place they mention as if it were an important town (called Felconia) I’ve never heard of before. Swallows fly low over the river, and from the far bank comes the song of a cuckoo. We cross the Po again heading towards Castelmassa, in search of the levee road. The man who asked us for a lift is hard to understand when he talks because he is missing all his front teeth. He keeps smiling without reason and is wearing a faded t-shirt with the name of a bicycle company written across his chest. Continuing to smile without reason, he says that he wants to show us a place by the Po. He insists that he accompany us. At the end of a bumpy little side road we arrive at an abandoned villa or stately house with crumbling balconies, covered with vegetation. Apart from its front, the house is hidden by a swath of thick briar bushes and locust trees. On the roof above the pediment is a statue of a soldier with crossed arms that seems Byzantine. Our toothless passenger points it out: “That’s the penitence hero.” Because we had passed by posters paying tribute to the heroes of the resistance, and he was grinning in his odd way, I thought it might have been a play on words. The toothless man asked while smiling: “Does it look like me?” He is the penitence hero: he goes around cleaning old abandoned houses along the Po without anyone asking him to do so, this being his act of penitence, as far as we were able to understand. Afterward he took us to the remains of a little pier on the river that flowed full of foam and garbage. He pointed to the bubbles the color of bread scattered over the surface of the water and said: “Have you ever seen them before? They come from the electric power plants. There are lots of power plants, eh!” Back at the car he asked for a cigarette then asked us to send him a postcard, making sure to write down his address. At the end he asked for a bit of money and wanted the whole pack of cigarettes.

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We are in Calto, in the region of Polesine, but here everything seems as if we’re closer to Ferrara, from the dialect to the slightly wan air enveloping the bell towers. A little town of nearly identical square new houses next to older ones with red roofs beneath a stairway that descends the levee. On the far side a narrow lane leads to flooded fields and a spur of land sticking out into the river, where two marvelous holm oaks cover everything with their branches. A little unsettled by the encounter with the penitence hero, we stop to rest. A motorboat was tied to a chain wrapped around the trunk of one of the two holm oaks, and while Luciano was out taking photographs, two fishermen arrived, untied the boat, and left on the river. They looked at me as if they weren’t happy to have found me there, long wary glances from the little quay. When he worked near Ferrara as a water field officer, Ruggeri used to greatly suffer over this sort of mistrust he would encounter in people. He had to monitor the level of the river and also take care that no unauthorized boats came to dredge the bottom of the river to take away gravel. But all the boats were authorized, and he knew that dredging caused disasters, because the structure of the riverbed would remain disturbed and the river would go crazy. That everyone treated the river as an inanimate object enraged him. And whenever he could, he would explain to everyone that the path of the Po changed all the time (like our bodies), due to the centrifugal force of the water eroding its concave banks and to the alluvial materials deposited on its convex banks, such that every bend is destined to become eroded along its internal part, as the external curve little by little becomes closed by a fluvial terrace. The meanders continuously straighten and then reform downstream with the movement of an advancing snake, which has been reshaping the flow of the water since the long-ago quaternary period. But now that everyone treated it as an inanimate object, the river was slowly going crazy, and its movements had become incomprehensible, due also to the two barricading levees that almost entirely line its banks. And so with the loss of this wisdom of the river, there remained only the mistrust of the men: thus were the thoughts of Ruggieri when he used to work as a water field officer. 3pm. In the direction of Ficarolo along the levee. Two coots take flight through the rushes as a dragonfly escapes in front of our car. We wonder how we’ll manage to reach the delta at this pace. From where we are, there is a clear view of the parade of garbage carried downstream by the river. The bread-colored bubbles here are stuck to a protrusion covered with shrubs. When the bubbles run aground they look like

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sponges covered with grey froth, and when they dry out they look like clay and are hard to tell apart from the dirt on which they have been deposited. At times the gray froth, withered on a bush, is pushed by the wind back into the water, falling like a very fine sand that doesn’t sink. Little trails depart along the levee and descend through the poplar trees, disappear, then reappear farther on where there are fishermen along the bank near one of the boats used to dredge the riverbed. Flat-keeled boats beached on a pile of clay, this too covered with the gray froth that extends to an old oxbow full of the frothy bubbles. And on the river now no longer just bubbles flow by but splotches that look like minestrone poured into the water. Below the levee we encounter a gloomy building, in front of which a group of boys are playing a soccer match. After a few moments we realize that many of the boys have Down syndrome, and that this is a home for people like them. Some of the children walk along the levee accompanied by relatives or nurses. The atmosphere doesn’t feel clinical thanks to the nearby river. Two boys wearing black leather jackets and black rockstar sunglasses walk arm in arm with a pretty blond nurse. External appearances advance upon us always in flux to form moments, and moments are what beings gather themselves in, like the children with Down syndrome strolling along the riverbank. On the other hand, the Sunday back-and-forth of cars and scooters towards the bridge is a thing so apathetic to make you forget the moments, a mechanical coursing of lost souls trying to save themselves by heading out in cars over the asphalt along the grassy coast. We abandon the levee with its mechanical Sunday back-and-forth where everyone is swearing and from which it’s impossible to disentangle yourself. Gone the idea of being able to watch and listen to everything: out in the world there’s a depressing potential, which if it hits you, ruins the will to form ideas as detached observers. We stop for a break at the piazza in Ficarolo, a vast flat space, with a crooked bell tower and a large archway with a haughty air, that has lost its charm due to the mass-produced apartment blocks built on one side. A few people in the piazza chat about politics around a stage for campaign assemblies. Sitting next to us outside a bar some teenagers are talking dementedly about a famous TV personality. We quickly escaped, and are now on a main highway heading towards Occhiobello and Ferrara. We saw in passing the perspective of an old villa completely blocked by a furniture emporium; an eight-year-old poster for a circus hung from the closed shutters of a farmhouse.

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Under a dark sky around five in the afternoon we arrive in Occhiobello, where I want to see the dead city. Along a little street with low houses, an old man all wrapped up on an armchair in front of a house has been taken outside for some fresh air, with an alarm clock in his hand. In the empty piazza a little barbershop is open, even though it’s Sunday. The barber was shaving a client while three kids on the doorstep sang a song by Lucio Dalla. The barber came out and irritatedly waved them off, and the three kids left grumbling to slouch outstretched on the stairway leading to the levee. The piazza is bounded on this end by the travertine stairway, and from the top we see an expanse of red roofs and gardens behind two-story houses with chimneys running up external walls that begin to taper at the height of the first floor, common in areas between Ferrara and Rovigo. It starts to rain, and from the houses below, many women almost simultaneously come out to take down laundry hung to dry. I went in the rain to see the dead city, below the levee near the river. Houses abandoned after the great flood of 1951, the old city is now completely invaded by nature. Leafy branches of large trees, bramble bushes, and creeping bindweed cover everything. A narrow trail leads to a maze of collapsed roofs, walls sprouting shrubs and little trees, fallen shutters covered with dirt and poppies. A fig tree’s branches have become an arched entryway to a ruined house, and from there to a squalid hole that might have been another house, but now seems a cave full of bushes and shit. Coming out of that squalid hole I found myself face to face with a woman in a raincoat holding an umbrella who looked at me as if she was very sad to have found me there poking around. From the top of the levee I see roofs that are gaping holes, thick walls from which hang roof fragments, with tiles blackened by old moss. On a narrow windowsill a locust tree nearly three feet tall has sprouted, its roots growing into the cracks of the wall. I again meet the woman with the raincoat and umbrella, who is watching the water in the river and the floating dock of the local rowing club, where the silhouettes of athletic young men gesture to one another in the grand unreality of a Sunday. I also find Luciano, who is thinking about his daughter, and fear that he’s been burdened with worry from the start of the trip (but which is now getting worse). The wind is blowing broken branches down the levee, and in the heat evaporating vapor forms two puffy strips along the edges of the asphalt. I see from far away the Po reverberating in the rain, and as soon as the rain stops everything becomes immobile, grey, and peaceful. In the end, out in the distance all around there’s nothing special to see or record, there’s only time that passes. Space is a sort of giant prison where we

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await something: no one knows what, we can only make guesses, and there’s only time that passes. I am writing in a fog of depressive gas. In the evening we cross the Po again on the Stellata bridge. The river was full of iridescent reflections, and many fishermen were sitting along the edges of the road and fishing in the canals. We’re heading towards Ferrara. We decided to take a road to Bondeno because it occurred to me that we might go out to eat in the town where my father was born, but as soon as we arrived in Bondeno we went into the first restaurant that we found. Along the wide highway were rows of nearly countless furniture factories, plastic goods factories, and a weapons factory, while the surrounding landscape was full of little houses and apartment complexes scattered everywhere. Only a few old farmhouses and villas were still visible from the road. Here begins one of the richest areas in the world, more in the direction of Modena than Ferrara: it’s from Modena that the fog of depressive, suffocating gas originates, impossible to miss when it arises. I know very well that it originates from down there, where money has hemmed itself in with scorched earth. Nothing left to save, families in their tombs and amen. No more will you have a place of belonging. Everything continues, as every evening does in any place, with the rituals of the sunset and then the rising of the moon. On a final evening stroll in the countryside we stumble upon a huge dance club, called KONTIKI MUSIC HALL, surrounded by brightly lit palm trees in the middle of the darkness of the fields. Under the palm trees swarmed young men and women in search of love, cheering us up. 23 May 1983 Early in the morning in these plains the light is completely absorbed by the colors of the soil. An azure vapor makes distances vanish, and beyond a certain limit you can tell only that things are out in the distance, scattered in space. And with the high sun and clear light, large separations become visible. The edges of light and shadow bring forth stark forms on all the walls, pieces of asphalt, hedges, or signs along the edges of a general movement of traffic and commerce. Things not indicating commerce or road directions are all in a state of abandonment. Where there is traffic, the shadows always have the air of appearing useless, too motionless for this world. And if a truck passes by, lifting a piece of newspaper off the asphalt, you immediately understand that in these parts every hesitation or delay is out of place. In Ferrara we slept in a hotel in the piazza behind the castle. We went to revisit Cosmé Tura’s triptych in the cathedral museum: in the section to the right behind the Virgin are those vaporous distances that make me think of Chinese painting. I missed this way of treating the far-off, of viewing space

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that bursts open in the background where everything disappears: not a gaze into the infinite, but a gaze into all that vanishes. Then we sent a postcard to the penitence hero. Noon. We cross an area of industrial warehouses in search of a road towards Pontelagoscuro and the Po, rows of cisterns, smokestacks, and refinery distillation towers that shoot fire and vapor. Writing while Luciano drives, I’m able to keep at bay a panic that comes and goes. On the way to the iron bridge in Pontelagoscuro, to the side of the trafficfilled highway, some tracks run along a blackened brick wall that encircles the Montedison industrial complex. On the other side of the wall arise the domes of cisterns, towers full of valves and coils, bundles of pipes with spire-shaped burners, and metal platforms suspended between the towers. A few minutes ago while Luciano was taking a photo on the tracks by the wall, he had to quickly leap away to dodge a SOLVAY & NACCO tank train car that suddenly came up on him. As soon as he was on the asphalt a truck honked so violently at him that it made me jump too. Around the corner we stop and get out of the car in front of the main gates of the industrial complex and hear someone shout from above, sending us away. There was a man high up on a tower watching us, wearing a striped tshirt and a single suspender that ran diagonally across his chest. In front of us was an enormous empty shed lit by three arrays of floodlights turned on in the middle of the day. In the back a smokestack emitted a gush of smoke, which now covers part of the sky, yellow and transparent. At last we manage to stop in front of a side entrance to the industrial complex, along a wide road where only trucks drive by. There’s a panic that arises when we feel inadequate, with our heads full of useless opinions. Here invasive plants cover most of the blackened wall, and the asphalt in front of the entrance is crumbling into puddles; other puddles are full of soaked boxes, pieces of tires, fragments of styrofoam, a crushed can, and packing hay that someone lost along the road. Out in the distance everything continues of its own accord day and night: the Po flows towards the sea full of viscous bubbles and foam, the rowing club outboard motorboat passes under the iron bridge, and on this levee where we’ve taken refuge comes the intermittent buzzing of an electrical power plant at the edge of the river. Further along the levee is a spillway with tracks suspended over holding tanks, rusty ferrules, and windlasses against a cloudy background. Luciano is in the car smoking a cigarette; he no longer feels like photographing these places. In the distance are factories made of blackened bricks, perhaps the first built in Pontelagoscuro. All the windows are broken, and

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inside is only darkness. In the time when all the walls began to blacken, those factories must have been deities of this place. On the other side of the spillway in the abandoned countryside are grey cisterns of an old company, WATER TREATMENT COMPANY, and they too must have once been deities of this place. Now between the cisterns and the distant scrubland arise smokestacks and burners with streams of smoke and fire. We’ve been here for about an hour. I climbed down the levee and gathered plants that must have survived from the era in which everything blackened. Prickly as a thistle, they have deformed leaves and are no longer bilaterally symmetrical: one side of the leaf is lanceolate and the other is runcinate. In the countryside, against the background of smokestacks and spireshaped burners, with the sky thick with vapors, a little flock of sheep has come to graze around those old cisterns. The shepherd, an old man in a yellow raincoat, is sitting on a metal pipe, listening to a transistor radio. In the direction of Francolino. Along the levee a man on a bike with an open umbrella, and birds flying low. We took a little road that ended in front of a village of egg-yellow houses, completely deserted in the middle of corn fields. The road ended between two concrete bins full of garbage, the houses with all their rolling shutters closed, the outline of the fields against the distant levee; perhaps a place for residents who come here only to sleep. On this trip across the countryside we’ve seen a general abandonment of the external world: clusters of concrete houses with the air of having been abandoned as soon as they had appeared, lifeless farms, deserted sandpits, fenced-off travel trailers in the middle of fields, high-voltage electric pylons with wires hung across vast distances. The void is filled with the names of nonexistent localities, not places but only names put on road signs by some administrator of external space. We’ve been traveling along the edge of the Po for an hour without saying a word, the whole time with a dark motionless sky full of low clouds. Even the river water seems immobile, and over the plain for as far we can see there is no one. No cars, no motorcycles or bicycles, along the little roads that wind along the grassy steps that form the interior contours of the levees. 5:20pm. Luciano has gone back into action, deciding to go out and photograph the dark horizon, where all that’s visible are clouds broken up by the wind, wandering across the landscape. Then suddenly men on scooters appear on the levee with nylon tarps on their heads for protection from the rain. Then another man arrives on foot, wearing tall rolled-down fishing boots and carrying a large basin on his shoulder. He heads towards the flooded

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poplar grove, where we watch him climb into a little boat and disappear through the trees. Following the man into the poplar grove we find a beautiful old house immersed in the water up to the first floor and surrounded by fir, locust, plum, and cherry trees. Ivy has grown up to the balcony, and clematis covers everything. On the roof a blackbird sings a two-note song. Soon after comes a chirping and squawking of other birds, a repetitive reverberation of croaking and cooing in the scrub that seems comical. The sounds in the scrub lighten the day’s dark mood a bit, and we decide to return to Ferrara to eat in a good restaurant. The only landscapes we encounter are movements of habits, circumstances depending on the hours, lights, colors, and sounds that change. All this vanishing from which are born stories, our dispersed minuteness near a river. Back at the levee. Everything is as it was, a little altered by the falling rain and the still air that absorbs the light, scattering it into the increasingly wide open space of the plain without points of reference. We passed in the rain through Ruina, Saletta, and Tamara, and now are backtracking towards Ferrara between two rows of plane trees. Everywhere are the lights of restaurants, gas stations, dance clubs, pizzerias. Here the external world all seems a place to eat or drink. At a restaurant in San Giorgio, a large photo takes up the back wall. In the photo is the same restaurant that we have before our eyes, with the same red napkins tucked in the glasses, the same flowers on the tables, carts of desserts and meats and appetizers, the same red plastic light fixtures. The manager is an elderly man, somewhat obese, hair glinting with pomade, wearing a yachtsman’s jacket and glasses with golden frames. He asks all his clients if they’re hungry, what they wish to eat, if they would like to try the appetizers, and if they have a preference for a certain vintage of wine. Speaking in proper Italian, he greets every client with a formal title, and looks everyone in the face as if he recognizes in them attractive qualities. After such treatment, every client is transformed into someone, a meaningful human presence, no longer lost in the wild. And we too with this treatment have once again become recognizable members of our species, however tired and badly off we feel. Only that the waiter smiled like a puppet in approval of all of our responses, and faced with such theater, we weren’t able to rise to the occasion. As soon as we stepped outside, Luciano said that he had eaten too much, drunk too much, and that he had had enough of the trip. Digging around in his pocket, under a streetlight, he said: “I don’t know where I put the car keys. I don’t understand anything that I’m doing, what I’m photographing. I don’t feel good either and I want to see my daughter. I’m going home.”

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THREE DAYS IN THE TERRITORIES OF RECLAIMED LAND 9 May 1984 Traveling by bus I revisited the countryside near Ferrara and passed by one of the beautiful masonry spillways from the Estensi period, built to drain marshes with a method of regulated outflow. Construction perhaps sixteenthcentury, with a boxy little tower above a small bridge of short segmental arches. The four little pointy turrets on the roof are, I think, a prototype still adopted by draftsmen who design houses in this part of the countryside. Before falling asleep, I heard the rolling shutters tremble from a faraway vibration, and thought that here at night the earth gives way as far as the Po Delta. At dawn I seemed to hear a radio advertisement for a furniture store echoing through the streets of this forlorn little town, Finale di Rero, in the territories of reclaimed land. It gave me the impression that a car with a loudspeaker was driving along the deserted streets. The owner of the bar-hotel asked me if I had slept well, with a smile that I interpreted as grimace of solitude. After serving me coffee she made the same smile, which made me feel like shaking her hand as I was leaving; she cleaned her hand on her apron and awkwardly shook mine, saying: “Excuse me.” Her son offered to give me a lift in his little van to Tresigallo, and wanted to know what I was doing in the area. It must have seemed comic to him that I was there to write, because he said teasing me a bit: “But what are you writing, a book for the consortium?” It seems that here many people write books for farming consortiums, why I’m not sure. The main piazza in Tresigallo is a uniform opening between four streets, delimited on one side by a fascist-era construction with epic bas-reliefs, and on the other by a parking lot packed with little cars in front of the town hall, a modern building in the shape of a graduated cube. A boulevard leading out of town is lined with short recently pruned trees and squat old houses, then passes next to the cemetery from which I see exiting many women, their heads wrapped with scarves. In the piazza, people saunter about slowly with the slow movements of vacationers, and here too I hear a radio advertisement echoing in the air. The young men in shorts and flip-flops also give the impression of being on vacation, clustered together to talk about sports under the shelter of a tree. At the end of the piazza is a narrow street of brightly painted little geometric houses, and I head in its direction. Sensation of being amid people who populate the inner reaches of a continent, in some far-removed province, where everything arrives a little muffled. Perhaps this is what I was searching for, yesterday on the bus.

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The road that leads from Tresigallo to Jolanda di Savoia is narrow and straight, bordered by plane trees. The yellow wheatfields, the still-green cornfields, the furrows with other plantings, all have straight lines that seem to converge in perspective towards the same point on the horizon, and that point moves with me as I walk. Houses and trees and bell towers stand out, very low in the background, distant and scattered in space. Cars pass by at high speed and I have to walk along the outside shoulder. Up high a crow slowly turns, then I watch it land on the asphalt to take something that looks like a piece of plastic. White cumulus clouds along the edge of the earth loom over faraway isolated clusters of houses and barriers of poplars. I pass in front of an old abandoned farming complex, with its walls all covered with grey mold, its windows broken, and crows sauntering about in front of the stables awaiting something. On the other side of the road is a little pink villa with weeping willows in the yard. No one to be seen for a moment, and then a truck drove by pulling a trailer loaded with tractors. The bus appeared and I had to run to catch it. Jolanda di Savoia is a wide road with two cross streets, around which you see clusters of geometric houses everywhere. An agricultural settlement established during the fascist era under the auspices of Italo Balbo, I think. When my mother was a child it didn’t yet exist, and here there was marshland. Along the wide road a row of shops with all the modern sacraments, and women off to do their shopping pedaling along as if time for them was weightless. A little gothic-styled church from the fascist era, flowerings of TV antennas on the roofs, and here too that tone of life of far-removed places, where it feels that everyone is living below the standard level of some universal life financial scheme. Just outside of town, in the fields and along the road, many little brightly painted houses, well kept, modest. They all have sharply pitched roofs, aluminum frame windows and doors, yards enclosed with simple metal fences, glassed entryways that protect the front doors. They don’t seem prefabricated prototypes, but old houses remodeled in keeping with common trends. From the bus they appeared awaiting out in the distance, like everything else. Everywhere an air of waiting, of time flowing, days passing, one season turning into another, that you don’t feel in cities. I thought that the bus was going to Codigoro, but instead at the end of a farm it turned back. Looks from passengers as I asked the driver to let me off, with overly hurried gestures. At times I feel the difference between the city and country in the way that people stare at my gestures as if they were

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incomprehensible. A woman in the bus had a relatively fixed gaze, but she stared at me without staring at me, looking rather at something around me. The bus turned back leaving a cloud of dust behind it. Here the dirt road leads into the fields, after a little bridge over a canal. In front of me empty countryside with ample sky above, an extremely wide sky over an expanse of rectangular plots, cut through by ditches and highways. I’ve been walking for an hour through the fields, following a canal that on my military map is called Canale Leone. I haven’t seen anyone, and I don’t really know where I am going. With my compass I see that I’m traveling approximately eastward. There’s a kind of happiness out there, in the lines of earth that extend everywhere without undulations. They’re so flat that I seem to be in an elevated spot, simply due to the fact that the little path is a foot higher than the fields. In the far distance are indistinct visions of brightly painted houses, emerald, pink, egg yellow, grass green. I hadn’t realized that these sheets of phosphorescent green, the large grasslands across which my path leads, are rice paddies. Stems of rice plants rise up just above the surface of the water, surrounding me like a submerged prairie. The sky is dark again, low flat-bottomed clouds that darken towards their tops. Surprised to be in rice paddies, and rice paddies everywhere here, as far as I can see. 3pm. I pop out on an asphalt road, in front of a heap of crumbling masonry on which a beautiful ailanthus tree has sprouted. On the other side of the road is another abandoned farm complex. Stables, storehouses, farmhouse, all closed with big padlocks, and the scent of manure still in the air. Here the base of the road is about ten feet higher than the surrounding land, and I finally have a good view of the rice paddies. A sea of green rectangles that seem meadows, if it weren’t for the glimmer of the strips of water separating them. I’m very drawn to them, and am happy to be here. A man in a three-wheeled Vespa truck gave me a ride to a little town called Le Contane. Passing through rice paddies, we saw many herons. The man talked about the weather forecast, but I think that he took me for a foreigner, because at some point he asked me: “But can you understand what I’m saying?” Walking towards the line of the horizon always gives you the sense that you’re adrift in some far-flung point in the sweep of the earth, like objects visible in the distance. One must search for another point for orientation, and imagine that it will come sooner or later. There arises the need to continually

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imagine what’s out there in the distance; otherwise it becomes impossible to take even a single step. It’s six miles from Le Contane to Ariano Ferrarese, and I walk through tomato fields and a few more rice paddies. On a strip of grassy land between the paddies, hundreds of thronging seagulls frantically squawked. It begins to rain, a woman comes out of a farmhouse to take down the laundry, and some birds take shelter on the branches of a big oak tree under a dark sky. Now with my hood pulled up under the rain it seems that outside, in everything occurring, there appears the mirage of a stirring presence. The call of open space issues from everything that appears, grows, or arises around me. The young driver of a Volvo gave me a lift to Mezzogoro, telling me that he was in college and about to graduate with a degree in economics. I got out on a bypass in front of a completely white little house, in a style that you might call postmodern. An excavator was almost done clearing away the remains of an old house, to make room for another little white house, in the same style, I imagine. Among the debris I saw an oleograph of Venice and an image of the Madonna. An old man on a motor scooter came up to me and said, “You should have been here this morning, when they were tearing off the roof.” As if I had missed an enthralling spectacle. Then he told me the whole story of the demolished house and its hapless owners, without once looking me in the face: when he had finished the story, he left without saying goodbye. I ran into the old man again in front of a bar, where young men in sandals with toothpicks in their mouths looked at my shoes. That is, they were looking at the shoes of everyone and the legs of the women, without once overly lifting their eyes, with gestures so idle that they seemed exaggerated. In the bar a heavyset barman was talking about fishing with a client. Coming out of the bar, I was accosted by the old man on the motor scooter, who whispered to me, pointing out a man sitting off to the side: “He’s an Egyptian. Three more of them have already come,” showing me the number three with his fingers. Then he left without saying goodbye. I write in the bus, passing along a canal that flows between two concrete embankments with water that comes up to the level of the road. This is the realm of canals. At the outskirts of Codigoro little houses everywhere. An ultramodernlooking supermarket with diagonal green stripes. Stores selling designer clothes with English names at what seems almost a rural crossroads. 9pm. Feeling the need to talk, I call G. but don’t find her. The intimacy that we carry with us is also part of the landscape, its tone transmitted by the space that opens out in the distance, at every glance; thoughts too are external

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phenomena into which we stumble, a strip of light on a wall, or the shadow of a cloud. In order to write, I always need to calm myself, sitting down or leaning somewhere, without fighting the passing time. I can even write while walking, but later discover in my journal only lists of things seen, without the opening of the space in which I saw them. 10 June 1984 (Sunday in Codigoro) I wake in a room with dark curtains and a quilt with large flowers. I’m up and walking soon after in the direction of the little remodeled station and a neighborhood with new houses. Once marshlands invaded this entire area. Manually channeled and filled in over centuries by malarial farmers, once more invaded by water, and then again filled in by malarial farmers and agricultural consortiums, the area was finally drained during extensive state reclamation projects, becoming fertile ground for various social experiments under fascism. Now in this place modern houses rise up, boxy and faceless. The houses without faces have only locked openings and reinforced surfaces to hide behind. People come out to look around and make sure everything is still normal, then retreat to hide in warrens. Large white warrens that could be anywhere, and here by the station, gorse bushes grow randomly. It’s Sunday, and along the roads I see only teenagers wandering around with their secrets. On the other side of the station are groups of cyclists in colorful shirts passing by on racing bikes. There’s the scent of grass in the air. A little before midday the landscape under a full sun was suddenly darkened by a plane dragging a banner across the light advertising a furniture outlet. In a soccer field, players wore jerseys with the names of a bank and a car dealer. I lingered for a long time to watch those ad-covered jerseys play soccer. Along the edges of the field were clusters of players’ wives and girlfriends. They chatted about home matters without paying much attention to the game. Well-kempt and wearing summer dresses, they turned to watch what was happening on the field only when they ran out of things to say. One of them was knitting a sweater, raising her eyes only to show her acceptance of that pointless wait. At times the movements of others seem poses meant to prop up a senseless meaning. The impression of an empty order that repeats itself everywhere for no reason. In big cities everyone clings one to another in suffocating loves to avoid feeling lost in that empty order that repeats itself everywhere without reason. Here there’s rather the sense that things are just like

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this, and that there’s not a big difference between that perpetual repetition and the random growth of wild shrubs along a road. In Codigoro’s central piazza, in a bar, at lunchtime. At times the desire to write wanes, and I’m struck by the impression that it’s useless to note down what I see, because this too is a fiction. And then I think of those who organize everything according to what they’ve learned, believe only in what they’ve read in books and newspapers, and look down with condescension upon this world because they hate to feel lost, exposed to the randomness of appearances. If you have the feeling that you know everything, the desire to observe disappears. Behind the piazza there’s a road that runs along the Po di Volano, with Art Nouveau buildings just over a small bridge. The crossing is low, almost even with the current, and seems it might have once been a drawbridge. Downstream the banks branch out in perspective, the flow of water amplifies everything, and breathing comes more easily. Fascinated by the houses along the banks, those with three-window Venetian gables, others with small attic windows aligned with beautiful green shutters. A virtue of the frontal perspective of Venetian architecture: you become used to looking at surfaces as something joyful, the joy of objects materializing. One of the small Art Nouveau-styled villas on the far bank has a veranda on the ground floor and above a tower and loggia. Well maintained, it gives the impression of being more private than the other houses, but with a serene façade. The houses along both sides of the canal, all built in other times and adorned by the simple rhythms of the windows, open up the space into an expansive cove, truly forming a place. Nothing abstract or planned, you can see that time down there has become shaped space, with one layer growing little by little on the others, like the wrinkles on our skin. Some children ride around me in wide circles, watching me write from the corners of their eyes. I wave to them, but out of shyness they mutely dart away. Afternoon in my room. On my map the area of extensive reclamation is a giant tangle of canals that cross ancient marshlands. To the south the Po di Volano, an old branch of the Po, flows through here. In its final stretches it passes through what are now dreadful places, all covered with asphalt, seaside resorts built for summer tourism, crowded anonymous developments that in winter are as empty as cemeteries. I came to this area to see the territories of reclaimed land, the land made uniform and productive, and what remains of the countryside. All life and land by now in the hands of developers. But I have to quit being so cynical,

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and instead observe that which recurs day after day without reason, the most inconspicuous of spectacles. On a Sunday afternoon stroll in Codigoro’s main piazza, I pass by posters advertising American films. The piazza, named after a well-known victim of fascism, is a crossroads with vague contours. People stroll around slowly, exchanging greetings and forming little clusters. There’s a war monument to the fallen with a fervent-looking unknown soldier holding up a ragged bronze flag. There are many bars, and to the left is a military police barracks built during fascism with a convex travertine façade. The cadences I hear in town, the drawn-out vowels, the nasal singsong, resemble my mother’s family’s way of speaking. Not far from the piazza at another intersection is a video game arcade with swarms of teenagers coming and going on scooters as evening descends. The road here is lined with bars. Outside sitting in chairs along the sidewalk are teenage boys who lost in the excitement of a soccer argument without thinking grab at their testicles. A group of short men in hats linger under a streetlamp, enjoying the pleasure of a chat. At dinner in a restaurant, all glances tell me that I’m an incomplete being. It always seems as if lone people carry with them some strange enigma. There’s a party tonight in celebration of something, with old people at the head of a long, crowded table making a toast with younger adults and children seated in the middle. The women wear flowery dresses, and many give the impression of being self-assured, full of sensual vitality, an impression I’ve had at times in the countryside. A little boy, hidden under the table after getting slapped, is looking at the legs of the women under their skirts. We’re never completely isolated from all that which goes on around us, and even less so when we are alone. The body is an organ for sensing the external, like stone, leaf, lichen. Still the urge to write, at the edge of town in search of a phone booth after dinner. In front of a large pumping station are canals where someone is fishing. The sunset glows red, and suddenly remorse wells up in me for things I haven’t done and am not doing, and then I also begin to think of people with whom I’ve lost touch, separations that are only likely to worsen. Along the little lane bordering the canal I now see many men fishing, seated in folding chairs. Here there’s a slowing of rhythms, even the birdsong, the cars passing by on the main road, a dog howling in the distance. In this light the perspective of the fields, crossed by canals, seems the surface of a game. A few fishermen have lit their gas lamps, and in the willow bushes there’s only the dim shade, the abstract calm of this time of day.

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11 June 1984 Departure from Codigoro towards Migliarino and the bridge over the Po di Volano. Little houses with gardens along the road, a beautiful day, the movements of a return to work. Something almost imperceptible renders familiar the gestures of a Monday morning. 8am. Before the grade crossing, a long and wide two-story house topped with a row of little statues of shepherds and stable boys arrayed in neoclassical rustic scenes. Perhaps the headquarters of an old farming consortium, it has a large arched entryway with a spiked wooden front door. A delivery van is unloading something by the front door. A woman leans out to laugh with the driver, and he responds wittily, clearly desiring her. The highway widens, and walking along it, I come back to the Volano canal, then the pumping station. There’s a bronze plaque: Consortium of the Grand Ferrarese Land Reclamation, Codigoro Pumping Station. The plaque features a bas-relief of a pumping station that looks instead like a huge dam, with water rushing over as if it were Niagara Falls, a bit of exaggeration by the artist. The pumping station is a severe-looking construction built of bare bricks and flanked by towers, with huge pipes that run out from its base. In the little security booth at the entrance a watchman looks up fearing that I want to come in, then goes back to reading his newspaper. A straight road flanks the canal, and beyond the canal the horizon spreads out with distant barriers of poplar trees. On the right is Codigoro’s enormous sugar factory, in ruins. The windows on all three floors are broken, the walls all moldy, and even the windows of a skylight on the roof are broken. Invasive plants grow in the broken pavement of the vast courtyard, and on the gate there survives this inscription: “ERIDANIA,” NATIONAL SUGAR FACTORIES. At one time this was the only industry that existed in these areas, and everyone wanted to produce sugar. The Greek name of the Po (related to the myth of Phaeton) came back to me thanks to that word in quotation marks. 10 A bit like the memory of an old love, a time in which families would all gather together, and there was still the habit of giving mythic names to factories, because factories were still mythic giants. Now a sign reads: ERIDANIA INDUSTRIAL LOTS. Beneath is a phone number for information and sales. In front of the collapsing sugar factory, on the bank of the canal, are piles of junk. Someone has dumped an old refrigerator, a spring mattress, a broken chair. Next to the junk, two old men on bikes have stopped to talk, and we exchange glances.

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As I continue to walk along the canal, the landscape now looks to me like Texas. High voltage electric pylons cross from one end to the other, with cables hung over vast distances. The road is higher than the fields, and the color of clay is visible everywhere, far into the distance. To my right is an expansive plain, flat, of a desert hue tinged with the ochers of this area. At a gas station I chat for a bit with the attendant, the wind blows, and the air is very clear. I see on the horizon another abandoned factory complex, smokestacks, and buildings with empty windows. Wooden light posts line the road, and on the other side of the canal appears the diesel locomotive that runs from Ferrara to Codigoro. It is green, with only three cars, and travels through the countryside like a passing thought. Strong gusts of wind shake the grass on the edge of the road. Seeing me standing there and writing, someone from a passing car shouted at me: “Ehi, sapiente, vat a piè?” 11 The Volano here is full of meanders, and the road follows it with many curves. In the fields on the opposite bank I saw a half-fallen ancient tower. To the right many canals intersect down below in checkerboard fashion, and one of them comes to where I am, passing under the road. I wish I could go and explore those canals one by one, they seem so marvelous. The mythic eras are out there, in the landscape, in the roads and canals that cross the territories, and in all this use of the world everywhere in motion. 1:30pm. On the bridge leading to Massa Fiscaglia. At the entrance to town a row of mustard-colored modern townhouses. Each little house has its own curving staircase, two massive balconies one above the other, and thick angled dividing walls to isolate each house from the others. Little mustardcolored houses for the poor hapless rich who need to live according to a style. The road follows a series of curves, and then arrives at a large empty asphalted space that seems to be a sort of piazza. Here there’s a four-story block of working class apartments, with identical balconies and metal parapets, and I’m in the bar on the other side of the street. In the bar and in the barman I recognize something faded that I know well from childhood. A specific way of manifesting poverty, as extreme cautiousness, a lack of colorfulness, a lack of vanity. A kind of official etiquette of penury; it comes from times in which life wasn’t planned, but focused on subsistence and nothing else. Thus it was in my family, and so too in this faded bar in Massa Fiscaglia where there’s an old billiards table and a few men speaking in dialect, all with hats on their heads. And yet an advertisement for a private gym in a neighboring town, hung on the wall in front of me, speaks in English: FUTURE FITNESS DI LAGOSANTO. DAY EXERCISES, FITNESS,

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BEAUTY. A man with a little clipped mustache gave me a ride down the road to Migliarino, but grumbled the whole way. At the wheel he said: “Se non si ha i mezzi non si viaggia. E po’ cus’a ghé da védar? Boia d’un dio, la zent l’an capiss più niènt. Io non posso mica portarla tanto avanti, sa? Boia d’un dio, mi i mazarev qui ch’i fan l’autostop. Ma dove vuole andare, a piedi?” 12 He was one of those southerners who come to work in the north, who then take on the local dialect in order to play the part of a native. The road is mostly deserted, with many curves; it isn’t that hot outside because the wind keeps blowing in from the sea. I realize only now that to my right, beyond the wall of reeds, in the far distance you can see the outline of the mountains. This morning the gas station attendant had told me—that today is so clear you can see the Alps. What I see is an azure shadow more pronounced to the northwest, above which are white clouds that render it uncertain. They must be the pre-Alps. Along a canal full of reeds and daffodils, I find a sign that says: FISHING ONLY WITH ROD AND REEL. Here begins a row of plane trees that border the road. The horizon is an uninterrupted green line, apart from the tops of a few distant bell towers and the darker outline of a few clusters of willow trees in the middle of orchards. White clouds arise from the direction of the sea, and inland is visible the barely perceptible azure profile of the mountains. Under a large umbrella appears a seller of potatoes, peaches, and watermelons, with her boxes arranged along the edge of the road. Seated on a folding chair, she’s reading a news magazine. The seller under the umbrella sold me some peaches and handed me a bottle of water to rinse my hands. About 50 years old, she didn’t seem surprised that I was traveling on foot, and told me that there was a bus stop a little down the road. I told her that today the sky was so clear that you could see the Alps, and she responded by saying that here no one has ever seen the Alps because they’re too far away. I then searched for that azure line with my eyes, but didn’t see anything because of the reeds in the canal. I was sorry to leave the seller, but she went back to reading her news magazine. Along the road I tried to find that azure line of the mountains, but didn’t see anything, and the doubt arose that I had imagined it all. Then there were white clouds that covered the horizon; probably no one here has ever seen the Alps, but many like me must have imagined seeing them. The imagination too is a part of the landscape: she inspires love for something out there, but more often she puts us on the defensive with too many fears; without her we wouldn’t be able to take a single step, but we

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never know where she carries us. Inextirpable goddess behind every gaze, figure of the horizon, be it so. I took a bus to the station in Portomaggiore. The empty main hall with veined marble walls, the gumball machine, and a ringing bell that signals the arrival of a train. The station is a barren parallelepiped, with the air of being new or almost new, on a boulevard lined with geometric houses. Next to it in a bar with outdoor raffia parasols and an awning for bicycles, a few kids are seated at little tables eating ice cream. 6pm. About to return home. An image comes to mind of the squashed hedgehog, with open jaws. An image of the road sign that read: STRADA SMARRITA. 13 An image of the woman in the dairy store that greeted me, saying, “Good morning, young man”; and when I brought to her attention that I wasn’t young, she replied, “Well, it’s just a way of saying.” On the train it seemed that I was the only passenger to board in Portomaggiore. I slept a bit. After Consandolo, Traghetto, Ospedale, we’re now stopped in Molinella. I’m astounded that these towns are so big, that there are so many houses and factories and inhabitants. How many places like these are there in the world, which almost no one has heard about? Think about all the towns that you saw traveling in America, and how remote they seemed. Strange names, the idea of a little settlement, and then instead complex places that would take months to just begin to know. Every moment is a surprise, and you find out that you know nothing very precise about the external world. And then there comes the desire to ask forgiveness of everyone: forgive our presumptuousness, forgive our discourses, forgive us for having believed that you were a swarm of flies on which to splutter our sentences. Forgive us, forgive us, we are inept and forgetful, and not even smart enough to stay at home, keeping our mouths shut and not moving, imitating the trees.

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TOWARDS THE RIVER’S MOUTH 31 May 1983 Near Ostellato visiting Mr. Costantino’s tomb. The cemetery wall running along the road is made of overly red industrial bricks, and above the entrance is a Latin inscription in wrought iron of which I’m able to decipher only a single word: INCIPIT. Along the road in the midst of agricultural fields, three men wait next to their cars talking about sports and fishing while their wives change the flowers on tombs in the cemetery. The central gravel pathway has only a few rows of recent tombs in black or grey marble, and at the back is a wall of those sad recessed burial compartments in grey marble, with little fake electric grave lamps and bunches of artificial flowers. On one of the tombs a girl in jeans and an old woman were cleaning the marble with a brush and soap, as if they were cleaning the floor at home. When we were at the hospital, I promised Mr. Costantino that I would have come to find him; easy promises, then he managed to die. His son who gave me a ride by car to the cemetery, and who came to the door when I was about to ring the bell, is a big man even taller than his father. In the dining room full of veneered furniture with glass doors and mirrors, we had little to say to one another. Emma, his mother, offered me a caffe latte, then I’m not sure why started telling me about her grandson who didn’t like to study. I caused some confusion when leaving the cemetery when I told the son that someone was waiting for me in Ostellato. The morning telephone call, my wish to see his father’s tomb, the fact that I’m headed to the Po Delta with someone who had dropped me off there to wander around the countryside on foot. All this perhaps seemed like a strange story to the big man. Giving me a lift to Ostellato, he talked in Ferrarese dialect, and I could see on his face traces of his family; the way his facial muscles were arrayed, certain looks that remain the same from childhood, family traits you carry till death. 11am, in Ostellato, still no sign of Reinhard Dellit. He picked me up this morning in Ferrara: soft-spoken and smiling, he’s wearing little gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a nice silk shirt. I had remembered him completely different. We speak in English; he wants to visit the Po Delta in preparation for a German television documentary. Notes about Mr. Costantino, who I want to remember. When we were at the hospital he often said: “I like it here, in good company and at ease, for sure more than at home!” He would say that at home with his family he would get irritated, often boiling over like a pot. Seeing me write, he always had the same joke: “You write difficult things so ignorant people like me can’t read them?” I remember the time when

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walking along the hospital hallways we entered a big room decorated for a funeral ceremony. He looked at the dead man and told me: “You see, Mr. writer? This, yes this, is realism.” Noon. Still here waiting in the bar under the portico, no sign of my travelling companion. Young men in the bar look me over and mutter while I write; passing by they stared at me as if I were some strange animal (why was I writing?), and I greeted them. These days few people in the countryside respond to a greeting; yesterday a young man looked away in embarrassment, this morning a woman pretended not to hear me, and a little while ago a car driver responded to me: “What?” Only the old don’t pretend to be too distracted to look at you in your face, perhaps tired of all the pretending that they’ve had to do in life. Apathy of all external comings and goings. There are the schedules, departing buses and trains, business dealings and administrative justifications, the world’s abstract game of moving ahead, and for the rest: an emotionless song. Mr. Costantino had another joke that made me laugh. He used to say that he wanted to make a request in the town hall that he be addressed only by his taxpayer number. He said that nowadays everyone wanted to buy names, names of machines, names of places to go on vacation, names of designer clothes, names of food and TV personalities. Instead his new name wouldn’t interest anyone, no one would ever buy it, and in any event, he didn’t want to go around blowing his own horn: much better if everyone just called him by his taxpayer number. Reinhard Dellit arrived in a big German car two hours late because he had lost his way driving around looking at things. He had gone to photograph a cattle feedlot and had been surprised to see that all the animals had little numbered tags attached to their ears; I told him that it was normal, that it would be like this in Germany too, that every animal now has its own number. He was struck too by a field completely full of garbage, plastic bags, bottles, cans, pieces of discarded furniture; a vast array of garbage, with hundreds of seagulls flying wildly about. Reinhard Dellit was also very surprised by this. Outside Ostellato we stopped for gas near a dairy store, and the gas station attendant didn’t respond to my greeting. The dairy farmer instead was all smiles for Reinhard, who tried to speak to her in Italian. She told him: “You Germans, we can barely understand you, but it’s OK all the same.” We head towards the Comacchio lowlands. I have a sore throat and my gums hurt. With someone next to me, it’s easier to take in the images coming in from outside, like a murky question that needs always be kept at bay.

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Beyond a drawbridge amid endless wheatfields and distant skylines cut through by barriers of poplar groves, straight lines of utility poles traverse the entire expanse, horizon to horizon. The sky is calm, and a tractor in the middle of the road seems to have broken down. We’re about to cross a valley, and a sign announces: WILDLIFE REFUGE. To the left the land opens up in a soft mossy expanse that looks like tundra. We cross a bridge between two concrete cubes, which are water regulation structures, and then just ahead is the lagoon. The narrow strip of asphalt passes through the middle, seagulls fly high up to the north, and between the marshy islands full of reeds we see herons walking in the water. It feels like being in the middle of the sea, with no sign of the shore except for a strip of land to the right where a man is fishing. My companion has stopped to take pictures, and two teenagers pass by on motor scooters who turn to look at him then laugh together. Dark birds with very sharp beaks rise up in flight from the islands of reeds and daffodils, beating their wings backwards to keep from being carried away by gusts of wind. Sitting near a methane pipeline coupling, I see seagulls squawking as they glide over the water, while further off are calm avocets with long upward curving beaks and egrets that I recognize by their flight. Trucks and cars go by, the wind blows the grass in front of me, and the grey water in the lagoon is covered with a mass of little half-moon waves. A police helicopter flies by close to the water, and Reinhard stops to look at it with his nose in the air. In the middle of the asphalt white with glare, lies a cat smashed by the passing traffic. At the end of a very long strip of asphalt, we arrive in a little town called ANITA (the name of Garibaldi’s wife, who died in a nearby shack). The deserted little agricultural settlement is a row of squat houses and a concrete church that looks a bit like a bunker. In the grassy area in front of the church are red flags marking a communist celebration, and no one is out at this time of day. The flags celebrate the centenary, with a phrase written on a huge sign washed out by the rain: PROLETARIATS OF THE WHOLE WORLD UNITE, 1883-1983. Facing the grassy area is the town hall and a bar with a corrugated metal roof, closed, while at the end of the road a tractor disappears behind a corner. On the ground fine sand is scattered over the asphalt, a sign that water must have covered this area up until very recent times, when there were only lowland fishermen who didn’t speak Italian and who were considered gypsies by inland people (such as my father, for example). All around there would have only been accumulations of detritus brought by the river, deposited in narrow strips of mud in these now-drained valleys.

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Objects dumped in the bushes around which the fine sand accumulates. This road doesn’t go anywhere. Backtracking along another straight and deserted road. To the side a line of utility poles leads to a cluster of three-story working-class housing blocks in the middle of wheatfields. The sun still high, but the light is becoming more diffuse, with the outlines of things growing fuzzier and more protracted. While my travelling companion walks through a wheat field, a man blind in one eye drives up in a small car. He thought I was the specialist come to look at his onions. He told me that nearby there was an agricultural cooperative of seventy-six people, all living in the public housing he pointed out. He had lived in the area for eight years and likes it here, even if it’s isolated; and yet, when an outsider comes through, he’s always happy to chat a bit (unfortunately there isn’t a bar here). Short, bald, his shirt collar faded, blind in one eye, southern accent; someone happy to exchange greetings when meeting another human on these plains. According to my military map, a ribbon of earth called Argine dei Borgazzi once separated the wide Valle del Mezzano in the west from the Valle Pega in the east. There was only water, and in the middle of these valleys of water ran strips of mud and marsh plants full of birds, one of which was called Dosso Mondo Nuovo, another Barena Zavalea, and another Dosso del Moro. Names vanished along with the rest of an entire world I don’t know and can only imagine with words. To the east the only valleys not drained now have generic names or no name, all now referred to as the Valleys of Comacchio. Few birds and many passing cars, water to the right. An ancient levee separating Valle Rillo from Valle Fattibello, and now this straight road full of traffic leading to Comacchio. A detour. An elbow-shaped offshoot of water encircled by sedge-filled strips of terrain that in the distance seem tundra, flows into a canal blocked by a wooden fishing weir. The weir is triangular, with a base built of wooden posts and wattle fencing that runs across the canal. Eels in the spring coming from the Atlantic swim up the canals, and later, after the summer when returning to the open sea to mate, are caught in the weirs. Thanks to that triangle where the eels are caught, fishing is regulated in a way to keep the populations from going extinct. This morning just outside the cemetery I was already starting to forget Mr. Costantino, with dark thoughts and no desire to look around in order to write; while crossing these valleys I started to feel better.

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Very flat landscape with lines of water on all sides; only one big cloud illuminated from behind by the sun with glimmers and little flickers of light in the shape of a cross. We enter Comacchio across a drawbridge by the port. We suddenly smell seaweed and see men standing around with crossed arms looking out over the lagoon, where all around are fishing huts built on stilts with drop nets. The light is brightening, lifting things, and just now Reinhard realizes that the battery in his light meter has gone dead. In search of a photo supply store, and a row of men sitting in front of a bar gave us directions. They all simultaneously lifted their hands, pointing in the same direction, then went back to silently watching the traffic, their gestures remaining very compact. Dense traffic along the streets, difficult to maneuver with our huge car. In this packed environment, kids on bikes race around cars, women talk from the street to other women leaning out of windows, a girl in overalls is telling a friend about a radio program, and the street is blocked by two trucks travelling in opposite directions unable to pass each other. In the outdoor bar where we’re sitting under a towering renaissancestyled loggia, there are only adults and old people. The young instead hang out on the other side of the street around a little VIDEO ARCADE where I stopped a while ago. From the arcade and its beeping video games flickers an electric blue light that turns the ancient pavement an electric blue. Kids on motor scooters keep revving their engines while they talk, constantly turning their heads to see what’s happening around them. Apart from the comings and goings of motor scooters, there are myriad points of interest which the kids seem ready at any minute to run off to. As if no one is ever able to stop from looking for something somewhere else, revving their engines to be ready to take off towards what looks like some amazing discovery, blowing in the wind. My companion has gone off to see Comacchio, the bridges over the canals, while I rest here in the area of adults and old people. I take solace in the fact that the centers of attention here seem more stationary. When someone looks around it is for a bit of distraction, not in order to look for something to run off to. 7pm, in the same bar. When I call Masotti to tell him that I’m in this area and am headed to the delta, he starts to give me a lesson over the phone about the local vernacular architecture: the disappearance of old farmhouses and the thatched fishermen’s cottages, the construction of reclamation-era houses, then the agricultural reform of 1951, the new social isolation of the

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countryside. I had to plead with him to stop, fed up with that communist telephone call that had to keep explaining “the reasons” of the world to me. Passing thoughts. The inclination to observe comes with the desire to show to others what you see. The connection to others is what gives color to things, which otherwise seem washed-out. There’s a persistent inner emptiness of the soul to keep at bay, for which we seek out images seen or dreamed, in order to recount them to others and breathe a bit more easily. But some people quickly squash the desire to recount: they look only for “the reasons” of the world, and thus consider all images as pieces of inert information concerning external events. In one of Delfini’s stories the main character gets it in his head to become a writer-smuggler. 14 To become a real and proper writer requires too much hypocrisy, and poor Delfini was never able to do it. Instead, the writersmuggler is there to enact revenge: to trick the hypocritical critics who pretend that there isn’t an inner emptiness, that everything is fine, as if they had solid rock inside instead of a hole, like everyone. In the piazza by the campanile a parade of young women stream by in the twilight, all with studied moves based on their mode of dress. The practiced gait of the one wearing jeans is different from the one wearing a pleated skirt, and none is able to forget even for a moment the style dictating their moves. But what a persuasive and tranquil contribution they all offer to the rituals of evening! On the cobblestones a crowd of kids hold ice cream, bicyclists ring their bells, tourists curiously look around, and all around is a diffuse murmuring. I listen, and every phrase has a singsong cadence, every word reverberates. People call to each other as birds do, singing or recounting and nothing else. This is everyday life. Perhaps what we say has very little importance, everything already having been expressed by the order that guides us. We return to Porto Garibaldi in search of a place to sleep. But here everything is closed, it being still too early in the season. The owner of a trattoria along the shipyard pulled a table outside for us and served us two heaping plates of pasta. A German mother walks along the canal with her son. Local kids watch them go by, as there descends the calm of the colors, of the air, of the wave in the still canal. 1 June 1983 In Goro at the bar-hotel. As the piazza clock tower was sounding 9am, we were awoken by an argument between three young German tourists and the hotel owner. The three were upset because they thought that the price of the

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room was too expensive. Reinhard had to go down in order to convince them that they were wrong. Along the little street in front of the bar-hotel, lined with faded two-story houses and scrawny trees, a boy rides by on a bike. At first glance I apprehend what is happening around me, the season and the time of day, this spectacle of obvious things that I am able to recognize and name. If all this were a foreseeable happening, all that I would need do is pull out one of those big words (sociological or others) that explain with a definition “the reasons” of how the world is. But then all that which happens would already have been established and explained even before happening! And so, speaking in that language of big words that explain everything, it sometimes becomes difficult to grasp where you are. Last night my companion wasn’t able to fall asleep and got up many times to smoke in the dark. He talked about a group of German ethologists traveling around the Po Delta, in search of certain birds that come here to nest. A woman from Düsseldorf had come to join them, and he was looking for her; this was the news of the day. After warm farewells with the owner, we walked along the levee by the Po di Goro, passing by long lines of clothes hung to dry. From the rushes on the far side of the levee came the song of a cuckoo and the croaking of amorous frogs. I walked down into the grass among the reeds, where the water in the canal flowed by very slowly. There I saw a spectral boat float by in the morning mist; on the boat two men were talking about how to replace a linchpin. Another levee, and here flows the Po di Gorino, another narrow canal full of marsh reeds. A short time ago a forest service jeep passed us with a man and a young woman inside; at a junction to the left of a willow grove, seeing the jeep parked, Reinhard suddenly sped up. He had realized before me that the woman was bent over the open pants of the man. The two were there to celebrate that secret rite in the willow grove, like an “aside” from the mass of apathetic external affairs happening around them. After emerging on Via Romea, we stop for breakfast in an enormous restaurant for summer tourists. An immense warehouse with shiny metal window frames, striped curtains, and a huge parking lot in front. A hundred yards away is another warehouse of the same type, with various signs that announce: HOME FURNISHINGS 2000, UNBEATABLE PRICES FOR YOUR HOUSE. But inside there’s only a mess of burnt wreckage and metal beams deformed by a fire that caused a comic swelling of the façade that looks like a chewing gum bubble.

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Here all around they’ve massacred the beaches, transforming the area into a desert of summer homes, a catastrophe of junk everywhere. And everywhere will appear those endless expanses of asphalt, with everything taken over “forever and ever.” In front of the enormous restaurant I see a bus full of foreign tourists pulling up. Traveling inland towards Ariano Polesine. In the overly bright morning light today, with vaporous wisps that blur the outlines of things, a tractor in the middle of the road suddenly seems to me a sign of industriousness, and a woman passing by on a bike with a scarf holding her hair back seems another sign of industriousness. In this way little by little the landscape ordered with little farmhouses, vegetable gardens, wheatfields, and orchards, seems to me the selfsame form of the industrious world; and all that which comes to my eyes seems a confirmation of the world which I believe to have recognized. Thinking it over, I recognized only one kind of light, the summer light of the busy harvest season. In Ariano Polesine’s main piazza, marked by a monument to fallen soldiers with a list of the dead from the last war separated from the dead from other wars, and the dead in Libya from all the others. Outside a bar under a parasol sits a man yawning and scratching himself, and on a wall in the background is some graffiti about a recent soccer match: JUVENTUS MAKE US DREAM!! Masotti showed up on a Kawasaki motorcycle, with one of his various girlfriends riding behind. Suntanned, with eyes straying all over the place in search of something, he started in to talk about his various research projects without even taking a breath. He had become head of cultural affairs in a nearby small town, and spent most of his time organizing cultural events for young people and conducting research about the area. He had just finished a study in the area of Rosolina (in the direction of Chioggia) where all the young men were leaving because there wasn’t any work, with the old, women, and children being left behind. The only hope (according to Masotti) was if some investment company were to buy everything and redevelop it into renamed vacation spots for the rich. He told me about another nearby research project, along the Po di Goro, about surviving traces of an old “patrimony of environmental knowledge”: knowledge of plants and trees, the land and water, ways to predict the weather and forms of local medicine. But it seems that the old people had no interest at all in speaking about these things, as if they were ashamed. Masotti felt very disappointed, having even somehow planned an exchange between the old and young. How? Through a local radio program, with quizzes and prizes (he had already found a sponsor). 12:30pm. Masotti told us about his research projects and then took off, without once glancing at Reinhard, his new girlfriend always quiet and lis-

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tening. In front of the bar the man under the parasol continued to yawn and scratch himself, while over the shadowless piazza shone a glaring light. My travel companion wants to search for the German ethologists and the woman who is with them; but he doesn’t know where they are, and searching blindly for them doesn’t appeal to me. We’ve already detoured away from the delta thanks to this bewildering encounter with Masotti; I now feel an urgency to make it to the farthest point of the delta, the land’s edge, and want to escape from places of encounters (with no desire to meet the ethologists). From Ariano Polesine to Porto Tolle is only a little over 10 miles; I could walk to the delta in a day. But Reinhard asks me to come with him, and I can tell that he’s in love: and so we continue towards Taglio di Po and Contarina, through long, drawn-out outskirts that sprawl into the country at the threshold of the delta. 2:30pm. The little weekly market selling clothes, cheese, radios, pots, shirts, and remnants in one of Contarina’s little piazzas. The stands around the piazza are starting to come down at this time. Against the background of trees and canvas overhangs, among colorful parasols and open vans, are the men and women who “work the market.” The men in t-shirts and shorts, the women all in flowery dresses, work with relatively slow movements, talking to one another from one overhang to another, from one parasol to another, in a back-and-forth of playful joking. One tall muscular man lingers to speak while holding the trestles from his stand in the air, repeating the same phrase three or four times until someone laughs. In the moments in which I am able to be calm, the practicality of the external world always strikes me: nothing seems to me a purposeless movement, everything appears to be enmeshed in a ceremonial motion that involves every aspect of the world, every hour and moment of the day, every phrase pronounced according to the circumstances. Someone who has already finished loading his goods into his van loudly calls out goodbyes to the others. The farewells end with a funny joke, left behind by the one leaving. Reinhard has gone to call Düsseldorf for news about the woman he’s searching for. I have just finished reading a story by Delfini about a milliner who is doing well, cheerful, independent, and happy with her lover. But then her lover leaves her, and the milliner sits in an armchair and becomes only this: a woman sitting in an armchair thinking (in a state of abandonment, the inner emptiness of the soul gathers us in its lap, like an armchair from which we don’t want to arise). Many thoughts on this trip; don’t forget Mr. Costantino.

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Porto Levante, 4:30pm. In an empty bar where we asked if anyone had seen the German ethologists, the bartender was looking at her neck in a mirror, lifting her chin and feeling for wrinkles with her hand. This place is a little cluster of row houses at the end of a long inlet that looks like a canal. The town faces a strip of land in the middle of the sea, which divides the mouth of the Po di Levante from the mouth of the Po di Maestra; we are on a thread of a spider web that extends out along the valleys on the northern edge of the delta. The sun a bit hazy due to the heat. Most of the houses arise along the port crowded with fishing boats, houses with the light-colored stucco of sea towns. Two girls call out to each other from one house to another, long cries like birds, with the one on the balcony repeating an echoing shout that rises in two notes, then ends on a note in a minor key. I hear cries from the boats too, but these are pronounced with recognizable words. In the meantime swallows fly low over the boats, diving down sharply then pulling up at the last moment. On the road that borders the long inlet, buses jostle over the broken asphalt. The water all around is surrounded by lines of low earth at the horizon, and now we’re crossing the inlet on a little ferry, for a fair price. Reinhard is at the prow looking off into the distance, while the ferryman cheerfully declares that “if we sink, he won’t even notice.” Near the ragged coastline a motorboat passes by, brushing against bushy growths of marsh reeds. Those ragged shores are vague terrains, and what’s visible today next year will be different, thanks to floods or coastal storms or bradyseisms; what’s visible today is a lissome apparition in the middle of countless dissolutions. 15 On the far side of the inlet is a lone little church that looks a bit Mexican, isolated on a sliver of earth. Fish jump out of the water, and two herons fly through luminous space full of reddish glimmers. There is a resort for rich Swiss and German tourists that my German companion wants to photograph. Two paired signs reappear along this road in the middle of the lagoons: ROSWALL REAL ESTATE and ALBARELLA ISLAND. Then there appears an immense area of asphalt surrounding a shopping center for the tourist resort, which is hidden within a thick growth of Mediterranean pine trees. It is there where the rich go to hide. At the entrance is a sentry box and gate, where an armored guard with a holster and big pistol on his thigh watches the traffic. The daring Reinhard greeted him in German as he passed by, and the guard nodded as if they knew one another. The asphalt horizon is divided into identical numbered spaces, numbered parking spots, numbered piers for boats, numbered compartments for show-

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ers. A fancy restaurant, an outdoor bar on a terrace, many shops with colorful neon signs, at least a dozen real estate agencies: here spreads a little kingdom over which flutter the flags of Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, plus the flag of the big Roswall real estate company. Everywhere are signs that read: PROPRIETÀ PRIVATA, PRIVAT GRUND. A family passes by on bikes, and the wife points her finger at my German friend: “You took a picture of me!” Far off on the terrace of the bar a waiter with a tray of colored drinks remains motionless for a few seconds against the sun, observing the scene. In this place sheltered from watery uncertainty by concrete pillars and layers of asphalt, an outpost hovering over swampy wetlands thick with aquatic plants, the only thing Roswall can’t control very well are the mosquitos; really too many here, even for the Po Delta. 7pm. The sun over the main road through Rosolina starts to turn a veiled red, and I don’t know where Reinhard is taking me. Calm foreigners stroll among Mediterranean pine trees and Provençal-styled houses, a Somali woman sitting on a low wall knits a sweater, and magpies fly over a brightly lit and empty SHOPPING CENTER in the trees. It must have been in a shopping center like this one where I saw a window shatter by itself, its vibrating pieces hovering in the air, then suddenly after there ensued a general panic. Outside at the end of the boulevard, at the base of a rampart, stood a giant military-looking tent with radar dishes installed on top. In the sky airplanes flew by continuously. And only when from the other end of the rampart I saw Paule-Andrèe and Roger running towards the tent to save themselves, did I realize that I was in Paris, in a piazza that I think was called Place Octobus. Behind me I saw buildings under attack along the Avenue de l’Opéra start to collapse, but they remained suspended, vibrating in the air. Thoughts of the end of the world by now follow us like a vague bradyseism or an imminent coastal storm: countless collapsings every second inside you and out, strange cities where you feel lost, and a vision of men closed in their homes in front of televisions because they can’t stand to look other men in the face. At the far end of Rosolina, a rocky tar-stained world, a deserted electric power plant, the water’s edge full of putrid seaweed, and a sign that read PERICOLO DI MORTE; for a moment I seemed to see the nakedness of the earth. 16 Departure from the delta. At the turnoff to Chioggia we saw a wartime bunker that was still inhabited, with tables and clothes hung to dry in the facing yard. Sitting at the tables were families with many children who were eating dinner outside, while now the dusk reddens in the west.

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When we pass under the entrance archway that leads to Chioggia’s piazza, it’s promenade time. The light is so ambiguous that the faces of the girls fade and eventually no longer look like the faces in a publicity film. The streetlights along the harbor are lit, the cars parked, and men look out at the haze over the sea. A man sitting on a motorcycle finishes a cigarette, tosses the butt into the darkness, starts the motor, and leaves. The moderate back and forth of motor scooters along the calm edges of the crowds shows, it seems to me, that here we are somewhat sheltered from the frenzy of the renamed places. But now I have lost the desire to reflect, and am attracted only to descriptions and to describing everything. We eat dinner near the harbor, in a restaurant called LA MANO AMICA, where the cashier is watching a soccer match on a little television, and the waiter leans over every so often to check the score. The sky still azure, even if down here the air is quite dark while we eat. In the piazza the promenade is already over, and in the outdoor bars that line the porticos I see many heads that here seem silent. Women take in some fresh air at the windows of Venetian palaces in front of us, and everything that happens is extraordinary and normal. While we crossed the piazza, some kids played ball in the shade of a side street, and the clock tower of the church sounded 11am. Sitting in the last bar still open, Reinhard tried to tell me something about the woman he was seeking. But his pronunciation of English is so approximate that I miss about half of what he is saying, then neither are his explanations in German much clearer to me. This lack of communication more than anything else eases my mind: it gives me a sense of solidarity with this friend found along the road, and with the things all around that we observe together in silence. Appearances in the external world have an unceasing progression that nothing can disrupt: they have no direction, only continuity. A transistor radio in the bar is playing a song by Lou Reed or someone who sounds like him. A Senegalese man wearing a kaftan under the porticos is showing ivory necklaces and little mahogany statues to some young people at the bar. A young bodybuilder responds to him with bodybuilder gestures. A car stops in front of the bar, and from the car someone shouts the name of a woman. 2 June 1983 Objects are out there floating in the light, emerging from the void to find a place in front of our eyes. We are always implicated in their appearing and disappearing, almost as if we were here just for this. The external world needs us to observe and recount it, in order to exist. And when a man dies he carries with him the apparitions come to him since childhood, leaving others to sniff the hole where all things vanish.

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This landscape hasn’t yet vanished, in the beautiful light: lines of fields as far as the eye can see, of narrow straight canals between embankments, of roads with little traffic across the countryside. And a fresher quality of the sky, thanks to the winds that circulate without obstacles. The Po Delta is made of lobes formed of detritus carried by the various branches of the river that continually shift the land further seaward. Around here there no cities or towns, only little settlements with Venetian family names, the delta having been created by Venetians to channel here all the detritus carried over centuries by the river. These lands are thus masses of detritus that are slipping over the continental shelf towards the sea, a plain that is the color of moss in the winter, with myriad greens and yellows in the seasons when the sun is less oblique, and with a large river that comes to its end fanning out in six branches: as if this were the penchant of everything here, to open up, drifting towards the sea, reaching a mouth where all apparitions eclipse back into detritus. In Contarina, having turned back, we’re heading east towards the outer reaches of the delta. At noon we stop at a little white bridge with white arches that crosses low over the Po di Maestra, which here diverges from the Po di Venezia. For fifteen minutes we’ve been following a yellow school bus, which stops at every side road to drop off a student. Reinhard drives slowly, not wanting to miss this little ritual. It’s time to come home from school, and here there’s an inland turnoff leading to a little place called Ca’ Pisani. The students on the yellow bus, little girls for the most part, are excited because a big car is following them and gesture to us from the window, some silly and some aggressive. Meanwhile we’ve lost sight of the Po di Venezia, hidden to the right behind a levee, and the bus stops to drop off many children who instantly scatter, vanishing over the levees. A tiny girl with a large band-aid on her forehead, before rushing down the levee, stops to send us an elaborate farewell gesture. The school bus turns around and heads back, leaving us alone in the vast plain, in the middle of treeless expanses. There is a pond with lily pads next to the road, and beyond the pond is a levee covered with locust trees that cover our line of sight. In the distance everywhere are yellow wheatfields swollen by the wind. I crouch down on my heels like an Indian, and Reinhard comments: “Landschaften für Aquarelle.” At Isola Ca’ Venier there’s a poplar grove; next to the grove is a bar, which is just an old farmhouse with an advert for a brand of coffee over the door. No one in sight, except for the bar owner and children, who every so often rush out of another room, then return to play a video game. The video game

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emits harpsichord music, and the children translate the English words written on the screen into dialect. When we arrived a jet flew by with a deafening roar, and through an iron gate we saw children cover their ears, all bent over with laugher. A little bit ago, while I was playing pinball, there was a moment of complete silence over the countryside. The light coming through a window divided the room into two parts, and shadows lengthened the legs of the chairs and tables. Everything seemed compact at last, as if sheltered from solitude and isolation, along the back of this long room crossed by a counter of green linoleum. And a photo of soccer players on the wall, the coffee bean grinder, a plastic box full of gum balls, bus schedules next to the door, all these things seemed safe within a light and possible order. My favorite story by Delfini is called “Il fidanzato.” 17 Teodoro Gondrano travels across the plain towards the defining encounter with his love, with the surrounding space of his journey populated with images that narrate his story. That which drives him forward to his destination, where he will be reunited with Maddalena Marfusa, is a lightheadedness no longer assailed by dark thoughts: an irrational faith in emerging images, which lightens your step when traveling towards someone. Teodoro is traveling towards a defining condition of life, which being a defining condition, no longer knows what to do with definitions (for example, for the polite hypocrites, love has become an object of ridicule, but being ridiculous no longer concerns Teodoro). A condition in which the inner emptiness of the soul stops being felt, because into the loving union there enters a state of strength which has no need of display. It is like the vague slumber of the earth, from which everything sprouts (slumber and growth of children like plants, Maddalena’s vision of love at the end). We ate in this place, Isola Ca’ Venier, cheese and frittata, then rested in a field next to a poplar grove. The children watch us from a window; no longer playing the videogame, they linger there to watch us and whisper little words to each other behind cupped hands. It’s hot now. It’s three in the afternoon and we go back to the car; the delta is not far. The asphalt road winds through the marshlands at the level of the water, over a surface mottled with motionless dark splotches. Long strips of black mire form ribbons of shoreline, where the eel basins are. Here and there a few very old low houses with reed roofs, gill nets scattered nearby, and everywhere this miry landscape under a slightly darkening sky. We’re on the far side of Boccasette, made up of a few roads of low houses, where Reinhard wanted to go into a bar to ask about the German

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ethologists. The young men in the bar looked at him as if he were a Martian; they had no idea what he was looking for. Where we are now the surface of the ponds is never the same, variously higher or lower, and often covered with veil that seems rotten jelly. Around the strips of mire, fringes of algae have formed on which settled dust floats, so that in places it is hard to tell where the land ends and the floating accretions begin. A big masonry structure under a levee, built for people who come here to hunt coots. Scattered clouds, stretched over the sea like a thread, rise then little by little break up into the incredibly vast sky. At the far edge of Boccasette stretches a drained valley bordered by a green levee. On the far side of the levee is a canal that must be the mouth of the Po di Maestra, and beyond the canal is water leading to the open sea and vague strips of coastal land. But someone has carried off all the decking from the old bridge over the canal, since no one ventures into those dangerous areas; it will be difficult to cross this way. Large splotches of dead algae in the canal, and down below are tadpoles and jumping frogs who push up the veil of algae like a sheet. In the background a sand dune is visible where seagulls come and go as if it were a space station. A long pause to decide whether to cross the bridge like tightrope walkers. The distant lighthouse, which rises up beyond the embankments, seems on the verge of collapsing into the void. 7:30pm. We’re exhausted, our shoes are all muddy, and my sore throat has come back. I lost the little notebook that I brought along, thus gone are all my notes from this afternoon. Heading back towards the Po di Venezia, behind we could see the Ca’ Dolfin electric power plant with red and white smokestacks. We are looking for food and gas, and also a place to sleep. After buying some groceries in a very dimly lit general store facing a diked-in marsh, a man rode up on a motor scooter and gave Reinhard a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a letter to the communist workers at Ca’ Dolfin, who “want to teach some lessons about democracy.” Reinhard didn’t understand a thing and asked for an explanation; a woman walked by with a partial paralysis of the face, and I glanced away to avoid looking at her. In a recently built bar on the outskirts of town, we ask for directions to a gas station. In the bar everyone was talking about that stupid flyer against the communists, and fervently discussing politics. Impression of being in one of those Arabic bars where no one pays attention to outsiders. The men were all standing in a cluster, not moving to let anyone through, lost in their chatter.

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Around the corner, along a dirt road that runs off into a deserted moor, we find a gas station. From the new little apartment house with frosted glass doors and windows there emerged an obese man wearing slippers who filled the tank and took our money while always looking off in another direction. Then from the house a woman called him, emitting the “coccodè” of a hen, the same notes, and the obese man hurried back inside. In a moonless night, after a last shipyard, a bridge over a lagoon so dark it seems invisible. Cars that pass by on the road, red tail lights and yellow lights of something moving far off. Today we saw strips of sandy islands, swatches of alluvial deposits that emerge like arabesques from the water, grey and yellow. We came to where the still water is covered by a thin layer that seems plastic, a place with soft earth whose edges sink down. Where the land ends, watery erosion never stops, soil slipping down along the bottom of the sea, sediment always in turmoil. I see a signal in the dark over the sea. Tonight the comet Tempel 2 is passing in its perihelion. We feel the force of gravity more intensely at night, and perhaps too, even the settling of the earth. We sleep in the car, and I learn to write in the dark. 3 June 1983 On the Po di Pila with the sun overhead, a John Ford film came to mind in which Henry Fonda returns home after a long absence to find the shacks in his settlement abandoned. A drunk preacher tells him that bulldozers are coming to knock all the buildings down, because everything’s changed and that there’s no future there. Dancing in the dark with a candle in hand, the preacher prophesies: “No place! no place!” All places will come to the same end, becoming descriptive abstractions or the specialized projects of experts. A large touristic park will be created here, and tourists will come in buses to see I don’t know what, relicts of old sorrows, propagandistic billboards, places that are no longer places. There’s a yellow sign for tourists that announces a FISHING VILLAGE. The village appears as a series of sheet metal shacks full of fishing nets amid wrecked cars, shredded tires, dry-docked boats, and piles of marsh reeds. And the fishermen who haven’t been fishermen for a good while live elsewhere, in boxy three-story houses that look like barracks. Laundry hung to dry everywhere, women at the doors of their houses, men in t-shirts washing their cars, and children looking at us pass by together with other tourists. We continue on the levee road, not understanding if we’re following the Po di Pila or some other canal. After the village, distant water amid tall reeds

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curves to the side, then the view is lost, with reeds covering all lines of sight. When the reeds thin out, we find ourselves facing a soundless expanse of stagnant water. Little islands of reeds seem to float over the swampy lowland, and no movement of the water is visible, apart from the turquoise streaks of subterranean currents that flow under the aquatic plants. The aquatic plants are a cloak of leaflets edged with green froth, covering most of the little cove in front of us. Comment by my companion, a little perplexed: “Wo wird aus diesem Wasser Meer?” The high sun is reflected everywhere, and from the sea comes a cool breeze. The car had become a hindrance to us so we left it behind. Reinhard took a step into the sedges and sank up to his thighs. We’re on a gravelly isthmus where the water brushes in slow waves against the rocks in a pile of ballast; little grey birds dive for fish then fly off against the wind, their wings all ruffled. On one side of the isthmus for as far you can see there’s only an unwavering expanse of water, nameless to me, except perhaps for the tips of a few very distant marshy islands. We’ve come to where the stillness of the water in front of us is total and without reflections, the sun no longer at its zenith. While I write an insect landed on my hand with wings of transparent nylon; on the ground by my feet are other insects I can’t name, a worm with droopy antennae, a reddish spider dancing in the sand, an ant with a gigantic head. The stillness of the water and the complete silence bring to mind an infinity of invisible movements that endlessly repeat, under the algae, within the bushes, beneath the stones, and even underground. A section of tree trunk eaten by the water seems the face of an old man, the grass growing among the rocks is pockmarked, perhaps by some virus carried in the wind, a faded pack of cigarettes looks like it was chewed by some animal. The pretense of words; they pretend to keep track of everything happening around us, to describe and define it. But everything in flux around us doesn’t occur in this or that way, and has little to do with what words say. The river here flows out into an endless expanse, colors bleed into each other everywhere: how to describe this? Just as when you go looking for a friend, but the friend isn’t there, you feel the futility of vision. You are aware of being there, and would like to make bridges with words, but find it impossible. Stop it: the hole where everything vanishes is here where I am, choked with the sentiment of all those who have died before me. I am here at mouth of the Po, thinking about them. Suddenly the calling of seagulls resounds above me, one calls and the others reply. Words too are callings, without defining anything, calling out to

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something so that it remains with us. All we can do is to call to things, invoke them so that they may come to us with their stories: call to them so that they don’t become so estranged that they leave, each on its own divergent path into the cosmos, leaving us here unable to recognize any familiar trace with which to find our way. In any event here there is only water; we have to turn back and look for the car. Reinhard has already started down a little gulch from which grow wild irises and those cylindrical flower spikes called bulrushes. In the long crossing of that lagoon called Valle Ca’ Zullian, the earth and water lack discernible boundaries, and at the far reaches of land, not even the sky can be easily distinguished from the water. The road we are on is a precarious strip of fill where signs warn of the dangers of the place. While Reinhard wandered off to take some photographs, I scrambled into a ditch to take a shit. Just then, after hours of solitude, a man appeared on a bike. As he rode by he turned his head and looked at me without expression, then I saw him get off the bike to walk over a dip. He vanished, and I started to think about how that man had eyes, legs, arms, a head, and thoughts like me. And after arriving at Ca’ Zullian, when we had seen two girls running and then given them a ride, everything by then stood out to me. Their faces stood out to me, their clothes, way of talking, even their hands and fingernails. They were in a hurry because a soccer match was about to start in which some friends of theirs were playing, and they guided us down narrow roads to a little field illuminated by huge lights even if the sky wasn’t yet dark. From another little road came some fans with horns and drums, the two girls jumped out of the car laughing, and I tried to keep everything in my head so that it wouldn’t be lost. I couldn’t find a pen to write with, having lost it while everything rushed by; everything stood out to me in that soccer field, and I didn’t know what to do with myself; all it took was to look at something and I would start to feel moved. 4 June 1983 While coming back in the direction of Ca’ Venier this morning, I saw a girl sitting on the steps of a bar in the countryside. She had an old dictionary on her knees and was engrossed in spelling out words syllable by syllable. Some men at the bar door were talking about sports, and the girl would raise her head to listen to some sports term, then turn to look it up in the dictionary. After Ca’ Zullian, along the Po di Venezia there is a clearing on the bank where the ferry stops. Two young men in a small car were waiting with the

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radio turned all the way up. We talked about rock music, and they told me that they worked on the other side of the canal, in Ca’ Tiepolo. Over the past few days Reinhard has grown a blond beard and has been wearing clip-on sunglasses, along with his fine silk shirts. He wants to stay a while longer wandering around the Po di Venezia, in search of the ethologists I think, then will go back to Düsseldorf to work as a cameraman for a television station. As the ferry departs I see him next to the already long shadow of his car. At last in the area of Porto Tolle, my first destination. Arriving at the iron bridge marking the mouth of the Po di Gnocca, I throw myself down on the grass. The crossing looks like one of the iron railroad bridges I have always admired: a tunnel made of erector set pieces, so narrow that trucks barely pass through. The bridge is close to the water, its pillars covered by the still highrunning river. Around the pillars the current forms eddies where I see tin cans circulating, pushed into the center and then out and around again. The bank is grassy and surrounded by willows. I see dockweed again, and further off, flowering wild mallow and an elder bush. In the water I see willow bushes, and in the hedges bindweed and honeysuckle. I’ve left my little keyring compass on a hedge; someone will find it. This trip seems as if it has lasted a month. Here it is so flat that you always feel exposed in any given spot to the horizon. It is impossible to subtract from the general carryings-on the sense that the outside keeps on going, like a whistle or endless chatter. A short pause to give some thought to Mr. Costantino; over the past two days I have often forgotten him. Walking along the levee I made it as far as a high-voltage electric pylon, where I abandoned my topographic maps. As I was climbing down to look at the semi-circular windows of an isolated farmhouse, a dog suddenly rushed up to me barking. When we were face to face I could tell he was about to jump on me, but then a woman called him off, stopping him as he leapt. When I approached the woman to ask for a glass of water, she set off without a word toward the house, then at the door turned to ask if I wanted wine. While I drank the wine her husband came home down from the levee; propping up his bike he greeted me with a nod of his head, then said, “Nice weather, huh?” On the levee some kids were coming back from school by bike with satchels on their backs. They were playing with their bikes, trying to push each other over the edge and down the levee by running the front wheel of one bike into another bike. One kid on the edge was just about to go over, but

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then saved himself by pulling up his front wheel; afterward he rode off laughing so hard that we could hear him from the farm. Bus ride. Along the road towards the sea, after Tolle, I see a large car flipped over on the asphalt and another in the ditch. Policemen stop traffic in both directions, then let the cars pass by one by one. I follow an old worm-eaten sign on the levee that says “FERRY.” At the bottom of the levee is a canal called the Po di Gnocca, and bordering the canal is a wrecked dock with rotting grey planks that hang into the water. One boat is in the reeds and brush, chained to the dock, and another under a sheet metal roof is filled with water up to its gunwales. I have such a great love for ferries that I suddenly feel like leaving my copy of short stories by Antonio Delfini aboard the chained boat, because someone will find it and remember this place. But I reconsider, and put the book back in my pack. At a gas station a young man stops on a Vespa. From the nearby building a woman comes out with a child in one arm, and pumps gas for the man with her free hand. I ask the man if he can give me a lift in the direction of Scardovari, and he tells me that we are already in Scardovari. He offers to take me farther along towards the point, but first has to take care of some business. While waiting, I play pinball in the bar across the road. The illuminated back panel of the pinball machine says “VOLTAN ABANDONS THE EARTH.” Underneath is a picture of Voltan and Wanda dressed in spacesuits as they take off towards a spaceship. They have to abandon the earth, now uninhabitable, and Wanda offers her hand to Voltan, saying “Quick, Voltan, it is going to explode.” In the cartoon speech bubble coming from his mouth, Voltan replies, “Too bad, Wanda, it was a nice place where to live.” Beneath is a profile of New York City with long tongues of flames shooting out of skyscrapers, with the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty visible in the background. Since Voltan can save himself on a spaceship, he should at least put on a special act—as for me, I couldn’t pull it off. At the place where the Po di Gnocca branch flows into the sea, there are little islands of tar and algae that look like the back of a whale. From this side the roadside slopes down and is covered with bundles of marsh reeds and fishing nets. Beneath is an inlet of seawater green with algae. On the opposite side, the unbroken plain extends as far as the eye can see, with scattered farmhouses amid wheat fields all yellow at this time of year. Along the road, boxy two-story farmhouses are spread out at regular intervals, built about three decades ago during a time of agrarian reform. Here and there a house lies abandoned in the fields, its doors and windows

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bricked up, covered with invasive plants. The only person I could see was a lone old man, sitting on a chair under a tree and looking at the ground. At this time of day the inhabitants are in their yards, chatting between houses. Those I see are all relatively young and seem to withhold judgment as they watch me pass by. I have the impression that they move very comfortably through this empty, unbroken space that surrounds them, with no sense of loneliness or isolation. Now a deep silence, and the sky is already red. Far off, beyond the wheatfields, the marshlands glimmer. When I reach the levee leading to the point, it is almost evening. Nearby is a little trailer encampment, not far from a large sawmill that emits at intervals the sound of an electric saw still at work. The sea extends out in front of me, and the road leads to the right along the levee that borders the large inlet near Scardovari. A two-masted boat makes a wide turn and heads towards the area where the Po di Goro flows into the sea. Aboard is a man with a ragged straw hat and a boy with a dog. Near two white Mercedeses parked along the levee are two men in camouflaged military fatigues. They are equipped with binoculars, cameras, and a tripod with a long birdwatching scope. They are German, perhaps ethologists, and are watching the sea. 8:30pm. They keep watching the sea as if something is about to happen from one moment to the next. It seems as if the German ethologists are waiting for the end of the world, here at the extreme edge of the plains. Our souls have been mixed up, and by now we all share the same thoughts. We wait but nothing awaits us, neither a spaceship nor a destiny. If it started to rain now you would get wet, if tonight it is cold your throat will hurt, if you turn back on foot into the dark you will have to be brave, if you keep wandering you will wear yourself out. Every phenomenon in itself is serene. Call to things because they will remain with you until the end. Translated by Patrick Barron NOTES 1. Franco Occhetto was Editorial Director of Feltrinelli from 1982 until his premature death in 1986. 2. Alberto Sironi (dir.), Il Grande Fausto (1995). 3. The Movement of 1977: an extra-parliamentary social protest movement formed of various related leftist groups opposed, among other things, to the political party system and unions.

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4. The term Celati coins here, “case geometrili,” refers to houses designed by geometri (surveyors who also design small buildings), but also plays with the fact that many geometradesigned houses tend to be boxy with simple geometric features. 5. Communist club (casa del popolo): a local meeting place and headquarters for members of the communist party. 6. An imperial staircase: a staircase with a single flight of stairs leading to a landing, from which depart two parallel, divided flights of stairs that then lead to the next floor. 7. Malouf (or Maluf) is a type of music played in Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia, with origins from fifteenth-century Andalusia. 8. The term Celati uses, "chiavica," refers to a masonry building with gated arched spillways at its base designed to control the flow of water through a drainage channel. Found along the lower reaches of the Po River, many were first built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 9. In Davide Ferrario’s 2003 film Mondonuovo, a documentary in part based on Verso la foce, Celati revisits the hotel, at the time closed and in a state of near abandonment. 10. Eridanós (Greek), Eridanus (Latin), Eridano (Italian). 11. Roughly: “Hey wise guy, going by foot?” 12. Roughly: “You shouldn’t travel if you don’t have a car. Anyway, what’s there to see? My god, people just don’t understand anything anymore. I can’t really bring you much farther, you know? My god, I could just about kill people who hitchhike here. But where do you want to go, on foot?” 13. Missing Road. 14. “Il contrabbandiere” (“The Smuggler”). 15. Bradyseism: a gradual rising or sinking of the earth’s crust. 16. Danger (Risk of Death). 17. “The Fiancé.”

Chapter One

Gianni Celati’s Towards the River’s Mouth The Experience of Place between Writing and Photography Marina Spunta

Since its publication in 1989, Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth) has been celebrated as the pivotal core of Celati’s works in the 1980s and beyond, and, more broadly, for “opening a path” for much contemporary Italian narrative fiction (Belpoliti and Sironi 2008, 36), while leaving a lasting impact on other disciplines, from photography to geography and environmental studies. Stemming from Celati’s collaboration with Luigi Ghirri and other photographers on the Po Valley, which culminated in the 1984 photographic exhibition and catalogue Viaggio in Italia (Journey in Italy), Verso la foce has contributed to triggering a wave of literary, photographic, and cinematic texts in the past three decades aimed at restoring our awareness of forgotten or abandoned places and our experience of landscape. These works have sought not merely to document the new Italian landscape theorized since the 1980s but rather to reimagine places, to re-invent “ordinary” landscapes, as Antonello Frongia recently (2016) put it with reference to photography, and, ultimately, to recognize an aesthetic dimension to any place. Given the hybrid nature of the text, Verso la foce has attracted readings from various critical perspectives, including literary, aesthetic, and, more recently, geographical and environmental. The latter ones have usefully read the text through spatial theories (e.g., Barron 2007) ascribing to it and its author primarily an ecocritical aim (e.g., Iovino 2012, Seger 2015), and attempting to posit literature as “cultural ecology” (Zapf 2006) or as a tool to “‘restore the imagination’ of place” (Iovino 2012, 100). 77

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While a critique of the environmental and cultural desertification and commercialization of places, specifically the Po Valley region, is integral to the text, in this chapter I contend that no less important, and deserving further exploration, is the literary and interartistic self-fashioning that Celati put into play with Verso la foce, in an effort to present himself newly as a writer after his early fiction. This shift is in line with the visual and spatial turn taking place in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and with the redefinition of literature operated both within and outside of Italy, by writers such as Peter Handke, whom Celati read extensively at the time, as evidenced in the Fondo Celati [FC], an archival collection of Celati’s papers housed at the Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia. 1 Like Handke, Celati sought to move away from linguistic conformity, to foreground the centrality both of the visual and of the acoustic experience of space, to inscribe description within narrative fiction, and ultimately to reinvent himself as a writer whose practice stems from an “intense observation of the world,” carried out alongside Luigi Ghirri and other photographers in the 1980s (see Spunta 2017a; 2017b). With this aim as one of the foci of the text, the relationship between writing and photography in Verso la foce deserves a closer look, starting from its inherent link to Celati’s notion of experience as uncertainty, as drift, as a means of sentire-pensareimmaginare (feeling-thinking-imagining) [FC 1/2], achieved through both seeing and listening. In this chapter I suggest that the role of photography is used to challenge the implicit or alleged objectivity of reportage and to expose the multiplicity and contingency of our sensorial perception and our experience of the exterior. This approach can be read through Heidegger’s notion of “Sinn” (in Italian, senso), which as Adrienne Janus reminds us, should not be translated merely as “meaning,” according to a rigid, ocularcentric philosophical tradition, but rather in a tripartite way as meaning, sensorial perception, and sense of direction (2011, 183). Allowing for a multiplicity of senses, sensorial perceptions, and senses of direction, this take is consonant with the errancy that Celati performs in Verso la foce both spatially and temporally through the entries of his diary, and with the sensorial errancy between seeing and listening. The latter is to be understood as a non-linear and “appropriately ‘indisciplined’ mode of attending” to the exterior, where “indisciplinarity,” in Jacques Attali’s words, stands as “the tendency to open scholarly argument to creative meandering and flight of fantasy” (2011, 183)—an approach that can fruitfully illuminate Celati’s writing. Finally, these aspects are inextricably linked and should be considered alongside the writer’s self-styling, as realized through the text’s generic hybridity, which, in a way not dissimilar from Handke’s, draws on and rewrites a variety of genres, from travel and diary writing to reportage and the philosophical essay. Verso la foce had a long and complex gestation and underwent many rewritings, from the initial idea in 1981, spurred by Ghirri’s invitation to

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contribute a text to Viaggio in Italia, entitled “Verso la foce. Reportage per un amico fotografo” (1984, Towards the river’s mouth: Reportage for a photographer friend) [VF1], through the second version, “Verso la foce (estratti da un diario di viaggio)” (Towards the river’s mouth [excerpts from a travel diary]), published in 1987 in Narratori dell’invisibile. Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino (Narrators of the Invisible: Symposium in Memory of Italo Calvino) [VF2], to the final publication in the 1989 Feltrinelli volume Verso la foce [VF3]. 2 Besides these three published texts, the Fondo Celati has recently made available numerous manuscripts with multiple partial drafts of what later became Verso la foce and other texts, including Celati’s collections from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains), Quatto novelle sulle apparenze (Appearances) and Cinema naturale (Natural Cinema), which initially stemmed from the same nucleus. In an interview with Marco Belpoliti and Andrea Cortellessa published in Riga, Celati revealed that Verso la foce was “the book that changed me most and that involved me most,” and which marked “an end or a limit in my work” (2008, 36). In the same interview he conveyed at once the text’s difficulty and novelty, highlighting his effort to find a title and to transform a series of notes into a coherent text which engaged with the photographers’ work for Viaggio in Italia (32), and its departure from the commonly accepted notion of “literature”: “I kept telling myself: ‘This is not literature, it is not literature, it is a reportage on our vision of places.’ It was another collection of pezzi di roba sparsa trovata per strada (scattered stuff found on the way) and written down, like dreams, like the comical sentences in Banda dei sospiri (Gang of Sighs)” (32). This comment reveals a commonly held bias on the literary value and cultural status of genres such as reportage, diary writing, and travel writing, which has recently started to be redressed, and, at the same time, conveys the author’s anxiety about the reception of his text and his desire to fashion himself newly as a writer. In the same conversation on Verso la foce [VF3], Celati reiterated the difficulty of conveying a sense of Stimmung, an atmosphere of enchantment with the post-industrial wasteland of the Po Valley region, an approach which is deeply influenced by the intertextuality with photography and cinema, and echoes Handke’s writing in the same years. The double novelty of the text—in its intertextuality with the visual/ photographic and in its generic hybridization—is foregrounded from the introductory “Notizia” (note): These four travel journals were born while working with a group of photographers dedicated to describing the new Italian landscape, including my friend Luigi Ghirri. I would call them as they now appear, after having been rewritten and made legible, stories of observation. (1)

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Here Celati performs a balancing act by bringing together different genres in the same paragraph, defining the text both as travel journals or diaries and as tales or stories of observation (a noun that is repeated three times in the Notizia, including the initial and final paragraph), while declaring his effort of rewriting and editing the text to make it more readable. This calls into question the assumed contingency of the diaristic note of observation and firmly posits the text as a work of narrative fiction from the start. Celati intended Verso la foce to be a “reportage on our vision of places” that is a reflection on the process of seeing the exterior that focuses equally on describing the places he encounters and on the very process, and difficulty, of seeing, experiencing and narrating these places through writing. In the essay “La fotografia dei luoghi come fotografia” (Photography of places as photography), Roberta Valtorta argued that the observation of the landscape carried out by Ghirri and other photographers involved in the project Viaggio in Italia can be viewed as a verification or reflection on their own photographic practice ([1997] 2005, 246), a practice that gave a new direction to Italian photography in the 1980s. Similarly, for Celati (re)writing the texts that would later be published as Verso la foce (and also his stories and novellas from the 1980s and beyond) was both a means of reflecting on the landscape and, no less importantly, on the nature of his own writing, in an effort to remodel literary writing by performing at once an act of description, narration, and imagination. Verso la foce marks Celati’s attempt to move away from a notion of literature as cerebral theorization, explanation, or dry description, which he saw epitomized in Calvino’s Palomar, and away from his own 1970s works, toward a literature aimed at establishing an aesthetic connection with the exterior and with a collectivity, by recovering a collective imagination (immaginario collettivo). In her review of Verso la foce Elisabetta Rasy suggests a movement from an “idea” to a “practice” of literature (1989, 25), as an attempt to salvage literature and inject it with an external, ethical impulse. This can be read as Celati’s way of overcoming the impasse that Calvino faced with Palomar, which Celati attributed to Calvino’s fear of being lost due to the inability to categorize the exterior (Cottafavi and Magni 1987, 158), and to his struggle with finding inspiration, because of a lack of exposure to the exterior, ascribed by Celati to the French and Italian rationalist tradition. In his essay “Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio” (Hypothesis for a landscape description), published in the 1986 volume Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia. Scritture nel paesaggio, Calvino defined description starting from the method adopted when describing a landscape and highlighted the contingent nature of both the object of description and the describing subject. Perhaps in an implicit dialogue with this essay, it is not coincidental that Celati chose to publish the second version of “Verso la foce (estratti da un diario di viaggio)” [VF2] in the volume Narratori dell’invisibile. Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino (1987). In the debate recorded as an appendix to

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the volume, moving away from Calvino’s discourse on method Celati stressed the centrality of description and emplacement (through his reliance on deixis) and defined his text as an experiment to find a landscape and a place to breathe (tirare il fiato). Celati’s turn to photography, to the visual dimension and to description, however, should not be read as a means of ratifying the Western oculocentric tradition, but rather of escaping what he perceived to be a self-confined literary tradition. In contrast, the photographic approach is seen by Celati as epitomized by (collective) experience and practice, as it relies on the variability of the exterior and its lighting conditions, besides one’s subjective experience of the landscape. At the same time, photography works for Celati, as for Ghirri, as a theory, as a method, namely as a “guide through which to conceptualize exterior space” (Celati 2017a, 24), or in Jerry Thompson’s words, as a “new kind of epistemology, a new . . . way of learning about the world” (2016, 12), an approach which posits the artist as “an attentive observer, a willing participant in . . . a system larger than the artist’s individual, personal, particular needs” (14). In conversation with Belpoliti and Cortellessa, Celati described his encounter with the photographers, and especially with Ghirri whom he considered an “extraordinary interlocutor,” as resulting in a special “state of grace” and “connection with what is outside us,” as an “enchantment” that brings us outside ourselves and connects us with others, and, quoting Heidegger, with an “ecstatic experience” (Belpoliti and Cortellessa 2008, 34). As various critics have noted, the pivotal core of Celati’s reflections in the 1980s, as testified by many of his essays and lectures, and by various unpublished manuscripts, revolves around the notion of experience, in the Heideggerian notion of experience as “seeing-through” (Distaso 2002, 11) the appearance of the phenomenon, a seeing that goes beyond the eye to involve other senses, starting from hearing. In particular, Celati draws on the Benjaminian notion of Erfahrung, namely long, shared experience that locates the subject historically, a German word that derives from the semantic root of the verb fahren, or travelling, and thus is linked to a notion of movement, as the inherent metaphor of Verso la foce. As Markus Ophälders reminds us (2001, 11), experience is the empty core of Benjamin’s thought, in the sense that all of his work revolves around the decline of experience in modernity, as Benjamin argued in “The Artwork Essay,” where he linked this process to the fading away of memory and perception. A similar preoccupation underpins Celati’s 1980s work and specifically Verso la foce, and the practice of photographers like Ghirri, with whom he collaborated, as they sought to take stock of a vanishing vernacular landscape in postmodernity. Moreover, experience in Celati’s work is also to be understood in the Wittgensteinian sense of a practice of collective rituals and a means of learning to imagine possibilities. In the unpublished essay “La media oscurità dell’esperienza” (The Average Obscurity of Experience),

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which can be consulted at the Fondo Celati [FC 1/2], Celati posits “experience” as a way of “feeling-thinking-imagining,” namely as “the opposite of certainties,” or as a means of “learning to imagine possibilities” which is achieved through practice. This is consistent both with the Heideggerian notion of “sense” as plurimous, as discussed earlier, and with the philosopher’s “turn towards listening and acoustic and aural metaphors” as an attempt “to overcome Western metaphysics” (Janus 2011, 182). It is also consonant with Ghirri’s approach to photography, as a means of recovering a “more direct relationship with the environment” (Ghirri 2010, 58), aimed at challenging the increasing lack of attention toward landscape and environmental issues, and at triggering the workings of imagination (57). In Ghirri’s aesthetics, photography is a means of activating our ability to see afresh, of enabling a vision that is not limited to a narrow definition of documentary, but rather invokes imagination as an integral part of the practice of seeing, and functions as a means of representing the “unrepeatable apparition [of things] that gives rise to a sense of mystery, of fascination” (Ghirri 1997, 300). In different but comparable ways the three published versions of Verso la foce use photography as means of conveying both the fascination with the exterior and the impossibility of representing it either visually or verbally, while collapsing the boundaries between fact and fiction. In “Verso la foce (Reportage, per un amico fotografo)” [VF1], which combines early drafts of the sections “Esplorazioni sugli argini” (“Explorations along the Levees”) and “Verso la foce,” and parts of three stories later published in Narratori delle pianure, the narrator Celati recounts his wanderings along the Po River with various means of transport (by bus, by car, on foot), either on his own, or with the photographers Luciano (Capelli) and “lo svizzero” (Celati 1984, 25), later referred to as Reinhard or the German documentarist (in VF2 and VF3, i.e., Reinhard Dellit). Although armed with a detailed military map of the area, and at times accompanied by a photographer, the narrator often feels lost in a vague territory that cannot be mapped, but only experienced through a sudden, inexplicable empathy with the place or with people (Celati 1984, 23–24). The failure to make sense of a landscape that is presented as a blank canvas that needs performing is shared by Luciano, who suddenly decides to abandon Celati to his journey, having lost any sense of direction: “I don’t even understand what lies around me, what I photograph, what people are doing. . . . I’m going home” (Celati 1984, 22). Similarly, in Verso la foce (VF3) Luciano is first described as a reassuring presence due to “his patience and willing demeanor” and his fascination with everything he sees, though impermanent and contingent, but later becomes frustrated with the impossibility of photographing those places, which turn out to look obvious; it is only when forgetting “the need to photograph” that “something striking stands out to me” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 31). Rather than as a means to

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grasp the exterior, here photography is posited as appearance, as haphazard occurrence, as an emergence of sense that cannot be controlled and escapes any clear sense of direction, and is therefore more in line with the auditory than the visual paradigm. This is paralleled by the description of the photographer and documentarist Reinhard Dellit in the waterscape of the Valli di Comacchio, in both VF2 and VF3, whose presence serves to construct the landscape as appearance, flux, vagueness, and emptiness. Indeed, this is a place that escapes any boundaries and needs perceiving through all the senses, starting from the sense of hearing, which is heightened as vision fails to grasp clear boundaries between land and water. As the above examples testify, the intertextuality with photography in Verso la foce, as well as its latent presence, serves a variety of functions. On the one hand, by affirming the text’s verisimilitude, it foregrounds the environmental and cultural degradation of the post-industrial society, alongside a desire for a (visual) language that needs no explanation. On the other hand, it exposes as a fiction the very assumption of objectivity with which photography and the reportage are often associated, revealing their ambiguity and mystery, as in much of Ghirri’s late photography. This is in contrast with the “hyper”-precise trend of much contemporary (American) photography, which for Ghirri contributed to the present anesthetization of the gaze (Ghirri 2016, 72), and with the use of reportage photography in journalistic news which, in Celati’s words, broadcasts “the sense of the world as evidence without mystery, cold factual information on daily events and nothing else” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 5). This description echoes Celati’s view of Ghirri’s photography, which he celebrated for retaining a sense of mystery and appearance, and for challenging the assumption of objectivity that lies behind documentary or reportage photography: “Ghirri did the same thing with his unique photographic practice: he finally did away with the rules of social documentary, which had fixed our gaze on a sort of abstract objectivity” (Celati 2004, 222–23). Instead, for Celati, Ghirri embraced a notion of photography as contingency, perception, and imagination of the exterior; in Ghirri’s words: “photography is not a mere duplication or the eye stopwatch that freezes the physical world, but rather the language in which the difference between reproduction and interpretation, albeit minimal, exists and gives rise to infinite imaginary worlds” (Ghirri [1982] 2006, 36). In the essay “Fotografia e rappresentazione dell’esterno” (Photography and the representation of the exterior”), Ghirri talks of the “vanishing of an ‘image of the world’” (1986, ix), presenting photography as an effort to recover an experience of places that are felt on the brink of disappearing—a position that, like Celati’s, draws on Benjamin’s aesthetics (Spunta 2014; 2017a). When comparing his own work to that of Ghirri, Celati suggested that: “my problem in Verso la foce was precisely this: to dismantle the discursive apparatus that surrounds places and recover them to the experience of ‘seeing’, of ‘appear-

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ing’” (Celati 2004, 222–23); “what I tried to explore were sensorial and visual perceptions, and also the main fact that we perceive a place as appearance” (221). In line with this approach to visual images and to photography, Celati models a literary genre based on contingency, on observation, and on the fluidity of the oral/aural, where “explanations are nearly excluded” (Belpoliti and Cortellessa 2008, 25). This recalls his fondness for Giacomo Cangemi’s oral storytelling (34), and of Carlo Ginzburg’s writing or narrating style, where, in Celati’s words, “explanations were not part of the game,” but rather the narrative stemmed from the “bond created in imagining things together, where there are no longer boundaries to define verisimilitude” (il verosimile e l’inverosimile) (35). By turning to the medium of photography, Celati conveys his search for an “anti-literary” style of writing and signals his “change of route,” as he revealed in an interview with Palmieri and Lausten (2012, 239). In so doing, his approach echoes that of Julio Cortazar and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, whose use of photography as a subject in their narrative fiction, as suggested by Michele Vangi, stems from a search for an “anti-literary” literature and from an effort to foreground the porous nature of literature, where the boundaries between the factual and fictional collapse (2005, 91). According to Elio Grazioli, the relationship between literature and photography is made explicit in the secondary title of VF1: “Reportage per un amico fotografo” (2012, 144–45); however, this relationship is not fully explored by Grazioli, nor is the generic definition of reportage. Celati defined Verso la foce as a “reportage on the vision we have of places” (Belpoliti and Cortellessa 2008, 32); he also used the term in a number of early manuscript drafts, but erased it in later drafts in a long process of genre definition which suggests a movement from an initial effort to establish the documentary/ reportage nature of the text to a later recovery of its fictional quality, as evinced by a close perusal of the Fondo Celati. The notion of “reportage,” as used in journalism and photojournalism, suggests the idea of reporting “facts” that could portray certain truths, as opposed to narrating fiction, a dichotomy which Celati has often challenged. Moreover, when used in close proximity to the word “fotografo” as in the title, reportage evokes the tradition of photo-reportage that defined much Italian photography up until then, a tradition from which Ghirri and his contemporaries sought to distance themselves, while retaining a similar ethical commitment. In line with the photographers’s work and with recent theory on the genre (e.g., Bottiglieri 2001), Celati mobilizes the (hybrid) genre of literary reportage, or “reportage narrativo.” According to Roberto Baronti Marchiò, this genre challenges a clear-cut division between fact and fiction, and “the perverse binary logic according to which literature is either a representation of the world and, as such, has no aesthetic value, or talks about itself” (2001, 56–57)—a dichotomy that has also been challenged by recent theories of travel writing (e.g.,

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Carl Thompson 2011). For Baronti Marchiò, it is the recovery of “mimesis, which is implicit in the reportage, that challenges the very notion of the specificity of the literary genre (specifico letterario)” (2001, 54) and results from a balance between objectivity (namely the anthropological or sociological observation) and subjectivity, giving rise to a genre which borders with autobiography, diary, or fictional tale. By foregrounding the hybrid nature of this text through spelling out reportage in the title, Celati aims at shortcircuiting generic expectations and interartistic boundaries, while self-fashioning himself as the writer of a new type of narrative that stems from a close dialogue with place and photography, and is deeply rooted in twentiethcentury theoretical debates on (aesthetic) experience. This is interestingly redefined in VF2, which replaces the reference to reportage with one to travel and diary writing, as the secondary title reads: “extracts from a travel journey” (“estratti da un diario di viaggio”), in a movement aimed at recovering the merging of reportage and fiction. Commenting on Viaggio in Italia, Celati maintained that what he learned from photography and in turn informed his 1980s narrative work, starting from Narratori delle pianure, was the foregrounding of any place whatsoever, as in Zavattini’s notion of qualsiasità (random ordinaryness), and the act of showing the landscape from a “distance,” rather than the close-up view of the tourist gaze. The focus on everyday, forgotten, or “marginal” places that defines the work of Ghirri and other photographers echoes Celati’s poetics of “archaeology” and of the “desert” in those years; this in turn is in line with his rereading of Benjamin (shared by the photographers), Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and their notion of experience, and is in many ways consonant with Handke’s poetics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, the emphasis on distance, a recurrent word in Verso la foce, or rather on the dialectical coexistence between close and far, underpins much of Celati’s and Ghirri’s work and can be traced back to Benjamin’s definition of the “aura,” as “the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be” ([1931] 1999, 518), understood in both spatial and temporal terms. By foregrounding photography in Verso la foce, Celati is at pains to challenge both the predominance of the oculo-centric tradition and a hierarchical approach to meaning and to the senses, in an effort to move away from a dichotomic paradigm toward one that understands sense as plurimous and that acknowledges the complementary and indivisible working of all the senses in the perception of the surrounding and in the construction of the self. A close inspection of the manuscript material available at the Fondo Celati reveals a shift from Celati’s initial dichotomic juxtaposition of photography/documentary versus fiction to a more dialectical stance where these poles coexist. This is in line with his strategy of reinventing himself as a writer of a new kind of narrative fiction that encompasses different genres and is firmly rooted both within the European philosophical tradition and within a literary tradition of

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“travel writing” as a means of social critique, starting from positing himself as a “(self-)exile.” In this, Verso la foce resonates with a classic work of travel writing, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which Celati started to translate in the 1980s. In his introduction, Celati posits Gulliver’s estranged perspective as a means of describing again what we take for granted as familiar, through habitual perceptions, and as “common sense”—an approach that was adopted both by Celati and by Ghirri and other photographers at the time. This sense of exile is also that of the melancholic, which is how Celati presents himself, by drawing on a certain literary tradition and on an image of photography, which has long been associated with death, mourning, and melancholia. Regis Durand claims that the photographic experience is melancholic, as it foregrounds the defect of symbolization that exposes our sense of the real (1994, 72); similarly, through its intertextuality with photography, Verso la foce exposes the paradox whereby the documentary or work of reportage is used both to convey our vanishing experience of the exterior and to reinforce the fictionality of the text, through the inextricable link between reality and imagination. In reference to Giuliano Scabia’s unpublished theatrical project “I giganti del Po” and its influence on Verso la foce, Celati summarizes the short-circuiting of reality and imagination as a place where the “real becomes the most fantastic element” and “where everything functions beyond us” (2017, 402); these words illuminate Celati’s own text and distill its seminal contribution to contemporary Italian narrative fiction. By drawing on photography as a means of challenging dichotomies and of triggering the work of imagination, and through conflating different literary genres, with Verso la foce Celati sent a last “richiamo,” a call toward the world, in an effort to reestablish a connection with this region and with the experience of place as plurisensorial and contingent. NOTES 1. The Celati archive (Fondo Celati [FC]) stored at the Panizzi Municipal Library in Reggio Emilia includes Celati’s unpublished manuscripts as well as his own library. Among the texts he owned, there is an amply annotated copy of the French translation of Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming), which was published in French in 1982 and which presumably Celati acquired before the publication of the Italian translation in 1986. The Celati archive can be accessed at http://panizzi.comune.re.it. 2. I am using here the notation VF1, VF2, and VF3 proposed by Nunzia Palmieri, 2016.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise. A Political Economy of Music. Translation by Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baronti Marchiò, Roberto. 2001. “Journey without maps: il reportage narrativo.” In Camminare scrivendo. Il reportage narrativo e dintorni, edited by Nino Bottiglieri, 56–57. Cassino: Università degli studi.

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Barron, Patrick. 2007. “Gianni Celati’s Poetic Prose: Physical, Marginal, Spatial.” Italica 84, no. 2–3 (Summer–Autumn): 323–24. Belpoliti, Marco, and Andrea Cortellessa. 2008. “Letteratura come accumulo di roba sparsa.” Gianni Celati, Riga, no. 28: 24–44. Belpoliti, Marco, and Marco Sironi, eds. 2008. Gianni Celati, Riga, no. 28. Belpoliti, Marco, and Nunzia Palmieri, eds. 2016. Gianni Celati. Romanzi, cronache e racconti. Milan: Mondadori. Benjamin, Walter. (1931) 1999. “Little history of photography.” In Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. vol. 2, 506–30. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. ———. (1936) 2002. “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” (second version). In Walter Benjamin. Selected Writing, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Translation by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others, vol. 3, 101–33. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. ———. (1936–1939) 2003. “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” (third version). In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, edited by Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings. Translation by Edmund Jephcott and others, vol. 4, 251–83. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Bottiglieri, Nino. 2001. “L’esperienza del viaggio nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità narrativa.” In Camminare scrivendo. Il reportage narrativo e dintorni, edited by Nino Bottiglieri, 7–47. Cassino: Università degli studi. Calvino, Italo. Palomar. Turin: Einaudi, 1983. ———. 1986. “Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio.” In Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia. Scritture nel paesaggio, edited by Eleonora Bronzoni. 11–12. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Celati, Gianni. 1976. La banda dei sospiri. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 1984. “Verso la foce (reportage per un amico fotografo).” In Viaggio in Italia, edited by Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone, and Enzo Velati. 20–35. Alessandria: Il Quadrante. ———. 1987. “Verso la foce (estratti da un diario di viaggio).” In Narratori dell’invisibile. Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino, edited by Beppe Cottafavi, and Maurizio Magni. Modena: Mucchi. ———. 1989. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 2004. “Qualche idea sui luoghi e il lavoro con Luigi Ghirri. Intervista con Marco Sironi.” In Marco Sironi, Geografie del narrare. 221–29. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis. ———. 2004. “Introduction.” In Swift, Jonathan. I viaggi di Gulliver, edited and translation by Gianni Celati. vii-xxxiii. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 2017a. “Pedinando Zavattini.” L’Indice dei Libri del Mese 5: 24. ———. 2017b. “Ricerche sull’animazione del mondo.” In Gianni Celati con Carlo Gajani. Animazioni e incantamenti. 399–408. Rome: L’Orma. Cottafavi, Beppe, and Maurizio Magni. 1987. Narratori dell’invisibile. Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino. Modena: Mucchi. Distaso, Leonardo V. 2002. Lo sguardo dell’essere. Con Heidegger e Wittgenstein sulle tracce del guardare-attraverso. Rome: Carocci. Durand, Régis. 1994. “Quale storia (quali storie) della fotografia.” L’Asino d’oro. Letteratura e fotografia V, no. 9 (May): 65–75. Frongia, Antonello. 2016. “Fotografia, urbanistica, e (re-)invenzione del paesaggio nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra.” In Delli Aspetti de Paesi. Vecchi e nuovi media per l’immagine del paesaggio, vol. 1, Costruzione, descrizione, identità storica, edited by Annunziata Bernino, and Alfredo Buccaro, 533–43. Università degli Studi di Napoli: CIRCE. Ghirri, Luigi. 1986. “Fotografia e rappresentazione dell’esterno.” In Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia. Vedute nel paesaggio, edited by Giulio Bizzarri, and Eleonora Bronzoni, ix–xi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Also in Niente di antico sotto il sole and in The Complete Essays, 113–17. ———. 1997. Niente di antico sotto il sole. Scritti e immagini per un’autobiografia, edited by Paolo Costantini and Giovanni Chiaramonte. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale. 2016. The Complete Essays 1973–1991, edited by Michael Mack, and Izabella Scott. Translation by Ben Bazalgette, and Marguerite Shore. London: Mack.

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———. (1982) 2006. Still life. In Luigi Ghirri. Del guardare, edited by Ilaria Ghirri, and Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri. Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai. ———. 2010. Lezioni di fotografia, edited by Giulio Bizzarri, and Paolo Barbaro. Macerata: Quodlibet. Ghirri, Luigi, Gianni Leone, and Enzo Velati, eds. 1984. Viaggio in Italia. Alessandria: Il Quadrante. Grazioli, Elio. 2012. “Celati, Gianni e Luigi Ghirri.” In Il Comico come strategia in Gianni Celati & co, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, and Pia Schwarz Lausten. Nuova Prosa 59: 143–54. Handke, Peter. 1982. Lent retour. Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1979) 1986. Lento ritorno a casa. Translation by Rolando Zorzi. Milan: Garzanti. ———. 2009. The Long Way Around. In Slow Homecoming. Translation by Ralph Manheim. New York: New York Review of Books. Iovino, Serenella. 2012. “Restoring the Imagination of Place. Narrative reinhabitation and the Po Valley.” In The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, 100–117. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Janus, Adrienne. 2011. “Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Anti-Ocular’ Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory.” Comparative Literature 63, no. 2 (Spring): 182–202. Ophälders, Marcus. 2001. Costruire l’esperienza. Saggio su Walter Benjamin. Bologna: CLUEB. Palmieri, Nunzia. 2016. “Notizie sui testi.” In Gianni Celati. Romanzi, cronache e racconti, edited by Marco Belpoliti, and Nunzia Palmieri, 1725–1788. Milan: Mondadori. Palmieri, Nunzia, and Pia Schwarz Lausten, eds. 2012. Il Comico come strategia in Gianni Celati & co. Nuova Prosa no. 59. Rasy, Elisabetta. 1989. Gianni Celati, “Verso la foce.” Nuovi Argomenti 32 (Oct-Dec): 123–25. Seger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes in Between. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spunta, Marina. 2014. “‘A magical balance of opposites’. Reading Luigi Ghirri’s photography through Walter Benjamin.” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 2, no. 2 (May): 215–35. ———. 2017a. “Narrating the experience of place: Luigi Ghirri and literature.” In Luigi Ghirri and the Photography of Place. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Marina Spunta, and Jacopo Benci, 199–224. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2017b. “Narrare il fiume in Gianni Celati e Peter Handke: voce e ascolto come esperienza dei luoghi.” In Fiumi reali e immaginari nella letteratura italiana: luoghi, simboli, storie, voci, edited by Ulla Schroeder, and Franco Musarra. 217–224. Florence: Cesati. Spunta, Marina, and Jacopo Benci, eds. 2017. Luigi Ghirri and the Photography of Place. Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxford: Peter Lang. Thompson, Carl. 2011. Travel Writing. London: Routledge. Thompson, Jerry. 2016. Why Photography Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Valtorta, Roberta. (1997) 2005. “La fotografia dei luoghi come fotografia.” In Volti della fotografia, edited by Roberta Valtorta, 109–35. Milan: Skira. Vangi, Michele. 2005. Letteratura e fotografia. Pasian di Prato, Udine: Campanotto Editore. Zapf, Hubert. 2006. “The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology.” In Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf, and Sylvia Mayer, 49–69. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Chapter Two

Sight, Language, Time To be Surrounded by the World Monica Seger

At the start of his seminal 1972 essay collection, Ways of Seeing, John Berger reminds readers that “seeing comes before words,” that a (sighted) child sees before gaining the ability to express herself through language. He explains further: “But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it” (7). Berger spent much of his prolific career, which involved multiple media and forms of expression, exploring the effects of a visual understanding of being “surrounded” by the world. Gianni Celati has spent much of his own career doing the same, occasionally, as addressed below, in conversation with Berger himself. Like Berger’s, Celati’s work embodies multiple forms: lyrical prose, documentary cinema, critical essay, translation, and more. And, like Berger’s, his point of focus inevitably returns to how the act of seeing helps us to make sense of the world and our place in it, as well as how language might then communicate that sense to others, albeit a beat behind. I have long been intrigued by Celati’s attention to vision and language in Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth). 1 He is so profoundly attuned to what he describes as the external world’s need for “us to observe and recount it, in order to exist” (66). Reading once more the four gently meandering diaries collected in this volume, called by the author “stories of observation,” I remain struck by his ceaseless desire to capture the immediacy of visual observation through language—and how readily he admits to not quite making it (1). He confesses toward the end of the text’s first section, for example: “I walked for three days in order to observe something, but am already 89

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confused about what I observed,” as though that “something” had become instantly blurred once active observation ceased (24). Then, in the book’s final section: “The pretense of words; they pretend to keep track of everything happening around us, to describe and define it. But everything in flux around us doesn’t occur in this or that way, and has little to do with what words say. The river here flows out into an endless expanse, colors bleed into each other everywhere: how to describe this?” (71). Words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by the world, but for Celati words cannot entirely recompose that world’s structure either. Despite the inevitable disconnect, a desire to describe through language, to at least attempt re-composition of the everyday, is precisely what motivates his creative production in Verso la foce and elsewhere. In what follows, I consider Celati’s attention to the relationship between sight, language, and time in this text, as well as in the story collection Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Appearances, 1997) and the film Case sparse— Visioni di case che crollano (Scattered Houses—Visions of Collapsing Houses, 2002). In each of the three Celati is attuned to both the beauty and the challenge inherent in the twin acts of observing and recounting, what we might also describe as bearing witness. He focuses, in particular, on the ways in which observing and recounting can never entirely line up due to the inevitable passage of time between the first act and the second. Deeply aware of time moving forward in the external world, Celati seeks to convey that movement in his texts. Simultaneously, he contemplates the additional time that it takes to do so, as well as the inevitable reshaping of that time through narrative representation. Marina Spunta (2003) has written that Verso la foce represents Celati’s most acute attempt to make the “moments of perception, observation and reflection” coincide “with that of writing” (18, my translation). I agree, although I hold that the other texts addressed in the present essay are not so far behind. More importantly, I wish to emphasize here Spunta’s use of the word “moment.” It is the constancy of time’s passing, the never ceasing accumulation of moments that comprise the external world, that makes Celati’s longed for immediacy in language impossible. Between the moments of perception, observation, and reflection, and that (or those) of writing, the world has continued to advance. What was once perceived has somehow changed, and the written record will always be just slightly askew, especially for an author like Celati, who is prone to re-write his texts. 2 Whether in complement to this constant flow or in spite of it, the passing of time is one of Celati’s most beautifully wrought objects of attention in Verso la foce, as in Quattro novelle sulle apparenze and Case sparse. Just as time is a constant in the world all around us, it is also always at play in the human acts of writing or otherwise recounting, often in very different ways. Celati communicates time’s trajectory in the first text largely by tracing the subtle shifts of the

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external world, made only hazier by the as-yet-unknown effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and widespread industrial pollution in the Po Valley. Manifested in the physical movement of plants and sky, the forward progression of time in the nonhuman environment is one expression of what Anne Whiston Spirn (1998) calls the “language of landscape.” As she explains, this nonhuman grammar “reminds us that nothing stays the same,” alerting us to the memory of various pasts, while also allowing us to “anticipate the possible” (25–26). For Celati, the trick is to carefully read the signs of what has already come, while not letting such richly layered temporality allow him (or others) to overlook the present. In the final days of his postChernobyl wanderings, he pauses in an industrial zone covered in resurgent but chemically altered plants, rows of tidy little houses nearby. Later, he writes of the scene: “There was a battle among the clouds, then gusts of wind scattered them, leaving shreds of cirrus to float about over the tops of the poplars beyond the edge of the river” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 21). This description then spills seamlessly into a rumination on cultural tendencies toward a certain “amnesia,” which enables people “to put up levees, to be able to say ‘there’s a good side to everything,’ to put Walt Disney dwarves outside our front doors; in other words, to always say and show everywhere that something is completely different from what it is,” when what it actually is is steeped in what it has once been, as well as in what it might become (21). Here Celati offers a warning for our relationship to the more than human material world. We ought not to take the inevitable forward movement of our external surroundings—the transitions of the sky above—as an excuse to deny the lessons of history or, even more crucially, to look beyond uncomfortable present realities like the heavy industrial pollution just beyond those Walt Disney dwarves. This lesson in informed observation and affect, in sight and behavior, extends to Celati’s own efforts to recount realities just as they are in a particular moment. His task is complicated not only by a lack of stasis in the external world, as discussed above, but also by the “multidimensional, multiaxis” temporality of nature (Adam 1998, 10). Although the world is endlessly advancing, the sky never truly still, the temporality of the nonhuman is largely unpredictable beyond the general outline of lunar cycles and seasonal changes. Such temporality often seems outside of our comprehension in its separateness from clock time, which Barbara Adam defines as “intimately tied to the conceptual principles of Newtonian physics and the linear perspective,” the understanding that forces act on matter in predictable ways, A leading steadily to B. As Adam writes, the time of nature, of the more than human world, can instead feel like an “invisible ‘other,’ that which works outside and beyond the reach of our senses” (ibid.). We are totally surrounded by it, and yet we can never fully know it.

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This otherness of nonhuman time emerges in certain passages of Verso la foce when, rather than sweep things swiftly away, time does not move as fast as Celati or others might wish. Early in the book’s second section, “Explorations Along the Levees,” the author acknowledges the ways in which the autonomous temporality of the natural environment can not only obfuscate, but also impede, the process of recording or recounting what one has observed. His friend Luciano Capelli seeks to photograph the “landscape of levees” along the Po one morning but, as Celati explains, “It’s still early, the sun is rising very slowly over these plains, and we need to wait for midday because the shadows are too long” (26). Rather than speed things forward, blurring the impression of what they have seen, here the daily progression of the sky overhead slows down the men’s efforts to record and recount. And yet this occurrence bears similar results to a moment too quickly over, as it challenges Celati and Capelli to be simultaneously active in their observations and patient with themselves and the external world, recognizing yet again that the latter is ultimately beyond their control. Just as in the previous example, the text smoothly transitions in this passage from a breezy comment on the sovereign pace of the nonhuman—the shifting of the sun, its impact on the fields—to a warning about the effects of human action. Immediately after describing the scene above, complete with reddish stream and rampant pollen, Celati writes: “Pointing out a wide blotch on the ground, a man riding a bike told us that a tank of herbicide spilled there, and that it will take years for anything to grow. All the same, on the far side of the Po it’s only worse, he says, because the land there is sandy, and herbicides quickly filter into the aquifer, contaminating all the water” (26). In this instance, as in that of light moving across the plains, the timeline of environmental change (via recuperation, not contamination) is almost imperceptibly slow, “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive,” to use Rob Nixon’s words (2011, 2). It is also, of course, unfamiliar. As the old man says in departing, “Well, who knows what’ll happen to us next!” (26). Published two years before Verso la foce but written during approximately the same period, the 1987 Quattro novelle sulle apparenze offers similarly detailed descriptions of the external world, tucked into a set of gently meandering meditations on words and images. Like Verso la foce, this earlier collection is divided into four sections focused on the acts of observation and communication, whether through speech, the written word, or visual art. Here, however, the sections are distinct and fictional stories, as indicated by the word novella in the original Italian title. The first story considers both sight and language through a protagonist who one day stops speaking, choosing instead to “[lose] himself as he wanders about looking at everything that meets his eyes” (19). The third and fourth instead explore the various powers we attribute to the written word. It is the second story, “Conditions of Light

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on Via Emilia,” that most overtly addresses the effects of temporality in regards to sight and image, while still always engaging the question of language. Written in Celati’s first-person voice, the story is primarily focused on a landscape painter called Emanuele Menini. Like Celati himself (as well as Capelli, or photographer Luigi Ghirri, or so many of Celati’s other collaborators) the figure of Menini seeks to record and convey his perceptions of the external world. Specifically, he strives to offer a painted record of how particular vistas look when they are still, and touched by light. Ever frustrated in his attempts, he comes to realize that each day bears the undercurrent of a subtle tremor: “a tremor in the air which made everything unstable, swaying around him as he himself swayed with the others” (42). This “everyday tremor” makes it nearly impossible for Menini to capture stillness, as it inspires a ceaseless cycle of motion all around and even within him, “something that transports you and that you cannot resist” (42). It reads as a physical manifestation of time itself, rather than the proof of its effects on sky or river, a form for something otherwise tangible only through association. The tremor—time—is a subtle but powerful actor. As Menini explains, “one looks and thinks to have seen something, but the tremor in the air right away removes the thought of that which he saw. And so there is only the thought of moving in the brilliant light; we should move, and that’s all, through the hustle and bustle of every day” (43). The first half of the passage above recalls Celati’s previously cited rumination from Toward the River’s Mouth, when he is no longer sure what he has observed, while offering at least a partial explanation for that lack of clarity. Perhaps there too it is the tremor of every day, the effect of time’s passing, that has so easily blurred his vision. As Gilles Deleuze (1989) writes, “time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change” (82). Much like in Adam’s approach, time for Deleuze (and for Henri Bergson, on whom he is riffing) is the world by which we are surrounded—just as it challenges our vision of that world and our attempts to describe it. It may be appropriate to underline once again that for Celati this challenge is a positive one. Time’s destabilizing effect serves as his motivational force but also, and even more importantly, it is one of the things he most seeks to communicate as he traces, in Patrick Barron’s words, “the shifting, subtle appearances of everything other than the self” (2007, 326). In an essay entitled “Narrating as a Practical Activity,” based on a lecture from early in his career, Celati declares an awareness of temporality to be fundamental to his process of narration. He explains: I believe that narration consists in keeping oneself in line with temporality: in feeling and making felt how everything changes in every moment, and how in

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Monica Seger every moment, one must use words differently, with different meanings; and in feeling and making felt that all of our expressions and gestures and tones depend on the variation of moments, in the fluidity of the stream, the impossibility of fixing one perpetual and definitive sense. (2011, 29–30, my translation)

Narration “kept in line” with temporality: Celati is not so much concerned with the linearity of a traditional narrative arc, respecting the progression of beginning to end. Rather, he believes that narration must communicate the lack of fixity inherent in (nonhuman) temporality, and thus the external world at large. It is this belief that informs a certain ephemeral quality to his work, what Rebecca West (2000) describes as a “poetics of the contingent” (127). He writes, further: Narrative liveliness could be described like this: it is something that gives us the sense that moment by moment everything changes under our eyes and under our feet; and this perpetual changing of the thing around which we rotate is an experience like watching the clouds, where one person sees a lion and another an elephant . . . a narration is time in time, because it abides by the momentary: and so, I can say that something has one direction, and then a moment later that same thing has a different direction, that is, it changes meaning and it changes the sort of light that it sheds on the world. (31, my translation)

The last portion of the citation immediately above becomes particularly important when we consider the context in which Celati writes Verso la foce. While the final three sections are composed in the early 1980s, a time in which the Po Valley is suffering the environmental effects of poorly regulated industrial emissions, the first is written just weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, in which the threat of nuclear radiation looms large and nebulous. As he travels from town to town, Celati explores the constantly shifting perceptions of that historic moment by recording the transitioning content of conversations heard along the way. His record shows that common understanding of the disaster continues to change direction and meaning. This is especially so regarding the “sort of light” that Chernobyl might “shed on the world,” as concerns for environmental and corporeal health wax and wane in its immediate aftermath. As with so many iterations of environmental disaster, Chernobyl taps deeply into the multi-axial nature of nonhuman time by enacting both immediate effects and the slow environmental violence of which Nixon (2011) writes. In its continual unfolding, it forces human interlocutors to recognize that we are unable to speak with authority about, for example, the level of radiation in a cow’s milk on any given day. It also forces us to recognize the difficulty of seeing with authority. Much like time, radiation does not bear an immediately visible presence, but it does result in all manner of perceptible

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and often continually mutable shifts in other things and beings. In this, the Chernobyl disaster serves as an extreme example of environmental change at large, whether resulting from radiation, pollution, or simply new relationships to old landscapes: a complicated merger between temporality and matter (both human and non) that we must continually observe if we want to comprehend. The question of visibility brings us back to the function of sight with which this chapter began, and back to Berger’s reminder that “seeing comes before words.” In one of my favorite passages from Verso la foce, Celati notes: “Objects are out there floating in the light, emerging from the void to find a place in front of our eyes. We are always implicated in their appearing and disappearing, almost as if we were here just for this. The external world needs us to observe and recount it, in order to exist” (66). He believes in the role of the witness to make real, the power of testimony to make truth—note again the focus on eyes, appearance, observation—and yet he rejects any authority implicit in the role. 3 Celati underlines this rejection of authority, in a conversation with Marianne Schneider from 2008, when he suggests that we think of literary narratives as a sort of wind, or “collective flows of words,” rather than the work of particular authors (45). As underlined by the passive construction of the last two sentences cited at the start of this paragraph, he reads our agency as secondary to that of those objects floating about: they are what comprise the wind and the flow. And yet our observations are so necessary to their existence. John Berger also dedicated much attention throughout his career to the importance of bearing witness. In an interview with a young Geoff Dyer, first published in 1984 then widely recirculated after Berger’s death in 2017, he explains: “story tellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people . . . at any one moment it is difficult to see what the job of your life is because you are so aware of what you are lending yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term ‘being a witness’” (38). Writing, for Berger, was about fully opening himself to the lives of other people. It was also, however, about fully opening himself to landscapes, works of visual art, and the kinds of experiences that exist “at a level of perception and feeling which is probably preverbal,” such as gazing with pleasure upon a field (1992, 200). His description of lending oneself so completely to the process, serving as a sort of vessel for existences and experiences to travel through on their way to language, once again hinges on the word “moment,” with which this chapter began. To carefully observe and then recount, he suggests, involves immersing oneself entirely in a sliver of time soon to pass. This is the task of witnessing for Celati as well: capturing the world’s individual passing moments, as best he can. Present throughout Verso la foce, the role of witness, situated first in sight, then language, is further explored in a series of Celati’s films often

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discussed in conjunction with the book. The 2002 film Case sparse—Visioni di case che crollano is a particularly helpful interpretive guide when it comes to the author-director’s approach to observation and time, or the act of bearing witness. Case sparse is the final installment of a trilogy of films shot, over a ten-year span, in many of the same locations explored in Verso la foce. It follows Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of the Souls, 1991) and Il Mondo di Luigi Ghirri (The World of Luigi Ghirri, 1999), both of which are discussed in the present volume. All three films focus on the appearance and what we might call the spirit of the Po Valley, while offering meandering meditations on representation and narration at large. In this light, Antonio Costa (2011) reads the films as an “audiovisual trilogy that prolongs and integrates the work of writing” (61, my translation). Following his lead, I argue that, of the three, Case sparse most directly offers a response to the sense of limitation in language conveyed in Verso la foce, especially as it relates to temporality. 4 In true Celati fashion, this response is not so much a solution as an affirmation, akin to the collective part in call-and-response singing or speech. Exploring multiple forms of representation—filmmaking, photography, theater, writing, and oral narration—Case sparse makes an argument for the value of a multi-medial account of the world, just as it confirms that true immediacy in representation is fleeting, no matter the form. The film follows multiple interwoven threads: an international group of researchers, filmmakers, and others who are travelling through the Po Valley to interview inhabitants about abandoned structures and shifting attitudes; a director and actress, Alberto Sironi and Bianca Maria D’Amato, who prepare a theatrical performance about the “sunset of the agrarian world,” practicing monologues immersed in the very locations addressed within the piece; and finally, a series of lyrical landscape observations read in loco by John Berger. Marco Belpoliti and Gianni Canova both see Berger as a “Virgil” in this film for the way in which he offers sage explanation, much like Dante’s guide in the Divine Comedy. While there is something Virgilian in Berger’s calm knowing delivery, I read him instead as Celati’s cinematic double, reinforced by the fact that Celati himself provides the Italian voiceover translation for Berger’s narrations. 5 This is not the only occasion on which the two men overlap on film: Berger serves as part of Celati’s traveling entourage of friends and interlocutors in Strada provinciale delle anime. Furthermore, as West (2000) (who, for her part, declares Berger a sort of “brother” to Celati) notes, the two were united by a shared interest “in both appearance and existence,” as well as their respective clear critical voices and unfettered narrative styles (170). Case sparse is a self-reflexive patchwork of a film, as dedicated to earnestly representing the Po Valley as it is to critically reflecting on the act. In certain scenes we hear D’Amato’s monologue tracked over images of her

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sitting alongside the Po or gazing out of a car with Sironi, while in others her voice accompanies landscape shots, which serve as both a setting for the stories she tells and a reminder of how the land has changed since the time in which those stories occur. In yet other scenes D’Amato is filmed while actively reciting, at the edge of a city park or in a train station waiting room, the external world inserting itself in the form of passing traffic or curious passengers. Sironi grows frustrated, running his hand over his face, as the present jovially interjects into a time and space he had hoped could be dedicated to the past. The team of traveling researchers, including Celati and Berger, are at least as focused on analyzing video they have recently shot as on they are on watching the land passing beyond their train windows. As they scrutinize footage on a laptop computer, discussing the results of their interviews with area residents, the camera homes in on the laptop’s screen. For a moment we, the external audience, become part of the team as we watch the footage alongside them. A bit of the laptop’s edge is still visible on screen, however: a frame within a frame to recall our actual distance from the featured landscape; the camera’s role as intermediary; and the time that has inevitably passed between their present-tense discussion of events and the moments captured visually. In both of these threads Celati highlights different representational practices, drawing out their near-proximity to both immediacy and artifice, as well as their unique capacity to communicate different angles of the region’s story. Layered over one another, D’Amato’s recitation and the on-train caucus are further intercut with shots of the collapsing houses featured in the film’s title. In contrast to the highly verbal threads discussed thus far, these shots feature no sound except for a slow instrumental score heavy on creaky strings. They are marked instead by vibrant color, particularly the green of plants grown rampant throughout the long-abandoned structures. Occasionally the camera tracks forward, mimicking the gaze of Celati’s team and again inviting us to join them, while at other times it remains still, allowing movement to be embodied by leaves, birds, vehicles, or human bodies in the distance. Lacking narration, the shots of the houses and surrounding land pause the film’s other threads, providing viewers an opportunity to simply observe on our own within the bounds of the camera’s movement, to recall that seeing does indeed come “before words,” to refer again to Berger’s 1972 text. Citing their likeness to still photography, Marco Belpoliti (2011) reads such shots as fixed, noting that: “Celati’s cinema is made of still moments” (50, my translation). While I agree that it is a cinema of moments, I argue that they are never actually still, that the tremor of time, however slow, is always at work. Gianni Canova (2011) has made a similar argument. He suggests that Celati’s relationship to image in Case sparse is grounded expli-

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citly in the passing of time, and that the author-director is most interested in capturing duration in an image, the slow temporality of the houses’ actual collapse. Canova writes: “The collapse is not the before or the after of our gaze, it is the during, the meanwhile. Even if we don’t perceive it, there is a time of action (and of erosion, and of decay. . .) that works incessantly on things and on the images of things. This, according to Celati, is what cinema ought to know how to show: time working inside the image, the duration of vision” (56–57, my translation). Again we might think of the painter Menini, and how his desire to capture stillness is frustrated by the “everyday tremor.” It is precisely this tremor that Celati seeks to convey—especially, perhaps, at its faintest. Writing on the time image in cinema, Deleuze (1989) notes that “a purely optical and sound situation . . . makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp. . . . It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful” (18). This is bold language to borrow for Celati’s subtle work, veering awfully close to the sublime, but Deleuze’s suggestion of grasping or having suddenly lost a tight hold is applicable here. When Celati offers visual imagery unadorned by language, he allows viewers to experience the sensorial delight of being in place, to witness for ourselves the gentle beauty found in that land. Simultaneously, by allowing us to float adrift without narration, suddenly unanchored from the larger story being told, he underscores the sense-making function of language, its ability to explain the world, as Berger writes (1972, 7). Ultimately, Case sparse is as committed to linguistic expression as it is to an exploration of vision. As such, the film could have no guide more fitting than Berger, who is explicitly introduced in the film’s earliest minutes as both a narrator and writer. He is shown at a picnic bench by the Po’s edge, gazing out onto the landscape, papers and pen spread before him as he speaks. His English speech becomes softer as Celati’s Italian translation is soon tracked over, but the two voices continue to cross paths, much like the threads of the film to follow. Berger states that the film is about derelict houses along the Po River, as well as agricultural changes and the migration of residents to more urban areas. He says that we can find many historic motivations for these shifts, but that they matter little when we actually approach the ruins of the houses and, suddenly, no longer know what to think. We need, Berger explains, “new concepts and modes of thought” that “go along with what we are perceiving.” This is what Celati seeks in all of his narratives, especially but not only Verso la foce: a new mode of thought in harmony with that which we first see and then express, confirm, and make real through words, one that recognizes the act of perception as ongoing and ever-changing, much like the surrounding world.

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NOTES 1. See Monica Seger, Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 2. As the author discusses in an interview with translator Marianne Schneider, he has been prone throughout his career to rewrite his texts, viewing them as fluctuating rather than fixed, and noting that “to write means to re-write and you never reach the bottom” (2008, 45, my translation). 3. Barron opts for the term translator, rather than witness, describing Celati as a translator of the “voice of the spirit of place,” whose task is to “render this voice intelligible.” I suggest the two roles are the same in Celati’s work, and note that, like witnessing, the task of translation is an action in service to a primary agent. See Barron, “Gianni Celati’s Poetic Prose,” 326. 4. I should note that others, such as Rebecca West, instead read Strada provinciale delle anime as being in closest relationship to Toward the River’s Mouth, for the film’s attention to questions not only of seeing, but also of being seen. For more, see West (2000, 128–35). 5. This reading is admittedly complicated when the film’s threads increasingly blur together and the two men appear alongside each other, standing in close conversation in the open center of an abandoned house, the documentary crew circling quietly around them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. New York: Routledge. Barron, Patrick. 2007. “Gianni Celati’s Poetic Prose: Physical, Marginal, Spatial.” Italica 84:2–3: 323–44. Belpoliti, Marco. 2011. “Celati, cinema-filosofia lungo la valle del Po.” In Documentari Imprevedibili come i sogni: Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 49–54. Rome: Fandango. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Classics. ———. 1992. About Looking. New York: Vintage International. Canova, Gianni. 2011. “Tempo della visione, tempo dell’erosione.” In Documentari Imprevedibili come i sogni: Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 55–60. Rome: Fandango, 2011. Celati, Gianni. 1991. Appearances, translated by Stuart Hood. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 2002. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 5th ed. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 2011. “Narrare come attività pratica.” In Conversazioni del vento volatore, 26–34. Macerata: Quodlibet. Celati, Gianni, and Marianne Schneider. 2008. “Riscrivere, riraccontare, tradurre: Conversazione con Marianne Schneider.” In Gianni Celati (Riga 28), edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 45–49. Milan: Marcos y marcos. Costa, Antonio. 2011. “Cinema delle pianure: Case sparse di Gianni Celati.” In Documentari Imprevedibili come i sogni: Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 61–68. Rome: Fandango. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, edited by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Dyer, Geoff. “Ways of Witnessing: Interview with John Berger.” Marxism Today Dec 1983: 36–37. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spirn, Anne Whiston. 1998. The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spunta, Marina. 2003. “Lo spazio delle pianure come ‘territorio di racconti’—verso la foce con Gianni Celati.” Spunti e Ricerche 18: 5–28.

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West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter Three

Gianni Celati’s Strada provinciale delle anime A “Silent” Film about “Nothing” Rebecca West

Writer Gianni Celati has long been drawn to cinema as a source of inspiration for his prose works. 1 Now he has reversed the process, turning to filmmaking as an art form suited to the elaboration of his narrative visions. The mediatory factor between literature and film for him is photography specifically, and, behind both prose fiction and film, the more general issues of point of view, perspective, scale, and the like: all issues most typically associated with painting. By moving into visual media, Celati both explores the inherent limitations of purely verbal expression and reveals the deep connections between and among verbal and non-verbal modes of creativity. We can “read” his movie as if it were one of his recent written fictions, for it has strong affinities with those texts. In fact, it has been called a videoracconto (videostory) (Teatini 1991, 25). In her rich meditation on such crossovers, ‘‘Text/image border tensions” (The Politics of Postmodernism), Linda Hutcheon (1989) focuses on photography as a particularly suitable site for analyzing what she calls “fringe interference”; she writes: “My particular interest in this chapter is in those photographic ‘fringe’ constructions that combine the visual and the verbal, mass media and high art, artistic practice and aesthetic theory, and, in particular, in the spots where these apparent opposites overlap and interfere both with each other and with mainstream notions of ‘art’“ (118–19). These “fringe effects” are, in fact, at the heart of much art that we call “postmodern,” and are central to the complexities which Celati’s recent textual and filmic art (both very influenced by photographic theoretical concerns) in particular explores and embraces. 101

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Celati reappeared on the Italian literary scene—after several years of virtual silence—with his 1985 collection of stories entitled Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains). There followed a story in the 1986 anthology Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio (Explorations along the Via Emilia: Writings within the landscape) (which has a companion text—Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Vedute nel paesaggio [Explorations along the Via Emilia: Views within the Landscape]—made up of photographs by contemporary photographers and historical information of the via); this story, “Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia” (Conditions of Light on the via Emilia), was then included in the 1987 Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Appearances). In 1989, four diari di viaggio (travel diaries) (so named by Celati himself) appeared with the title Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth). One of these pieces had already been published in 1984 in a collection of photographs, Viaggio in Italia (Journey in Italy). Also in 1989 Celati published a remarkable introduction to a collection of Luigi Ghirri’s photographs, Il profilo delle nuvole: Immagini di un paesaggio italiano (The Profile of the Clouds: Images of an Italian landscape). In this work we see Celati’s intense interest in external space, photographic techniques, and what he himself calls “appearances.” We need merely to look at the titles as a first step in grasping the centrality to Celati’s recent work of landscape and externality: “plains”; “river mouth”; “landscape”; “via Emilia”; “viaggio in Italia”; “appearances.” From this starting point, we can begin to explore Celati’s not unexpected move into filmmaking and the creation of a film the heart of which is human motion through space, beginning at a signpost signaling “la strada provinciale delle anime” (“the provincial road of souls”). The collection Narratori delle pianure includes as frontispiece a map of the “plains” in the title. Following a line along both the Po river and the via Emilia, names of towns and cities appear—the same names that will be the locales of the stories to follow. I have discussed elsewhere the metaliterary properties of this map—the stories moving through towns from West to East just as writing and reading move left to right; the beginning, middle, and end of the temporal-spatial trajectory, which is analogous to the basic structural components of stories, and so on. 2 I discovered in re-reading Calvino’s “Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio” (“Toward a Description of a Landscape”), included as the opening piece to the 1986 via Emilia collection of stories, that he makes the similar and inevitable connection between observing a landscape and writing, seeing both as fundamentally spatial and temporal in essence: “Even if at the moment as I sit here ready to write I might seem unmoving, my eyes are in motion, external eyes that run back and forth following letters that run from one margin to the other, and interior eyes that also run back and forth amid the scattered objects of my memory” (1986, 11). But it is to the map itself that I want to direct some attention—or I should say not only to this map, but to the thoughts on the external world and

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our relation to representations of it that maps generically stimulate. These thoughts in turn will lead into a consideration of Celati’s film, which is, among other things, a map come alive through moving images and peopled spaces. Maps are basically graphic, pictorial representations of real space, but they are themselves, oxymoronically, concrete abstractions. They are highly referential and mimetic of the material world they depict, and yet they are so minimalist, so lacking in what is really there in those places named and placed, as to be mere ghosts or shadowy traces of the world. (I am not speaking of topographic maps that are highly marked by diverse colorations and that mimic the swell of mountains, for example, but rather of everyday black and white maps of countries and cities to which we most commonly refer.) One of the best meditations on maps I have read is contained in Robert Harbison’s Eccentric Spaces; he writes: “From cities of brick to cities in books to cities on maps is a path of increasing conceptualization” (1977, 124). Mapping, whether real or metaphorical, has great resonance in the realm of postmodern theorizing, perhaps because it is precisely one of the most conceptual of activities. We are deeply engaged in reconceptualizing our world, in discovering just where we are, just what our relation to space is, just how humankind can preserve collective dimore (dwelling places) and individual homes in a world more and more made up of ungrounded subjectivities, migrations, shifting boundaries, and literally homeless people. If our sense of place is radicalized, however, our maps are, as Harbison eloquently argues, “all old-fashioned . . . with their easy continuities between near and far, seeing to the end of every prospect, a concept at ease with its field. The maps in daily use represent a pre-nineteenth century, a medieval, agrarian world, and only choose to distinguish between country and town. In Europe today not much of either remains” (1977, 139). Maps stimulate nostalgia, then, not only for the places on them which we have visited, but also for their calm containment and ordering of the world. They stimulate restlessness as well, for maps are associated with “being on the road,” speaking to the nomadic impulse, the attraction to the ever-different, the not-yet-experienced, which continues to lure us even in this “global village” of a world where little is farther away than a television screen or a fax. The nostalgic and the restless are aspects of contemporaneity in the industrialized, technologized West on which a tremendous amount of media production and consumer goods depend. Nostalgia and so-called “adventures” for the restless are marketed according to what might be called “aestheticizing” and “documentarizing” techniques; the former emphasizes the beauty, calm, and warm corporeal appeal of some “long ago and far away” (à la Baudelairian “Invitation au voyage”: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / luxe, calme et volupté” [Baudelaire, (1917) 1861, 97]), while the latter takes a stark “you are there and this is what it’s really like” approach. Photography

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and film play a huge role in packaging and selling such views of the world. In advertising of all sorts—television commercials, magazines, travel brochures—photographs and moving pictures lure us with their gauzily lovely scenes or their “realistic” depictions of far-off places and promised “adventures.” Luigi Ghirri (who died prematurely in 1992), the photographer whose work was most important to Celati’s writing about the external world, avoids either aestheticizing or documentarizing. In discussing Ghirri’s appeal to him in an informal interview with me in 1985, the writer spoke of this avoidance, which he saw as “cleansing the gaze,” allowing a less manipulated and manipulating vision. Celati also spoke of the “lowering of the threshold” of representational intensity; that is, Ghirri’s ability to eschew beautifying the scenes he shot (as so much of the photography of “scenic Italy” does in what I have called the nostalgic mode) or, conversely, uglifying the seen, emphasizing the warts on the face of the world, so to speak, in the name of documentaristic “realism,” “starkness,” and the like. Instead, Ghirri tries to find a frame for what is photographed that does the least violence to the seen, a kind of “natural” frame or orientation that “caresses” rather than “possesses.” (He has called photography “a caress given to the world” [1985].) The horizon itself most often provides this “take” on the world: the line where sky and earth meet, and where verticality emerges out of horizontality in a balance provided by landscape rather than by a strong imposition of the viewer’s expectations or predispositions. 3 Everchanging light is another of Ghirri’s basic tools. Celati (1989a) discusses the importance of light to Ghirri’s photographs in his essay, “Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini” (“Comments on a natural theater of images”). 4 He begins by mentioning Ghirri’s tendency to compare photography with science fiction in its generation of a sense of the uncanny, moving from the normal to the unnatural by means of a piccolo scarto (small swerve). Celati elaborates: “In Ghirri’s photographs the piccolo scarto can almost always be traced back to a consideration of light. The same light can never be cast on things in two different moments, and thus things can never have the same colors. It would never be possible to take the same photograph in two different moments, and the piccolo scarto is born from this state of contingency that leads to the taking of the photograph.” Roland Barthes sees this contingency as that which ties photographs to death, but Ghirri (and Celati) positivize the contingent, seeing its representations in photographs and fiction alike as a renewal of perception rather than as “the gravestone marking life’s moments” (Celati 1989a). Celati makes explicit the connection between photographic and fictional contingency when he writes: “each photograph, even if tied to the contingent moment, in truth is linked back to another photograph already taken or one that will be taken, or to other seen images, analogous to a short story, which is composed of various states of contingency, passages from one moment to another” (1989a). Rather than

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being a cause for lamentation, then, the fundamental contingency of experience as captured in photographs and in narrative structures is the source of a sense of renewal, rememoration, and the infinite potentiality of experience, as we think of “other photos already taken or to be taken . . . other images seen.” In this view, art does not limit or close off, does not monumentalize or fix; rather it opens out onto the external world and creates bonds between the seer and the seen, both caught up in contingency, in past, present, and future. Celati’s narrative “mapping,” like Ghirri’s landscape photographs, avoids aestheticizing (turning experience into “high art”) and documentarizing (seeking a mimetic replication of the real in language); instead the contingent essence of both the nonverbal world and the verbal expression of it in stories and diaristic writings is sought. Celati’s stories and travel diaries all reflect this poetics of the contingent. There is an open-endedness to these writings in distinct opposition to closural narratives created by means of an emphasis on constant movement through space, shifting perspectives, multiple points of view, and a highlighting of written language’s limitations in capturing experience. There is also a strongly philosophical orientation, which could be called phenomenological and ontological, as Celati seeks, through observation and description of the external, to arrive at some sense of the meaning of being. The storyteller does not dominate the stories he recounts; rather, he transmits them in as limpid and respectful a manner as he can, mindful always that he himself is as much a part of the disorienting spaces as is that which he recounts. His task is to organize and thereby to dare sollievo (give consolation), in Celati’s words, not by constructing deluding myths of comprehensibility, closure, or absolute existential security, but by showing in his tales that the world is always narratable, even if not controllable. Narration thus reassumes its ancient role of consolation, by showing us that our contingency is our humanity, that a story (even our own) is only one in an infinite number of possible stories, past, present, and future, and that—to put it in an unfortunately clichéd (unfortunately considered so, since it is an importantly true) phrase—we are all in it together, and are all destined for the same end. As Guido Fink says in his blurb to Quattro novelle sulle apparenze: “the entire book is a game meant to lower the pretenses of the self, to lose track of the self amid other scattered appearances.” Celati writes in his brief “Note” that prefaces Verso la foce that “every observation needs to liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost. As a natural tendency that absorbs us, every intense observation of the external world carries us closer to our death—and perhaps also lessens our separation from ourselves” (1989c, 9–10). This assertion may appear to bring us back to the Barthian sense of death inherent in photography, but for Celati being “closer to our death” has the positive valence of being less separate from ourselves, and thus better

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able to live in a world that is not oppositionally hostile, but rather companionably caducous. These emphases reappear in the film, Strada provinciale delle anime, to which I now turn. First, some background information on the making of the film. Celati had spoken for some time about his wish to make what he called a “pseudo-documentary.” That is, the “realism” of the documentary would be maintained in terms of overall structure and style, but the film would be constructed according to a highly self-conscious artistic vision. In a 1991 interview, Celati was asked what aspects of the documentary interest him the most, and he responded: “I don’t much believe in documentaries, because the idea that images transmit a genuine sense of reality doesn’t pertain to my way of thinking. It seems to me that documentaries are stories like all other stories. But I also don’t much like the idea of ‘fiction’ in which cinema is so irremediably stuck” (Teatini 1991, 25–26). Clearly, the mixing of “real” documentary and “fictional” and film forms acts on both, blurring the boundaries between life and art, internal and external. With the financial support of RAI Tre, Celati was finally able to produce the film, which was shown in 1991 on television, to what sort of audience response it is hard to imagine. When I saw Celati in the summer of 1992 in Bologna, he lamented the treatment accorded his film; it was shown very late at night and at least one part of the soundtrack mix was missing. Celati also mentioned, as a visual reference point, the importance of Edward Hopper’s painting to his takes, as he and Ghirri (and the “tourist-group” cast, made up of thirty relatives and friends) traveled through the Po Delta region gathering many hours of shots that were eventually edited down into the film of around one hour. Let me begin, especially for those of you who have not seen the film, with a bare-bones description of it. A group of tourists takes a bus tour through the landscapes and towns of the Po Delta. That is, in a sense, it. There is no plot as such; there are no “meaningful” human interactions or extraordinary occurrences. The film is, quite consciously I believe, about “nothing.” And, although I call it a “silent movie” in my title, I should say that it is not literally silent, but rather reaches after the silent, seeks to ascoltare il silenzio (listen to silence), to use Paolo Valesio’s wonderful phrase. Celati uses various sounds—music, human voices—as well as actual silences to great effect throughout. The “videostory” brings together many threads that run through the writing of the same period as the film: the locales are, of course, those also found in Narratori delle pianure and Verso la foce; the dialogues and monologues are often “ministories” which, in being seen and heard on screen, remind us of the basic corporeal orality and presence of storytelling, just as the written texts seek to do; the constant emphasis on seeing and being seen harks back to the interest in appearances as in Quattro novelle sulle apparenze.

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This film works on our imaginative capacity much more than on a logicorational apperception of the world. In her excellent study, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Angela Dalle Vacche (1992) uses Vico (among others) as a starting point for her consideration of filmic representation. She reminds us that “Vico believed that human beings acquire knowledge only by representing themselves, and by translating mental processes into visible, anthropomorphic forms” (10). The earliest forms of these self-representations were, however, much more image-oriented than abstractly verbal, as “this early language was without sound. The visual dimension played a crucial role in this mute language because primitive people had no speculative skills, only imaginative ones. . . . Vico’s sense that the first language of humankind was mute, visual, and corporeal may very well have been preserved in the cinema” (10–11). These three adjectives can be applied as well to Celati’s art, both verbal and filmic, in which he seeks to transcend the limits of traditionally linguistic representations by heightening our awareness of the eloquence of silence, of seeing and being seen, and of the body’s role in imagining and reasoning alike. Strada provinciale delle anime uses several means to stimulate our imaginative skills, relying more on the understated and the suggestive than on the straightforwardly expository presentation of scenes. As the film opens, Celati’s voiceover tells us that thirty people took off in a “blue bus” on a trip through the Po Delta “in order to see in a different way.” Another voice tells us, “We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” simply “lots of houses” and “many people like us.” As they start out. the tour group’s bus comes to a signpost indicating that the road ahead is called “La strada provinciale delle anime.” In the 1991 interview, Celati says that the road and its name provided “a logic to our story” (Teatini 1991, 28). The voiceover comments that the road “doesn’t lead anywhere.” Throughout, a varied musical soundtrack accompanies the movement through space, sometimes classical and soaring, sometimes jazzy and dissonant. Diverse voices provide a “human soundtrack” as well. 5 This initial moment serves to highlight the literally “provincial” locales that the group will visit (no well-known or major cities will be stops on this itinerary), but the reference to “souls” (“delle anime”) immediately takes us out of the realm of the solely literal, and into that of imaginative and spiritual journeys. (Parenthetically, one of my students consistently referred to the film as “the provincial road of lost souls,” thus showing the tenacious influence of a Dante-esque perspective generated by the word “anime.”) The provinces in which the film will wander also take on the metaphorical sense of the place of art as described by Fellini (quoted by John Berger in his essay “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” in Keeping a Rendezvous): “What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one . . . it’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier-country between the tangible world and

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the intangible—which is really the realm of the artist” (1991, 18–19). The members of the tour group—now associated with the “anime” of the road marker—are quite “normal”; they are old and young, men and women, couples and single people, Italian and non-Italian. They travel comfortably in a typical tour bus, where we see them talking to each other, looking out of the windows, dozing, reading, writing, looking sometimes interested in their surroundings, sometimes supremely bored. The various tappe (stop-overs) in the journey are identified by means of interpolated written commentaries in the style of silent-film dialogue boxes, scrolls and all. These are not wellknown spots, for this is not a part of Italy that has been developed by the tourist industry either for its own citizens or for foreign visitors. As they move “towards the mouth” of the Po, roughly between Rovigo to the North and Ferrara to the South, they stop at places like Goro, Codigoro, Argine Agosta, and Comacchio. They also stop in many unidentified landscapes, where marshy plains stretch out to the horizon and no towns are visible. For the most part, the weather is overcast, misty, and rainy, adding to the sense of being nowhere in particular. When they arrive to a town, they get off the bus, walk around, chat with local citizens, look at their surroundings, and generally show the sort of mild befuddlement that tour groups often show when not being strongly “orchestrated” by a leader. In fact, it is precisely to this aimlessness that Celati directs attention. As we gradually stop waiting for “something to happen,” we too become caught up in a sense of aimless motion through space, which can be either pleasant or disturbing depending on individual expectations. The sense of solitude in company is also quite strong, for even the couples seem unable to help each other to break through the state of mild disorientation brought on by this trip (and perhaps all trips, especially those not clearly goal-oriented or highly choreographed by an authoritative leader). Although both Celati and Ghirri are in the film, neither actively directs the action, instead more commonly merging themselves into the desultory conversations and casual strolls of the group. As comic counterpoint, there is an “organizer,” a man with a microphone and a gruff manner of speaking, who throughout tries to round up the errant group, arranges for hotel and restaurant accommodations, and generally does his best to give some order and form to their wanderings. In spite of his efforts, the group members more often than not look slightly bewildered and a bit lost. At a certain point, a voiceover muses: “Is it better to feel lost or to look only at what they’ve told you to look at?” Celati’s preference is clear. We, the spectators, thus join the travelers—who are themselves spectators—in having to construct meanings for what we see that depend much more on something like errancy and daydreaming (individual imagination) than linearity and logic (“grand narratives”). In spite of its unemphatic, understated tone, the film reveals a strong sense of artistic composition. The oblique shots of landscapes, the music, and

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the voiceover commentaries and casual conversations all work in subtle accord to bring out the main “topics”: life as errancy, genuine seeing as opposed to media-produced images, the basic solitude of individual existence. There are moments in the film that stand out, however, in spite of the overall lack of emphatic highlighting. One of them is profoundly lyrical. The group is gathered around a campfire, obviously enjoying an evening of drinking and chatting. The camera pans to the moon shining down on them, and various members of the group (including Celati) recite Giacomo Leopardi’s “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia” (“Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia”): As the quiet voice begins, “Che fai tu, luna, in ciel? dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa luna?” (“What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? Tell me, what are you doing, / silent moon?"), we are drawn into the spell cast not only by the recitation but by the entire film which, like the poem, asks “ove tende / Questa vagar mio breve?” (“where leads / This brief wandering of mine?”) (for original text, see Leopardi’s Canti [1835] 1967). The communality of the group in this scene (and, by extension, our general communality in the human condition) also resonates deeply with the lines “. . . tu forse intendi, / Questo viver terreno, / II patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia; / Che sia questo morir, questo supremo / Scolorar del sembiante, / E perir dalla terra, e venir meno / Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia” (“. . . perhaps you understand / what might be this earthly existence, / our suffering and sighing / what might be this dying, / this fading of our faces, / and perishing from the earth, and leaving behind / all familiar and beloved company”). Existence as spiritual nomadism, as the errar (wandering) of which the film’s itinerary is made up, is similarly highlighted in the lines, “Ed io pur seggo sovra l’erbe, all’ombra, / E un fastidio m’ingombra / La mente, ed uno spron quasi mi punge / Sì che, sedendo, più che mai son lunge / Da trovar pace o loco” (“I too sit on the grass, in the shade, / And a disquiet envelops me / My mind, as if a thorn were pricking me / So that, sitting, I am even further / from finding peace or place”). This scene is surely one of the most effective—and affecting—uses of poetry as self-gloss to be found in cinema. After this scene, we see shots of the earth taken from outer space, and the Leopardian sense of solitudine immensa (vast solitude) is thus visually underlined. The basic errancy of life is also highlighted, as the group arrives at Contarina and a voice comments, “Sometimes you just don't know where to go anymore.” As the group waits for arrangements to be made at a local restaurant and hotel, the vacuity of so much of human speech is summed up in the soundtrack overlay of droning voices of newscasters whose “blahblah” is in painful contrast to the “silences” of the film. The group ends up, appropriately enough, at a desolate little beach bar named “Bar Ultima Spiaggia” (“Last Beach Bar”) where a paltry, rundown amusement park is another painful contrast to the natural beauty we have seen throughout the trip. As the film moves toward its close, Celati thus brings out those aspects of

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human-made, commercial “reality” most in opposition to his vision. A story is told (again, in the form of a voiceover) as the group leaves the bar for the last bus ride; the story implicitly speaks to the issue of the falsity of media images, and their harm to real human beings. A woman has a husband who watches “variety shows” all the time on television. In them, he especially watches “half-nude women” and the wife feels like an old rag—“uno straccio”—in contrast. Finally, she tells her husband, “it’s either me or the TV,” but he thinks she is overreacting and takes her to a doctor who prescribes tranquilizers. Her husband continues to watch the half-nude women on television each evening, and the drugged-up woman takes to wandering “by herself along the levees.” The woman recounting the story says she has seen the so-called “crazy wife” wandering about “like a tortured soul.” Are we also “tortured souls,” alone, unseen, invisible in a world of hyped-up, false images? There is a leitmotif that runs throughout the film, and it is the group photos that are shot by Ghirri at almost every locale. At the end of the film, these photos are displayed in an abandoned villa, used as a German command post during the Second World War, while a story about invisible people is recounted. The group has felt their collective “invisibility” as they moved through the diverse spaces of the trip, their lack of any impact or effect on the places they arrived to, saw, and left. Yet the story, told by Celati as a dream he had speaks of the tenacity of the invisible, the “phantom effect” that the past presences of people produce on landscape and humanmade places alike. He says that he dreamed of “deserted places,” yet containing “invisible populations.” When he is asked in the dream how he knows these invisible peoples are there, he answers: “I can feel them pressing in on me.” The setting itself is rife with history, filled with signs of the Germans’ presence, just as the photographs capture the past presence of the group in the many places they visited. Celati has written of history as precisely these spatial traces, countering the more traditional view of history as “an uninterrupted succession of events locatable within a chronological continuum” (1975, 14). If historical writing is to preserve the absolute alterity and “pure exteriority” of that which is past, then we need a spatial concept because “it is exactly in those spaces—marginalized or simply ignored by memorytradition—that there resides the Difference without which history is tautology” (1975, 14). In an earlier conversation with a town mayor who is interested in developing a saleable, commodified image of his town and the natural areas around it, Celati speaks animatedly of the wrong-mindedness of such a desire, as if packaging an image robs it of its invisible historical soul, just as photography is viewed as soul-robbing by certain peoples. In what is no doubt the film’s most assertive scene (which comes just before the “Leopardi” scene), Celati rails against this “Americanization” (read commodification), while the mayor insists that tourism is needed to bring money into the

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depressed area, and that poetry cannot save the world. Celati’s film seems to suggest that a “poetic” emphasis on the invisible soul of the world, which we can catch glimpses of only if we surrender completely to a disempowerment of assertive subjectivity, may not “save the world,” but late capitalistic approaches certainly have gone far in ruining it. The ecological concerns subtending the film are thus subtly brought out; these “underdeveloped” marshes and unvisited towns of the Po Delta are obviously loved by Celati precisely for their invisible resonances and their lack of “tourist appeal,” even while they are lamented as being on the verge of losing their soul to commodified visibility. My comments have underlined the thematic and philosophical similarities, the shared stylistic preference for understatement—verbal and visual— and the structural errancy of both texts and film. What further brings these works together is their creation of a mode of reception among readers and viewers that depends on openness to categories of experience that counter more traditional categories activated by literary “high art” and mass media alike. Where literature and the media commonly have a sort of horror vacui, Celati embraces voids: silences, empty spaces, unemphatic, “vacuous” speech and scenes. Where seeing and being seen are allied to a concept of the self—be it author or consumer—as dominant and self-assertive subjectivity, Celati looks for the invisible, the shareable, and the disempowered, whether natural or human. In conclusion, let me briefly comment on the ethical as well as aesthetic implications of this poetics. In doing so, I hope to begin to counter some views of ontological postmodernist thought that see “weakened” approaches to being and creating such as Celati’s as irresponsible, and bereft of ethical or political force. We find the most detailed discussion of Celati’s own views on silence, invisibility, and corporeal eloquence in his introduction to his translation of Melville’s story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In fact, I believe that the reticent Bartleby is a character of emblematic significance for all of Celati’s work from the late sixties to today, subsuming in his simultaneously tragic and comic presence aspects to be found in the earliest narratives as well as in the more recent stories and film work. Celati spoke to me of wanting to translate the story when I first met him in the late seventies; he continued to meditate on it over the years, referring to it from time to time in many different contexts. Bartleby, called “unassailably mild-mannered” in the first lines of the introduction, occasions a story told by the Wall Street lawyer narrator that is, in relation to the world of high finance in which it takes place, “so expendable that he struggles to encapsulate it somehow, except perhaps (he can succeed) with the image of grass growing between the stones of the Manhattan prison that in the end the lawyer recognizes as if it were emblematic of the type of life he has recounted” (1991c, vii). Everything about Bartleby is, like grass growing between rocks, scarcely noticeable, until one

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day he simply refuses to do or say anything, responding to every request with one phrase: “I would prefer not to” (“Avrei preferenza di no”). Celati discusses the social inappropriateness of this phrase, by which Bartleby’s boss, the lawyer, is rendered powerless in the face of an expression both “affected” and “austere,” mildly and mechanically repeated so as to close off any further discussion. When pressed, Bartleby retreats into complete silence. The lawyer cannot divine his employee’s intentions, and so must be frustrated in every attempt to interpret the meaning of the phrase. His expectations of interpretability are utterly upset; Celati concludes: Bartleby “upends the idea that it is ever possible really to understand others by way of dialogue and rational accords” (1991c, viii). Silence—or Bartleby’s automatically repeated phrase, which equals the impasse of silence—thus goes counter to interpretive strategies of the most basic sort: you say something; I respond according to my understanding; we agree to agree on what was meant by each; and so on. The social pact of mutual accord to reach meaning is broken, and the lawyer—and all readers of the story—search for a toehold on this rough wall where we must scramble to pull ourselves up from the abyss of noninterpretability yawning below. If Bartleby represents the breakdown of interpretability, he is nonetheless very much there; his presence is undeniable, just as the presence of the phenomenal world is undeniable. What do we do with “thereness” when we cannot interpret its meaning or meanings? A different sort of response to the seen is needed, one that does not seek to assimilate, dominate, or specularize. In a 1985 interview with me, Celati spoke of this response as “being permeable” by the seen: “There’s been a big debate in left wing politics about the fact that people are crushed, alienated, and losing their identity. But I would rather upend this and see it from a positive angle. Everything that happens is only an infinite recurrence; thus we need to be open, permeable.” Celati characterizes the lawyer as “driven by the delirium of intentions,” while Bartleby “is a creature of preferences because his way of being relies on an inertia on which the game of intentions has no grip” (1991c, xii). We cannot understand him by means of traditional interpretive schema; we can only believe in him, “believe in his figure, in the way you believe in an idea or feeling” (x). Celati finds his passive self-sufficiency, far from the game of intentions and mutual interpretations, inverosimile (improbable) in that it is the extreme exception to the rule of social and linguistic interaction. But it is “an extraordinary improbability . . . if it is able to bring back the question of understanding to that of believing” (x). Believing here is seen as depending on preferenze (preferences), which Celati defines in its etymological sense as a richiamo prioritario (primary or given attraction), a pre-disposition given to us by our individual way of being. He explains: “trust in one’s own preferences is a state of devotion similar to that of the saints—devotion to the limits in which all people find themselves: the anomaly of living as individu-

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als, in the separateness of our own bodies, with faces that we haven’t chosen” (xii). Bartleby’s “inertial manner of being” clashes with the lawyer’s reliance on “the ways of coexistence on which people base their accords,” producing a comic effect emerging out of “incommensurable distance” that separates the two (xii). Celati remarks that this is true of almost all classically comic characters who remain true to their elementary destiny, which is called the anteriorità assoluta (absolute anteriority) of individual being which we all have. The implication of this view for Celati’s own art, especially the visual medium of film, is that we need to let being be, let the existent world exist with an attitude of respect and belief rather than one of domination or identification with our own particular being. Just as faith is belief in things unseen, Celati’s perspective solicits our response to what must remain uninterpretable and invisible, although not for that less a part of being: the silent, inherent unknowability of both our own given beings and of the external world. Only then will we be able to see and be seen without pretenses to exceptionality or uniqueness (since everything is “exceptional” and “unique”), and only then might the external world and the internal psyche attain some measure of peaceful and positive cohabitation. The external world, like us, is embodied in materiality, and we living humans share in what Celati calls “the absolute condition of present things” (1991c, xvi). The best we can ever do with things, places, and people is to recognize what Melville named the “unconditional democracy of all things” and what Celati explores in his writings and film as the stato di potenza (inherent strength) of silent things. In the last words of the introduction to “Bartleby,” Celati writes: “The strength resides in that which is kept in reserve, in the reserve that keeps in suspension the forces and expansive gestures or movements of the self” (1991c, xxvi). Learning to respond to the external appearances of things and places with full respect for their separate beingness—not to speak of other people—means shedding expectations of systematizable “meanings” and ultimately clarifying revelations. This is not indifference, this is not irresponsibility; this, I think, is attuning ourselves to literal con-viviality. For if being is truly recognized as democratic—everything and everyone equally are—then violent preemption and dominance of things and others will perhaps diminish. Celati’s silent movie about nothing, with its refusal of a masterful mentality, its “caress to the world” in shots of the external made with a respectful gaze, and its implicit valorization of being, is, I think, a small contribution to the creation of another way of looking, both for the creator and for the audience. Like his recent writing, the film quietly posits modes of seeing and being that have philosophical and ethical resonances far beyond the dominant aestheticizing and documentarizing tendencies of so many of the contemporary literary and media-orchestrated representations of experience to which we are more accustomed.

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NOTES 1. A version of this essay first appeared in Romance Languages Annual (1992) 4.1: 367–74. 2. See my “Lo spazio nei Narratori delle pianure” for a discussion of the role of space in the collection. 3. Art critic, writer, and screenwriter John Berger (1984) refers to Mircea Eliade’s work on the ontology of the concept of “home” as “the place from which the world could be founded.” Berger continues: “Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one.” Verticality established ties with the gods above and the dead below, while horizontality represented the “traffic of the world . . . thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and the dead in the underworld . . . and at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys” (56). Something of this founding, spiritual nature of “home” is captured in Ghirri’s photographs. 4. Celati’s essay, “Finzioni a cui credere,” is also based in great part on a consideration of Ghirri’s art. 5. Celati creates a “new way of hearing” as well as of seeing. The soundtrack is an integral part of the film’s effect, as is true of the majority of films. The difference here is that the sounds of the human voice are as much a part of that effect as is music or natural sounds. Visual punctuation of the role of sound is provided in the figure of a soundman in the film who walks about with a large boom microphone, more often than not listening to rustling grass or other “unimportant” sounds rather than honing in on conversations. In fact, conversations are often muddled or cut off short, and there are moments when all sound is entirely cancelled.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AA. VV. “Scritture contemporanee: Gianni Celati.” Nuova Corrente 97 (1986). Barbolini, Roberto. 1992. “Ma Celati sta in riserva.” Panorama, July 5: 97. Barile, Laura. 1992. “Un ostinato inseguimento: linguaggio e immagine in Calvino, Celati, Perec, e l’ultimo Beckett.” Forum Italicum 26.1: 188–200. Baudelaire, Charles. (1861) 1917. Les fleurs du mal. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles Parisiens. Berger, John. 1984. And our faces. my heart, brief as photos. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1991. Keeping a Rendezvous. New York: Pantheon Books. Bizzarri, Giulio, ed. 1986. Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio. Milan: Feltrinelli. Calvino, Italo. 1986. “Ipotesi di descrizione di un paesaggio.” In Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Scritture nel paesaggio, edited by Giulio Bizzarri, 11–12. Milan: Feltrinelli. Celati, Gianni. 1975. “II bazar archeologico.” Finzioni occidentali: Fabulazione, comicità e scrittura, 195–227. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 1984a. “Finzioni a cui credere.” Alfabeta 67: 13. ———. 1984b. “Verso la foce: reportage, per un amico fotografo.” In Viaggio in Italia. Ed. Luigi Ghirri, et. al. 20–35. Alessandria: Il Quadrante. ———. 1985a. Narratori delle pianure. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1985b. Voices from the Plains. Trans. Robert Lumley. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 1987. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1989a. “Commenti su un teatro naturale delle immagini.” In Il profilo delle nuvole, by Luigi Ghirri. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1989b. Parlamenti buffi. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1989c. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———. 1991a. Appearances. Trans. Stuart Hood. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. (1991b) 2011. Strada provinciale delle anime. In Cinema all’aperto: Tre documentari e un libro. Rome: Fandango. DVD. ———, ed. and trans. 1991c. Bartleby Lo Scrivano, by Herman Melville. Milan: Feltrinelli. ———, ed. 1992. Narratori delle riserve. Milan: Feltrinelli.

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Chatwin, Bruce. 1989. What Am I Doing Here? New York: Penguin Books. Dalle Vacche, Angela. 1992. The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davenport. Guy. 1991. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press. Ermanno, Cavazzoni, and Eleonora Bronzoni, eds. 1986. Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia: Vedute nel paesaggio. Milan: Feltrinelli. Ghirri, Luigi. 1985. “Una carezza al mondo.” Panorama, June 39: 24–25. Harbison, Robert. 1977. Eccentric Spaces. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Leopardi, Giacomo. (1835) 1967. Canti. Ed. John Humphrey Whitfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Teatini, Manuela (interviewer). 1991. “Il sentimento della spazio: conversazione con Gianni Celati.” Cinema e cinema 62 (Sept/Dec): 25–28. Valesio Paolo. 1986. Ascoltare il silenzio: la retorica come teoria. Bologna: II Mulino. West, Rebecca. 1985. Personal taped interview with Gianni Celati (unpublished). October. ———. 1986. “Lo spazio nei Narratori delle pianure.” Nuova Corrente 97: 65–74.

Chapter Four

The Posthuman Imagination of Gianni Celati’s Cinema Matteo Gilebbi

It is a noisy night on the banks of the Po River just outside the town of Gualtieri. The soundscape is filled by the calls of crickets and cicadas. The hooting of an owl rhythmically emerges from the darkness of a grove, interrupted only once by the sound of the flapping wings of another nocturnal bird that leaves the river bank, unseen. The sound of a strong wind ties these noises together, carrying them toward a bed sheet hanging from a rope suspended between two trees. The sheet waves in the wind. On its rippled surface, photos by Luigi Ghirri, Gianni Celati’s friend, collaborator, and inspirer, are projected. Ghirri died six years before. If you blink, you might miss the silhouette projected onto the sheet of a man passing through, like a sudden eclipse. Maybe it was a ghost. This is the scene that concludes the 1999 Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri (The World of Luigi Ghirri) dedicated to the study and celebration of Ghirri’s work, Gianni Celati’s second documentary (or video project, or video essay, or experimental film—Celati’s films are hard to define 1). The scene demonstrates how Celati’s filmic imagination frames an environment that seamlessly encloses the river bank, the animals, the trees, the darkness, the weather, and human presence, indicated by the apparition of various objects (e.g., the blanket, the photos, the shadow). These elements, together, create a single environment, with no indication of human preeminence over the other elements present inside the frame. There is no human/nature dichotomy, but a continuous superimposition of living beings and material objects that share the same domain and the same ontological condition. Celati films a scene where—using the words of posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013)—“the binary opposition between the given and the constructed is 117

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currently being replaced by a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction” (2–3). An anthropocentric imagination—a way of seeing that is especially pervasive in films portraying the natural world out there with documentary intent—maintains a chasm between natural and artificial entities. Conversely, in the final scene of Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri—and in all of Celati’s films—this anthropocentric way of looking shifts toward an ecocentric perspective, a filmic imagination that conceives the eco in its etymological sense, that is as the oikos shared by all animate and seemingly inanimate beings. Celati’s films can be better understood when, in addition to this ecocentric—and posthuman—thought, we also consider the influence of Luigi Ghirri’s art. As pointed out by Rebecca West (2000), “Ghirri’s photographic poetics and practice were deeply influential, and stimulated much writing by Celati, both essayistic and creative” (95). Here I will consider how Ghirri’s photography, and in particular his way of using photography to study, as Celati himself explains it, “the form of things, . . . how things want to be seen,” had a significant impact on Celati’s films. 2 This way of seeing and portraying objects as they wish to be seen expresses in fact a form of objectoriented imagination and ontology that pervades Celati’s visual texts. Following Cary Wolfe and Ian Bogost, I consider object-oriented ontology a form of posthumanism, namely a philosophical endeavor that, like posthumanism, aims to reconfigure our understanding of the human condition by making it more uncertain, unstable, elusive, peripheral, and queer. Objectoriented ontology does this by asking the uncomfortable but fascinating question that Celati insinuates at the very beginning of Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, “How do objects wish to be seen?” and other pivotal questions such as “How do objects exist in relation to each other?”; “How do objects express their agency?”; “How does the human object interact with other objects?”; “How do objects make a difference in something’s or someone’s existence”; and “Does differentiating between subjects and objects make any sense?” 3 I hope it is clear that this kind of ontology shares one of the main goals of posthumanism, which is “to anthrodecenter” and “to travel through planes of reality” (Caffo and Marchesini 2014, 21–22). Clearly, in order to decenter our anthropological position and to embark on this journey through the realities of other-than-human-worlds inhabited by non-human objects and nonhuman animals, we are required to develop quite an altered and alternative imagination. This imagination is precisely one of the most fascinating and unsettling characteristics of Celati’s cinema. It is his posthuman imagination. In his first film, the 1991 Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of Souls), Celati travels with a group of friends back to the same areas around the Po River Delta he previously explored and described in his 1989 book Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth). The opening scenes immediately attest to Celati’s posthuman imagination and object-oriented cinematogra-

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phy. The screen is black; off-screen, several voices speak an Emilian dialect. Celati cuts to a landscape typical of the Po Delta: a line of recently built houses slashing through a green country field. The voices speaking dialect are still there, still off-screen. Cut again: this time to an interior, of a typical small-town Italian bar. Celati’s editing (two J cuts, in which the audio from a following scene overlaps the picture from the preceding scene) suggests that the voices heard since the beginning come from here: two old men are speaking in a corner, but their movements don’t seem to match the voices we hear. This sequence lasts around nine seconds and is composed of two shots and two cuts: from black screen to the countryside exterior, and from the countryside to the bar interior. The black screen is not really a shot: it is more like empty space, a nothingness that the voices begin to fill, followed by the images. And those asynchronous voices tie these images together; they connect the emptiness at the start to the landscape, and then to the interior that follows. These human voices maintain flow despite the cuts, despite the apparent separation between the realms of nowhere, the outside, and the inside. They hint at an undifferentiated environment, smooth, with no edges, no gaps, and no center. The audio lead cuts don’t transport us between different worlds; instead, they guide us through the collected images of a whole and coherent microcosm. In addition, in these shots, Celati’s camera does not move. He is not looking for something; it has been found, without searching. As pointed out by Marco Belpoliti (2011) “Celati’s cinema is made of static images, snapshots that last for a long time, photos that become animated in the moment when the eye that observes the scene tries, through a spatial progression, to put the things it is looking at into focus” (50). Through this static camera, Celati expresses his object-oriented cinematography and is able to represent things as they appear to an “anthrodecentered” eye. Celati is interested in the world that is just there, present in its seeming ontological simplicity, in its state of existence that is worth filming just because it exists. This is another lesson learned from Luigi Ghirri, from his “avoidance of exceptional objects of the gaze or exceptional effects imposed upon objects in order to render them ‘interesting’” (West 2000, 98). Inside this world, the camera mounted on a tripod is pointed at objects that are neither extraordinary nor ordinary, like glasses and bottles in Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes; they are just things that wish to be seen in a certain way, through a posthuman gaze oriented to the ontological status of the objects. Some of these objects are called houses, some green fields, some human voices, and some are called elderly people in a small town bar. Humans are simply things in a world that “is embodied in materiality, and we living humans share in what Celati might call the absolute condition of presence” (West 2000, 137). Therefore, this material world does not belong to us nor is it defined by us. As pointed out by Stacy Alaimo (2016), the dominant representations of the anthropological condition “ab-

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stract the human from the material realm”; instead, the posthuman perspective that propels Celati’s films presents humans as objects that are “immersed and enmeshed in the world” (157). The non-hierarchical unity of this world that is the foundation for the posthuman decentering of the anthropos is also discussed in Matteo Bellizzi’s (2008) analysis of Strada provinciale delle anime. In particular, he explains that the word “souls” (anime) in the title of the film refers to Celati’s “interpretation of the soul as, primarily, anima mundi, that is as a reminder that we belong to a single horizon that encloses humans and their ilk, plants and the other animals” (Bellizzi 2008, 247–48). It is important to note that Celati’s imagination would not be fully posthuman if he used this perspective as a way to separate and raise himself above the anima mundi, as if developing an awareness of the posthuman condition and the ability to represent it allowed him a privileged vantage point on the world represented in his films. This kind of self-aggrandizing state-of-mind would have instead demonstrated a quintessential anthropocentric behavior. Instead, as noted by Rebecca West (2000), Celati presents a “permeable subjectivity . . . open to the difference of other subjectivities” accompanied by the “refusal of a masterful mentality” (137). Celati’s thorough posthumanism is also confirmed by his way of making himself, the film crew, and the recording devices internal and inherent elements of his films. This is not done with metacinematic intent, but to emphasize that everyone and everything is an object in a world and in its representation, that an extrinsic viewpoint is illusory, and that internal/external, maker/made, subject/object are spurious dichotomies. In Strada provinciale delle anime, for example, sound technician Stefano Barnaba is often kept in the frame, or even becomes the protagonist of the shot, such as when the camera follows him scouting derelict buildings in the small town of Comacchio. In the 2002 Case sparse—Visioni di case che crollano (Scattered Houses—Visions of Collapsing Houses), art critic and writer John Berger is filmed giving a synopsis of the film while asking the crew information about the birds flying over the river in front of him. Camera operators Lamberto Borsetti and Paolo Mura are introduced at the very beginning of Celati’s most recent film, Diol Kadd (2010), filmed together with Celati in a moment of joy and relaxation at the conclusion of the filming process. In another scene of Diol Kadd, we hear the voice of camera operator Lamberto Borsetti thanking a young Senegalese woman who allowed him to film her extemporaneous dancing performance. All Celati’s films are filled with these moments where the separation between who/what films and who/what is filmed fades. Many times cameras, tripods, microphones, film crew members, dialogues between executive producers, and screenplay notebooks become organic elements in a shot. These brief but ubiquitous scenes intentionally establish that Celati’s films are part of the same world they investigate, that the human gaze that believed to be external and in control of what it saw and represented now is

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simply another object inside the frame, revealing the illusory nature of the position of privilege and dominance of the human point of view. Celati’s filming is therefore ecocentric also because it emphasizes how, inside the shared environment that humans observe, register, and study through the camera it is not possible to reach a privileged observation point that allows a full understanding of the ecosphere. As explained by Celati, the “encounter” with the environment filmed is the “opening toward what you don’t know. And what is at stake during the filming are the limits of what can be represented. Because everything run away, everything was apparitions of something I did not know, or I could not understand well” (Grosoli 2011, 13). The observational point of Celati’s camera reveals a fragmented human knowledge that is inherently internal to nature and unable to master it. This ecocentric filming results in the convergence of the operator, the camera, and the environment filmed, in an undoing of the traditional anthropocentric perspective, until the images attempt to engage in some way with all that exists behind, inside, and in front of the lens in its ontological unity (in Spinoza’s terms). Celati’s ecocinema, in fact, echoes Bruno Latour’s definition of this ontological unity, notably in Latour’s explanation that the divide between man and nature has the shape of a Moebius strip, meaning it has only one face and one border (Latour 2017, 120). Again, engaging with what is usually hidden behind the camera is not a metacinematic practice, nor is it an inward reflection of cinema on itself. Quite the contrary. This is a cinema that expands outward, a cinema that acknowledges its existence in a broad material ecosystem, and a cinema that in doing so reinforces an ecophilosophical concept already expressed. By presenting itself as one of the many elements that together constitute an environment, Celati’s cinema stresses the notion of the world as an ontologically uniform continuum—a world finally devoid of the human subject as its center of gravity and meaning, such as when Celati writes, in the diaries that recount the development of his film Diol Kadd, of his filming “going forward blindly,” without having anything to say and by “letting things happen” in front of the camera (Celati 2011, 97). In Celati’s films we can therefore witness a world populated by infinite centers where human exceptionalism reveals itself as a chimera, a false paradigm, a misconstrued ontological framework. Considering ourselves special beings appears to be just one of many ideologies. These infinite centers, with no order nor hierarchy, but only interrelations, are the protagonists of all Celati’s films. In Case sparse these protagonists are the crumbling abandoned farm houses that can be still spotted along the Po Valley, objects that Celati does not want to present as “melancholic relics of the past, but as one of the most surprising aspects of a modern landscape” (Hill 2008, 61). These derelict houses are some of the few testimonies left of Italian rural communities and their culture, before being swept away by the industrial farming practices of neocapitalism. These crumbling houses, as

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explained by Celati, are filmed with the intent of “reactivating the simple perception of things less noticed, the capacity of looking at the external world as it is” (Hill 2018, 61), meaning that the film aims to stimulate an ecological imagination by helping us put aside our anthropocentric superstructures and focus only on how these objects exist as objects. In Case sparse Celati aspires to film the abandoned houses as they are (object-oriented imagination), not as they are for us (human-oriented imagination). Therefore, the fact that these buildings are abandoned carries also a metaphorical meaning: just as humans physically left these places, so we must deprive these places of our superimposed anthropocentric way of looking at them and interpreting their status. This is made clear when Celati and his crew enter the houses; they do not discuss how to save, restore, or repurpose these buildings for the needs of contemporary society. That would transform these objects into simple commodities that exist only to serve human needs. The human would take center stage again. Instead, Celati and his collaborators envision the future of these buildings as something that the buildings themselves will transform into, organically, without human intervention and without a human goal. They could become aviaries, explains John Berger in the film, or “a museum for insects, and particularly for moths and butterflies.” These crumbling houses exist as integral elements of their environment and evolve together with it; therefore, these objects possess their own agency, organically connected to the world they are embedded in. This is the key aspect that Case sparse documents and that makes it a posthuman film. Celati’s approach in filming these houses as they are and as they might become allows us to consider them through an object-oriented ontology. The infinite centers and protagonists of Diol Kadd are the inhabitants of the eponymous village in Senegal and their environment, filmed in their daily life. Celati became familiar with this small village of the west African savanna after meeting Mandiaye N’diaye, an actor who had emigrated from Diol Kadd to Ravenna. Together with N’diaye, Celati developed the project of rewriting Aristophanes’s Plutus, adapting it to the Senegalese culture, and performing it in the village of Diol Kadd. The film was supposed to record the development of the project, the rehearsals, and the final staging of the play, all filmed in a few months. Instead, it became a very different enterprise; it became a film about the life of humans, animals, and objects in the Diol Kadd area, and took seven years to complete. As Celati recounts in the diaries he kept about the project, the original plan “did not leave the paper, and only in a few cases the staging of the play could be used in the final cut.” Instead he realized that other things had to be recorded, things “to which nobody pays attention: each hour of the day, from the early morning to the lights of the evening . . . the coming and going of the people, their greetings to each other, the repetitive actions, all these things that are nothing special” (Celati 2011, 29). The village could not simply be filmed in the way Celati

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wanted to originally portray it. He again realized that things want to be seen and filmed in a certain way, their way, and therefore those people and their world had their own agency regarding their representation, and the filmmaker needed to conform to it. Diol Kadd, then, is the representation of this small sub-Saharan village in the way it wished to be seen through what West (2000) refers to as Celati’s “respectful gaze” (137). People, cattle, insects, ancient myths, traditional but now forbidden dances, local musical instruments, the flora of the savanna, the Wolof language spoken by the villagers, the colorful clothes worn by the women: everything disrupted Celati’s original plan of filming an adaptation of Aristophanes’s Plutus and compelled him to develop an object-oriented filmic imagination and to produce another film permeated by posthuman awareness. In fact, when asked about the reality a documentary can or cannot display, Celati compares this reality to “a region of the subconscious, . . . something that is anonymous and collective, external and contingent, something that cannot be controlled or implied” (Hill 2008, 56). This is exemplified in the sequence focused on the arrival of the monsoon season. The sequence begins with Celati’s voice, added in post-production, narrating what happened during the filming and providing translations of the Wolof language spoken by the villagers. His calm monotone simply describes the scenes. The camera is pointed to the horizon, where the sun is setting. It then cuts to the night sky, while Celati explains that the wagoner who is accompanying the film crew has spotted a light in the sky that announces the beginning of the rainy season. Cut to the day after. Long shot: fixed camera showing the landscape of the savanna. While Celati continues to describe what he experienced and what we now see on-screen, fast dark clouds traverse the frame. Prominent in the scene are many tall trees. As the speed of the wind increases, some trees start to rock in the foreground of the approaching storm. Cut to another long shot: this time, small human figures appear, running from the impending rain. The camera is still, anchored to the ground. The villagers are growing in number, all running, moving closer to the camera. Suddenly we hear the voice of one of the cameramen: “We are going to get drenched. We have to leave, fast! It has already started raining.” Cut again. After some shots of the night sky illuminated by lightning, the sequence ends with several scenes of the villagers dancing to the music of a disc jockey. On the ground, between the dancing feet of the people, frogs hop around. The air is filled with thousands of insects, relentlessly attacking the sparse neon lights. A moth and an ant sit for a moment on the lens of the camera. Somebody behind the camera is trying to keep them in focus. But they are too close. This long sequence shows that Celati is no longer interested in working with a plan but that he embraces an open-ended approach attuned to the rhythms of the savanna and always ready to accept chance and randomness.

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The contingency of an uncontrollable environment becomes the protagonist of the sequence. Here, Celati switches, more than in other parts of the film, from the way he wants to present the world to the way the world randomly presents itself to him. Instead of forcing his representation and understanding of Diol Kadd inside the shot, instead of molding the vision of this subSaharan landscape by selecting only the images that fit his idea of it, Celati lets this microcosm speak for itself. He is there simply to record it and edit the footage in a way that may become intelligible for himself and the audience, while maintaining the unpredictability of its existence (Hill 2008, 59). The other crucial element of this sequence, an element unconditionally integrated by Celati’s posthuman imagination, is the panismo, that is, the outright unity between the natural world and the human realm, or, perhaps more accurately, the sealing of the fabricated gap between nature and culture. This element, mentioned above in my analysis of Strada provinciale delle anime and Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, becomes particularly explicit here. Under the dark cloudy sky that presages the heavy rain to come, trees, animals, villagers, and cameramen are moving increasingly closer to one another. Together, inside the same shot, these apparently different beings share the same condition, all of them at the mercy of the wind and the incoming storm. The separation between the cultural and the natural is feeble if it fades away at the first drop of rain. In an interview with Sarah Hill, Celati mentions how he was struck by this effect of the rain while watching Joris Ivens’ 1929 experimental film Rain, where humans and objects filmed in Amsterdam during a storm present themselves “in a contingency that made them exemplary images of being in the world,” and the rain falling on everyone and everything made Celati reflect on the “feeling of existing in the world together with the people passing by, the cars, the cats that peek out at the water” (Hill 2008, 57). This same panismo is explicit at the end of the monsoon sequence in Diol Kadd, during the dancing festivities attended by people, insects, and frogs. Here, Celati clearly aims to record a celebration of the unity of all beings: humans and animals together, revitalized by the rain, all sharing the same life cycle that is dependent on the presence of water. Water actually displays how humans and animals belong to the same ecosystem and how they now, through this burst of life that wards off death, interact with it in the same way. Rebecca West, in her analysis of Strada provinciale delle anime inspired by Celati’s preface to Verso la foce, highlights that his understanding of this communal interaction with the world is also the result of a reflection on the shared participation of all beings in the experience of death: she explains that when Celati writes that “every intense observation of the external world will perhaps bring us closer to our own death” he actually emphasizes that humans are “better able to live in a world that is not oppositionally hostile, but rather companionably caducous” (2000, 128). The observation and representation of this shared cycle of life and death present in Diol

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Kadd decisively highlights the inter-species companionship witnessed by Celati and reinforces his rejection of the human-animal-world separation. Even the camera is unable to escape the pulling force of this nature-culture singularity: as mentioned, the monsoon sequence closes with a moth and an ant crawling over the lens with the cameramen struggling to put them into focus, as they are too close to the aperture. The camera itself is, again, one of the many elements of the environment, struggling to catch a clear image of these insects, just as humans often struggle to find kinship with the ecosystem to which they belong. Celati’s films exist also to remind us that if this kinship can be imagined and represented, it might also be made real. This brings up an ethical position of posthumanism strongly present in Celati’s films. In fact, these works can be defined by what Donna Haraway (2016) calls “speculative fabulation,” a form of “multispecies storytelling” and “practices of companions” that emerge from “stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (10). In other words, by decentralizing the human subject and reorienting it toward the agency of objects (things, animals, humans, ideas, places), Celati tells stories and represents worlds where an inescapable kinship between different realms triggers a renewed solidarity between all beings. In his films we are not simply different things sharing the same oikos, we are companion things. This solidarity between companion things is the ethical guidance of the posthuman subject. A pansolidarity with fellow humans, fellow animals, fellow objects, fellow environments, fellow places, fellow worlds. Strada provinciale delle anime and Case sparse inspire solidarity with those landscapes and those cultures negatively impacted by neocapitalism and emigration; in Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, we find affinity with a mourning community, we are invited to join the legacy of a visionary photographer, and we find kinship with the cultural and natural environment of a river valley; Diol Kadd reveals a seemingly alien and distant community to be distinctly familiar, resembling a world that many of us used to inhabit some decades ago, a world where people had a more harmonious relationship with the land and with the passing of time. By looking at the world from an ecological and object-oriented perspective, Celati’s films trigger a posthuman ontological and ethical awareness. In Case sparse, John Berger says that “we don’t really know exactly what to think and, somehow, we sense that we need new concepts, new ways of thinking, to match, somehow, what we are perceiving.” By making films where images are no longer domesticated by an anthropocentric perspective, or better yet, where images have been undomesticated by a posthuman imagination, Gianni Celati offers us the visual language to develop and express these new concepts: above all, he gives us new ways of thinking and behaving in an always fascinating and often uneasy more-than-human-world.

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NOTES 1. Rebecca West, referring to an interview with Celati, calls Strada provinciale delle anime a “video-story” and a “pseudo-documentary” (West 2000, 89, 124, 128). Antonio Costa writes that “Gianni Celati’s cinema is a kind of back-stage of his books” and therefore represents an addendum to Celati’s travels. For this reason, Costa likes to define these films as “cinema of the plains” (Costa 2008, 211). Gianni Canova describes Case sparse as “an attempt to figurative philosophy” (“un tentativo di pensiero figurale”; Celati 2011, 58), a definition that I find applicable to all Celati’s films. 2. “Tutte le foto di Ghirri sono studi sulle forme delle cose, cioè come le cose vogliono essere viste.” (Celati 1999). 3. These questions are inspired by Harman 2011, Bryant 2011, Bogost 2012, and Morton 2014.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed. Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bellizzi, Matteo. 2008. “Parole con vista. Su due film di Gianni Celati.” In Gianni Celati, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 243–54. Milan: Marcos y Marcos. Belpoliti, Marco. 2011. “Celati, cinema-filosofia lungo la valle del Po.” In Documentari imprevedibili come i sogni. Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 49–54. Rome: Fandango Libri. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien phenomenology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bryant, Levi. 2011. The democracy of objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Caffo, Leonardo, and Roberto Marchesini. 2014. Così parlò il postumano. Aprilia: Novalogos. Celati, Gianni. (1991) 2011. Strada provinciale delle anime. In Cinema all’aperto: Tre documentari e un libro. Rome: Fandango. DVD. ———. (1999) 2011. Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri. In Cinema all'aperto: Tre documentari e un libro. Rome: Fandango. DVD. ———. (2002) 2011. Visioni di case che crollano (Case sparse). In Cinema all'aperto: Tre documentari e un libro. Rome: Fandango. DVD. ———. (2010) 2011. Diol Kadd. Vita, diari e riprese di un viaggio in Senegal. DVD. In Passar la vita a Diol Kadd. Milan: Feltrinelli. DVD. Costa, Antonio. 2008. “Cinema delle pianure: Case sparse di Gianni Celati.” In Gianni Celati, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 211–14. Milan: Marcos y Marcos. Grosoli, Fabrizio. 2011. “Il disponibile quotidiano. Gianni Celati risponde a Fabrizio Grosoli.” In Documentari imprevedibili come i sogni. Il cinema di Gianni Celati, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, 7–16. Rome: Fandango Libri. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harman, Graham. 2011. The quadruple object. Alresford: John Hunt Publishing. Hill, Sarah. 2008. “Documentari imprevedibili come i sogni.” In Gianni Celati, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi, 55–62. Milan: Marcos y Marcos. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. CambridgeMedford: Polity. Morton, Timothy. 2014. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati. The craft of everyday storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter Five

Restoring the Imagination of Place Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley Serenella Iovino

—For Ermanno Rea, in memoriam “It is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 1). 1 The speaker of these lines is a native writer, Gianni Celati, who was born in Sondrio, Lombardy, and grew up in Ferrara, near the river’s mouth. In such a rich and culturally specific bioregion, one in which territorial stances based on place identity led an autonomist party called the Northern League in the government coalition, a native feels like a stranger. Why might this be so? Maybe because a profound crisis, both cultural and ecological, is fatally affecting these places, a crisis stunningly visible in the landscape’s decline: once the heart of a fertile country and of potentially harmonious comingling of nature and urbanization, the Po River Valley is now one of Europe’s most polluted fluvial areas. How to respond to this crisis? The autonomist proposals have so far proven inadequate. They have, in fact, little to do with the protection of an endangered heritage, serving rather an ideology of territorialism, industrial development, local privilege, and xenophobia. But if a cultural survival strategy is required, bioregionalism might, in turn, become a valuable tool. Bioregional narratives, in particular, can be used as tools to “restore the imagination” of place, namely, to understand and to orient the evolutionary dynamics connected to the life of place, involving an open and more inclusive reflection on identity, history, and ecology.

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THE PO VALLEY: BIOREGION OR NECROREGION? The Po River Valley (Valle padana or Pianura padana) is a vast bioregion of the Italian territory: extending along 46,584 square miles, it covers nearly one-fourth of the country’s entire area. The Po (Latin: Padus) is the longest Italian river: from its sources on Mount Monviso (Cozie Alps), in Piedmont, to its six-fold mouth in the Adriatic Sea, it flows along 405 miles, crossing four of the major Italian regions: Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, and EmiliaRomagna. The Valley is densely populated (fifteen million inhabitants) and its human alteration can be dated back to the Cenozoic Era. The river’s course has been constantly modified by human activities. The mouth, in particular, has experienced large and continuous alterations, especially due to the massive deforestation in the inland zones. Some areas have been declared protected with the institution of the Po Fluvial Park (35,689 hectares). 2 Since the early 1990s, the Po Valley and Northern Italy in general are often referred to as “Padania,” a polemic denomination introduced by the Northern League against the centralized state. The ecology of the Po and its valley is, like many other Italian bioregions, long and deeply compromised. After decades of uncontrolled industrial development and urban sprawl, made recently even more serious by the criminal business of the so-called ecomafia, the Po Valley is slowly dying. 3 A dying region is literally at odds with the very idea of a bioregion. A detectable state of cultural and ecological abandon indicates that it would be more realistic to speak, here, of a necroregion. In a landscape of suburban countryside made of houses, industrial sites, electric power plants, and decommissioned nuclear reactors, the “stories” and “wisdom” of places seem on the verge of extinction. Once the familiar bond that connected people and their landscape has been worn out, a growing sense of alienation takes over. Gianni Celati describes this feeling of estrangement as a transitive state, affecting both the self and the land: It is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside. More than the polluted Po River, the sickened trees, the industrial stenches, the abandoned state of everything not connected to making a profit, and a method of construction devised for interchangeable residents with neither origin nor destination—more than all this, what is surprising is a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude. (Towards the River’s Mouth, 1)

The problem of the Po Valley, Celati suggests, is the material crisis of its landscape as a life place. A living landscape, with its built environment, is an attempt “to make place out of raw space” (Thayer 2003, 103). A place is a space where one can imagine living, a home to which values, in ethical and aesthetic terms, are attached. What happened to the Po Valley is exactly the reverse. From a place, this country has been turned back to a mere space—a

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space for real estate, for intensive farming and agriculture, for energy production, for industrial development: a space for “growth.” In the Po Valley space has become more valuable than place. If sense of place is lost, it is because this place—in Celati’s picture a depressed countryside disguised as urban outskirts—makes no sense anymore. ET IN PADANIA EGO; OR, HOW I BECAME A NATIVE I am not a native of this place. I saw the Po for the first time some twenty years ago, following a native, Maurizio, who subsequently became my husband. We spent four years wandering across Italy and Germany, naively believing that philosophy students should feel at home where good libraries are. In 2000, Maurizio got his professorship at Turin University. One year later, I obtained mine. We moved here, deciding to settle down in Savigliano, a little baroque town, deep in Padania’s productive countryside. It was not easy for me to get used to this place. Not easy, as a person accustomed to feel the Mediterranean wind mounting on a calm, maternal sea which nobody would ever call “the ocean.” And not easy, as a southern Italian, to be transplanted into a land where, for decades, southerners have been seen as inconvenient strangers, up to the point that when, in the early 1990s, a protest party arose, it chose to name itself the Northern League. But, little by little, I started to appreciate this country. I started to value these agricultural plains, the wetlands where Thomas Jefferson once came to buy rice, which in the spring are home to herons and cranes; these precious vineyards that novelist Cesare Pavese described as waves crossing the hills; the precarious terracotta belfries where storks nest. I learned to see this wounded landscape, with its polluted soils and waterways, its ambivalent residents, its ancient beauty replaced by ugly factories and anonymous condos. Little by little, this place was growing into me. It was rising in my imagination, and my imagination was out there. This place was making sense to me. My dawning awareness was reflected in my everyday life: in the small choices, such as the purchasing of food directly from the local farmers at the weekly market. 4 And in choices not so small, such as that to campaign against the decision of the town’s administration to “secure”—by means of reinforced concrete cages—the banks of the Maira river, a minor tributary of the Po, alleged to endanger the population in case of heavy rain. (To my sadness, and to the sadness of many fellow citizens, the campaign was a complete failure.) It was inevitable that living here would affect my work. In my early Padanian years, seconding a physiological metamorphosis, I was converting from German philosophy and literature to environmental ethics and ecocriti-

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cism. This made me particularly sensitive to the landscape of values and stories that intersected with the landscape of people and places. As I came to realize, values and stories were people and places, indeed. They were people and places declined over time, stories being an imaginary or real vision of the past, and values (both social and natural) being the condition to extend the present into a project of permanence or of sustainable transformation. My research and classes reflected this new awareness: understanding, interpreting, and teaching about place-based stories and values was becoming an instrument of social pedagogy, something that could be helpful to restore the imagination of this place. I did not know it clearly yet, but if to imagine a place is the first step to reinhabiting it, this was becoming my personal contribution to my new home. FROM PRACTICE TO THEORY: UNDERSTANDING A PLACE’S MIND Reading bioregional texts can be very useful to conceptualize this experience. Berg and Dasmann’s idea of reinhabitation, in particular, offers a very interesting theoretical framework. In fact, it reflects a situation’s critical condition, revealing at the same time the possible keys for a survival strategy: Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated, it involves becoming fully active in and with a place. (1977, 399)

As here outlined, reinhabitation is not only a mode of ecological restoration and planning, but—and primarily—an ethical-educational practice. In areas that have been “disrupted and injured,” like the Po Valley, reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place. Since we normally live in our places without a prior education to live-in-place, this task entails both awareness and commitment. For this reason, Berg and Dasmann aver that reinhabitation involves activities and behaviors based on the understanding of the “life of that place,” a life that results from the coevolution of society and natural environment. But here a further question occurs: What does it mean to understand the life of a place, and what are the “particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it”? As epistemologist Gregory Bateson main-

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tained, within and around the ecology of living forms an ecology of ideas, or of mind, exists, which strictly interacts with the former one. In this framework, mind is not synonymous with human self nor brain—it is in turn an ecological function, mirroring the concrete, ineludible interrelatedness between the self and the environment. To say that our ideas are “out there” means that they come from (and are part of) that complex circuit of information that constitutes the world. 5 American ecophenomenologist David Abram has lyrically expressed this thought: Mind . . . is very much like a medium in which we’re situated, and from which we are simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist. Everything we know or sense of ourselves is conditioned by this atmosphere. We are intimately acquainted with its character, ceaselessly transformed by its influence upon us and within us. . . . We are composed of this curious element, permeated by it, and hence can take no distance from it. (2010, 125–26)

If mind is a “medium”—a middle place where the inside and the outside meet—then there is nothing merely subjective in place imagination, and to imagine a place is never an abstract activity, nor a monological one. To imagine a place is always to imagine with a place, in the same way to dream of something is to dream with something, as philosopher Gaston Bachelard insisted. 6 Being that mind is the “subtle intelligence of a place” (Abram 2010, 139), place imagination is an ecology of mind. And each place, with its biospheric as well as its cultural elements, is “a unique state of mind” (133). 7 This has its practical repercussions. If a society becomes alienated from the land, it is because its imagination of the land has become disconnected from its natural referent, resulting in a worldless dimension and in potential self-destruction. In the perspective of the ecology of mind, this cultural and perceptual separation between self and nature is a form of schizophrenia and, more generally considered, it can be seen as the very root of the ecological crisis. In fact, given his conception of a healthy mind as a complex “survival unity” of environment and self, Bateson refers to the ecological crisis as a breakdown of the mind. 8 In the terms of our discourse, to understand the life of a place means to understand all the levels of this place’s ecology: the cultural as well as the biological. The ecological crisis of place is not limited therefore to its being “disrupted and injured” in its organic balances. It is a crisis that involves a place’s ecology of mind, namely, its imagination.

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AN ETHIC OF STORIES AND PLACES: NARRATIVE REINHABITATION Place imagination entails ethical and aesthetic values; it entails memory and identity. Being parts of this imagination, the stories of a place belong to this place’s ecology of mind; and as such they are part of the “survival unity” that includes ourselves and the world in which we live. What I call “narrative reinhabitation” is a cultural-educational practice that consists of restoring the ecological imagination of place by working with place-based stories. Visualizing the ecological connection of people and place through place-based stories is a way to remember a dismembered unity, to enliven our cultural and ecological potentialities—to reanimate the world. 9 A significant ethical dimension is here elicited. By conveying the imagination of the coevolution of environment and society in a specific place through its stories, narrative reinhabitation is a way to understand the life of that place in its multiple levels (above all, in terms of time, of space, of acting figures). Narrative reinhabitation stirs up awareness about values and responsibilities connected to the life-in-place (the “sense of the story”) and allows the envisioning of suitable strategies of change in the form of possible narrative “endings.” From an ethical perspective, the epilogue of a story is a task rather than an already accomplished reality. By telling a story, narrations not only confer a shape (namely, a sense) to the events that happen in a given context, making them understandable; they also creatively enable a project that takes on society and its values. In other words, by inspiring awareness, narrations can be a creative form of ethical responsibility, and the object of the story can be turned into a (moral and therefore political) project. 10 Narrative reinhabitation means to plan ways of learning to live-in-place using place-based stories as “moral instructions”: “[i]f value is implicit in our descriptions of the world and our place in it, then the narratives we construct will embody value and orient us” (Cheney 1989, 132). 11 A way to overcome the feeling of alienation described by Celati consists thus in retrieving the stories of places, but above all in imagining, through these stories, new “endings” for places and their inhabitants. The framework of such stories will be an open and nondeterministic vision of reality: namely, an ethical vision. This is the gist of an ethic of narration: to transform words into actions or—quoting French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1991)—to move “from text to action.” An ethic of narration, Ricoeur suggests, is based on the idea that “[t]he past must be reopened, and the unaccomplished, thwarted, even massacred potentialities rekindled” (221). And this is also the gist of reinhabitation as a dynamic process: to transform life-in-place from a fact into an act, into an “ecologically and socially sustainable” practice, whose players are multiple and ever evolving. In this process, we can truly “reopen the past,” reinventing ourselves as “native” and becoming “fully

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active in and with a place” (Berg and Dasmann 1977, 399). To tell stories of people and places is a way to reactivate their “unaccomplished potentialities,” and to restore ecological imagination as our fundamental “survival unity.” FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: REQUIREMENTS AND KEYWORDS A practice of narrative reinhabitation (for class teaching, or for a critical analysis) will start with selecting the stories. As regards the Po Valley, this is not an easy task: works on these lands are countless, in Italian literature and culture. Some have attained the status of classics, like Riccardo Bacchelli’s peasant epos The Mill on the Po (1938–40). 12 Nevertheless, in the framework of our project, I believe that stories should be privileged that suggest an “open vision” of this complex bioregion—“open,” in terms of critical perspectives, of acting figures, of values, of imagination. The most suitable narrative dimension is that of a genre that could be called an “anti-epos”: whereas the epos is a basically immobile representation, crystallized in an unchangeable destiny, our approach requires mobility, plasticity, “open-endedness.” This “being open” of the stories is here essential. In fact, it is the condition for both shaping the vision of place and involving a multiplicity of subjects within the narrative framework. On the social level, this means to redefine in evolutionary terms the concept of place identity, understanding it as a process (a “route”) rather than as an essence (a “root”), and therefore transforming it into an instrument of social inclusion that is decisively in contrast with the exclusionary rhetorics of place such as those upheld by autonomist parties. 13 On the environmental-ethical level, “being open” means to enlarge the scope of morally valuable subjects, highlighting the role of natural agency: landscape and nonhuman subjects have to be integrated in the narrative framework as essential components of the place’s “material imagination.” Awareness (about values and critical issues), projectuality (vision of the future), and empathy (as a mutually enhancing dialectic amid different subjects) are here the keywords. REINHABITING PADANIA: GIANNI CELATI AND ERMANNO REA I would like to provide two examples of narrative reinhabitation: Verso la foce (Toward the River’s Mouth, 1989) by Gianni Celati (b. 1936) and Il Po si racconta (The Po River tells its stories, 1990–1996), by Neapolitan Ermanno Rea 14 (1927–2016). Enthusiastically praised by literary critics and

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very appreciated by the educated audience, Celati and Rea are not bestselling authors. Nonetheless, framed into a discourse of bioregional narrative, their two works may have a strong educational impact and would be very interesting to teach together. In fact, although not overtly aimed at restoration, they share a sense of ecological and cultural loss, and suggest two complementary pathways of reinhabitation, equally “open” to an evolutionary view of the Po Valley’s life. Verso la foce and Il Po si racconta are diaries of a trip along the river’s banks. It is intriguing and fruitful to read a native vis-à-vis an “alien” (Rea 2004, 222), a postmodern writer whose style evokes Walter Benjamin’s “oral story teller” vis-à-vis a social novelist and journalist. These differences reverberate in their styles as well as in their traveling: Gianni Celati takes his journey downstream, partly driving and partly walking, sometimes silently accompanied by a photographer friend of his. Rea travels upstream, alone in his old Citroën, his camera always at hand. Their narrative perspectives are divergent, too. In order to record places and stories in an apparently vanishing landscape, Celati uses a phenomenological technique, in which the verbal and visual dimensions are unified. 15 He seems almost to wait for those places and stories to reveal themselves, in spite of the residents’ apparent aphasia. This gives a distinctly lyrical and antisubjective character to his prose, which truly appears “grounded in geography rather than in a linear essentialized self” (Cheney 1989, 126). On the other hand, Rea, a committed intellectual, adopts the approach of the environmental pragmatist. By shedding light on the concrete aspects of the river’s life, he stirs up in the reader a sense of urgency about the issues at stake with its decline. With his direct, journalistic style, he supplies an enormous amount of information about ecology, economy, and society. It is fascinating to compare the ways both authors portray the “transfiguration” of the river basin through its uses, above all those connected to energy production. The fact that both works were published shortly after Chernobyl’s disaster is not a minor detail here. By that time, four nuclear reactors were active in Italy (two of which are located in the Po Valley), but a referendum held in 1987 decreed their complete decommissioning by 1990. 16 Rea and Celati witness this situation, describing a landscape irremediably compromised by industrial exploitation. 17 Rea in particular links environmental abuse to a profound crisis of citizenship. A case in point is that of the numerous power stations that, even after the nuclear phase-out, are tied to the political hopelessness of the nearby communities: [The electric plants] rise from the green country like monstrous overlapping buildings, suburban lumps glued upon a mildly bucolic background. Still, . . . nobody protests. And to the visitor’s eye this is even more amazing because,

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the damage being unquestionable, if nobody complains, it means that the devil must have bought the soul of an entire community. (2004, 131) 18

In another stop, Rea points at a power plant inside a natural reservation in Lombardy, presenting it as a sign of the hypocrisy and incoherence typical of Italian environmental policies. 19 The same “toxic landscape” is depicted by Celati as surrounded by an illomened and spectral aura. In the sites of Italy’s early industrialization, abandoned factories appear like deserted shrines for the “place deities” of the “eras in which everything blackened” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 42). The heritage of those eras is, he suggests, overall disorientation. The narration echoes Celati’s own bewilderment: I climbed down the levee and gathered plants that must have survived from the era in which everything blackened. Prickly as a thistle, they have deformed leaves and are no longer bilaterally symmetrical: one side of the leaf is lanceolate and the other is runcinate. In the countryside, against the background of smokestacks and spireshaped burners, with the sky thick with vapors, a little flock of sheep has come to graze around those old cisterns. The shepherd, an old man in a yellow raincoat, is sitting on a metal pipe, listening to a transistor radio. (42)

As in Rea’s description, a reassuring bucolic landscape has here turned into Celati’s antipastoral version. 20 The dying places have almost become monstrous: necroregionalism has metamorphosed into terato-regionalism. But, while Rea highlights the social and political effects of this mutation, Celati prepares the “objective” groundwork to a place ethic rising from the places themselves, from their tangible agony. Regardless of human consideration and presence, places do have an intrinsic value and an independent life. Like their visions of landscape, Rea and Celati’s visions of people also act as perfect counterpoints to one another. Rea collects numerous “stories of men and women” (2004, 20), “of places, stones, landscapes, social and economic events, collective expectations, collective disenchantments” (11). Celati in turn experiences the Po Valley mostly as a land of silence. He is constantly confronted with the inhabitants’ estrangement from their places— places “where no one wants to live anymore, because ‘nothing happens’ there” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 33). A striking example is a man who, in spite of his fame as a “local expert,” declares to have “no interest whatsoever in places and landscapes,” having understood that “there is nothing to see, and that one place is worth any other” (9). This reflects a sense of deep cultural loss. Indeed, if folklore may remain, the ancient “river’s wisdom”— “knowledge of plants and trees, the land and water, ways to predict the weather and forms of local medicine” (62)—seems to have been repudiated by the old people, now nearly “ashamed” of their skills (62). Still, this dis-

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missive attitude reveals the inhabitants’ unease and ambivalence toward the fate of their land. At odds with the “local expert,” Celati introduces a very poetic figure: “the penitence hero,” an old man whose “penitence” (almost a symbolic fee for a collective responsibility), consists of cleaning up abandoned houses along the river. And the discomfort about the Po’s slow death is not only limited to solitary heroes. Pointing at the toxic dumping of power plants, a former water field official whom Celati meets while approaching the delta deprecates that “everybody treated the river as an inanimate object” (37). The consequence of this behavior is that the Po is “slowly going crazy and its movements had become incomprehensible” (37). The agony of the river is here the agony of a disappearing, age-old culture of interdependence between people and places. Nevertheless, it is from the encounter with these stories of both struggles and disorientation that Rea and Celati envision their strategies of reinhabitation. Coming from the “variously native” people he meets during his journey (many of them are immigrants), Rea’s stories mirror the multifaceted and compound identity of the Po plains and their inhabitants: an environmental and human richness endowed with enormous potentialities to preserve the “local” in a globalizing society. 21 This very richness leads him to see a partial territorial autonomy (both ecologically aware and culturally “permeable”) as the only viable solution. Reshaped as a new Italian macroregion, “Padania” could indeed evolve from a controversial political flag into an avant-garde example of sustainability: Padania . . . has to be created now: in order to grant protection and planning to our agricultural and food industry, but not only for that. Above all, in order to ensure protection to the river. . . . How could one deny that a regional institution denominated “Padania,” capable of taking the responsibilities related to the life, reclamation, health and even re-evaluation of the Po would be a fundamental progress . . . ? . . . [T]his—and only this—is the vision of Padania which fascinates us . . . : a complex of values, projects, and aspirations, that are worth a small institutional reform—one not intended to divide Italy, but to make it more cohesive. (Rea 2004, 219–22)

Explicitly responding to autonomist claims, Rea suggests that neither to turn this territory into an independent geopolitical entity, nor to secure its borders against potential immigrants would enhance its life. The true way to “free” Padania, we might paraphrase, is to reinhabit it. Namely, to develop within it “social behaviors” that could “enrich [its] life . . . , restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence” (Berg and Dasmann 1977, 399). This task is impossible, though, without appreciating the “stories of men and women,” of “places, stones, and landscapes,” being all equally involved in the life of the land. Without having Aldo Leopold in mind, Rea is formulating a cultural land ethic, one that

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expands the borders of citizenship and views the land as a shared place for action, memory (as a form of biocultural conservation), and social evolution. Probably without having heard a word about bioregionalism, Rea is envisioning a bioregional future for the Po Valley. The stories of Padanian people suggest to Rea a political blueprint. Correspondingly, it is the encounter with a river “slowly going crazy” (Towards the River’s Mouth, 37) that proves to Celati that a dying region can be reinhabited only by recovering its imagination. As Bateson would also say, the “insanity” of the river is a “crisis” in this place’s ecology of mind. The alienation experienced by Celati comes from the forcible separation within the “survival unity” of human mind and the mind of place. But, he observes, we have to comprehend that the human mind is the mind of place; and imagination represents both this unity, and its condition. Imagination is something that “inspires love for something out there” (53). Surprisingly resonating with Bateson’s ideas, Celati considers imagination “part of the landscape” (53). To restore imagination means to restore the intimate osmosis of inside and outside, of human mind and the mind of place. More profoundly, he writes that “the intimacy that we carry with us is also part of the landscape, its tone transmitted by the space that opens out in the distance, at every glance; thoughts too are external phenomena into which we stumble, a strip of light on a wall, or the shadow of a cloud” (47). 22 At odds with the sooty totems of industrialism, imagination is the “inextirpable goddess behind every gaze, figure of the horizon” (54). 23 Beyond land-abusing instrumentalism, this “goddess” makes a place out of raw space, bequeathing it a sense that transcends its being usable or economically valuable. In other words, imagination takes back the “transcendence” of place and, putting us “in a state of love for something out there,” makes a place “sacred” again. THE PARTS, THE WHOLE, THE EVOLVING MIND In almost the same period that Celati and Rea were narrating their journey, Ermanno Olmi, a native of Bergamo (Lombardy) and one of the most praised Italian directors, shot Lungo il fiume (Along the river, 1991), an intensely lyrical documentary on the Po. The river (here a metaphor of nature) is depicted as an imago Christi: its ecological misery, visually followed along the course of its waters, is spoken through the words of the Passion. But the meaning of this symbolic representation is above all a nonreligious appeal to human responsibility toward nature—a moral subject which is more than human, in the sense that nature is necessarily “more” than merely human. Without involving a “spiritual” awe, this responsibility expresses the realization that the whole may depend on one of its parts to continue existing.

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This is the meaning of the “sacredness” that imagination bestows to the place: awareness about the multiplicity of the interconnections which constitute the life of a place, and awareness of their vulnerability; empathy within the different subjects of this interconnection—something that we humans can cultivate as an extended and conscious biophilia, on the organic as well as on the social level; and vision of the future, meant as the implementation of responsible behaviors through which humans can watch over this whole complexity, taking care of a more-than-human reality on which they also depend. To restore the imagination of place means therefore to restore the sense of this complexity, and orient our survival toward its basic unity. In this framework, narrative reinhabitation—as a cultural and educational strategy—aims to “activate” the ethical function of the stories produced by this imagination; namely, to envision ways to transform necroregions into evolutionary landscapes. Accordingly, place identity has to be seen as a complex notion: flexible, built over time, and above all ethically in progress. If being native is a fact, becoming native can be a moral commitment. For a “native-in-progress” such as I am, writing this chapter has been a chance to reflect on the many ways our identity can interact with the identity of places, and on the necessity of stories not only for our lives, but also for the lives of places. As David Robertson suggests in his interview with Cheryll Glotfelty (2012, 33–46), a bioregion is a story—an open, permeable story. Such a story thrives with the biodiversity of ideas and subjects, experiences and visions through which imagination enables the future of a place. In this future, all citizens—human and nonhuman—will be storytellers, able to keep the memory of places by keeping the boundaries of their identity open, and always negotiable. Yesterday, returning from Milan, I drove along a portion of land where the Po is joined by the Ticino, another big river crossing these plains. It was a purple and blue sunset. The air was thin after a glorious, sunny November day. The river was large and slow, its banks dark with poplars and grasses. I felt that I really owe something to this mistreated country, my life place. Certainly, these pages will not be enough. But still, every thought, every word, is part of a story that can reopen the experience of this place. Everything comprising what I am, here and now, is an elemental fragment, minimal and yet necessary, of its evolving imagination. NOTES 1. This essay previously appeared in The Bioregional Imagination, edited by Karla Armbruster, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Tom Lynch. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 100117. (Slight changes have been introduced by the author.) 2. www.parks.it/parco.po.cn. See also: Parchi e aree naturali protette d’Italia. 3. Ecomafia is a nationwide phenomenon in Italy. The term was introduced by Legambiente (the country’s most relevant environmental NGO) in 1997, and it describes a large

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number of environmental crimes (illegal recycling of waste, unauthorized building, animal racketeering, illegal trade of archaeological pieces, illegal trade of endangered plant and animal species, etc.). An updated report on Ecomafia in Italy is yearly released by Legambiente. 4. Said incidentally, more than elsewhere in Italy, healthy and sustainable eating is almost a philosophy here: it is not a coincidence that the now-worldwide Slow Food movement was founded in Bra, a town ten miles from Savigliano. See Petrini 2007. 5. See, for example, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972); Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979); A Sacred Unity (1991). 6. A reference to the role of “material imagination” in Bachelard’s works cannot be omitted. See, for example, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942) and The Poetics of Space (1958). 7. See also Abram 1997. 8. “[A]s you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. . . . If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell” (Bateson 2000, 468). The survival unity is described by Bateson in holistic terms as “ecological mind.” See also Mathews 2003. 9. I owe this ethical reflection on the narrator’s commitment to “remember the dismembered” to Linda Hogan (personal communication). 10. See Nussbaum 1997 and Cavarero 2000. The discourse I am proposing here finds interesting correspondences in Hubert Zapf ’s theory of “literature as cultural ecology,” namely, the function that literature has to renew and restore cultural dynamics by shedding light on ideological blind spots and mechanisms of social exclusion (see Zapf, 2002; 2006). 11. “Bioregional narratives are normative, and they are subject of social negotiation” (Cheney 1989, 134). 12. Even Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi sposi, 1827), the archetype of Italian historical novel, is set in the Po Valley, more precisely between the Lake of Como and Milan. 13. Cf. Clifford 1997. As rightly observed by Mike Carr, the concept of bioregion “transcends a strictly local definition of place.” For this reason, a bioregional identity can be said to be a “wider” one, meaning that “the terrain of consciousness extends beyond the local ecosystem scale” (2004, 77). Speaking of the ideology of place identity upheld by the Northern League, the philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco, himself a Northern Italian, has depicted it as “pre-modern” expressions of a “qualitative populism” (2001, 65–88). 14. As a journalist, Ermanno Rea wrote for several of the foremost Italian newspapers. His narrative works result often from a very interesting combination of biographical experiences and social inquiries. His novel La dismissione (The Decommissioning, 2002), for example, discusses Naples’s failed industrialization through the story of the dismantling of the ILVA metallurgic factory. Like Celati, Rea also received important literary prizes (Viareggio and Campiello). He died in Rome in 2016. 15. “Celati . . . has long accompanied the pair—visual and verbal—on his own journey in the country of stories, and the role of the ‘eye,’ more than the role of the ‘I,’ has been of fundamental concern to him” (West 2000, 93). 16. Nuclear energy is an extremely controversial issue in Italy. In 2008, the right-wing government decided to reverse the referendum of 1987 and to restart production, but another referendum, that took place in 2011 right after the Fukushima disaster, reaffirmed the popular decision of 1987. The issue of nuclear waste in Italy is very problematic as well. Once again, the Po Valley is a threatened territory. In fact, the decommissioned plant of Saluggia (Piedmont), where 1500 cubic meters of highly radioactive material are disposed, is situated on the banks of the Dora Baltea, very near the point at which this river merges into the Po. Furthermore, the plant is located directly on the Piedmontese aquifer faults, on a high-alluvial-risk zone. 17. Starting his travelogue in 1983, Celati in particular testifies the transition to the phaseout.

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18. Where not otherwise indicated, all the translations of Italian texts supplied in this article are mine. 19. “[O]n this biotope raised to the privileges of a ‘protected area,’ the huge chimneys of the power plant impend . . . . Boschina Island lies there, at their feet, like the kneeling body of a humiliated person, . . . an allegory of the tragic conflict about the Big River’s banks, everywhere suspended between enchantment and plunder, (actual) abuse and (dreamt) preservation” (Rea 2004, 141). 20. On antipastoral, see Gifford 1999, 116–45. 21. Rea’s book was written in 1990. A revised edition, documenting a second journey taken by the author in order to update his work, was published in 1996. Rea seemed to be extremely aware about the issues of globalization and the potentialities of local resources to confront it. 22. “I am here at mouth of the Po . . . . Suddenly the calling of seagulls resounds above me, one calls and the others reply. Words too are callings, without defining anything, calling out to something so that it remains with us. All we can do is to call to things, invoke them so that they may come to us with their stories: call to them so that they don’t become so estranged that they leave, each on its own divergent path into the cosmos, leaving us here unable to recognize any familiar trace with which to find our way” (71). 23. Imagination is said to be a “goddess” mostly because the Italian word immaginazione is feminine. But I believe that Celati, a writer with an extremely solid background in English literature and culture, might also refer here to the generative power of imagination as a universal “sexual” force as theorized, for example, by British natural philosopher and physician Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ illustrious grandfather) in his works The Loves of the Plants (1789) and Zoönomia (1794–96). On Darwin’s doctrine of love and imagination, see Valsania 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abram, David. 2010. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage. Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam. ———. 1991. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. 1977. “Reinhabiting California.” The Ecologist 7.10 (1977): 399–401. Carr, Mike. 2004. Bioregionalism and the Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives. London: Routledge. Celati, Gianni. 1979. Verso la foce. Milan: Feltrinelli. Cheney, Jim. 1989. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative.” Environmental Ethics 11 (Summer): 117–34. Clifford, Jim. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eco, Umberto. 2001. Five Moral Pieces. Orlando: Harcourt. Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. London: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll. 2012. “Big Picture, Local Place: A Conversation with David Robertson and Robert L. Thayer Jr.” In The Bioregional Imagination, edited by Karla Armbruster, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Tom Lynch, 33–46. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mathews, Freya. 2003. The Ecological Self. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parchi e aree naturali protette d’Italia. 1999. Milan: Touring Club Italiano. Petrini, Carlo. 2007. Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. Milan: Rizzoli Ex Libris.

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Rea, Ermanno. 2004. Il Po si racconta: Uomini e donne, paesi e città, lungo le rive di un fiume sconosciuto. Milan: Net. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Thayer, Robert L. Jr. 2003. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Valsania, Maurizio. 2005. “Another and the Same: Nature and Human Beings in Erasmus Darwin’s Doctrines of Love and Imagination.” In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin. Ed. C.U.M. Smith and Robert Arnott, 337–56. London: Ashgate, 2005. West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zapf, Hubert. 2002. Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte am Beispiel des Amerikanischen Romans. Tü bingen: Niemeyer. ———. 2006. “The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology.” Nature in Literature and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Ed. C. Gersdord and S. Mayer, 49–70. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Chapter Six

Forms of Impegno in Towards the River’s Mouth Michele Ronchi Stefanati

I argue in this chapter that a key aspect of Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth) is the presence in the book of forms of impegno (namely ethical and political commitment) that consist in a strong opposition through literature to the negative effects of consumerist society on landscape and on relationships between people. A number of scholars have pointed out how political commitment represents a fundamental characteristic of Celati’s works, even if his writings and films are not generally considered as committed as the work of other intellectuals who directly participate in political and social debates and events, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini or Antonio Gramsci. As Marina Spunta (2006) writes, “Gianni Celati is a political writer in a broad sense of the word, in that he is deeply committed to portraying Italian culture and society, despite his apparent distance from it; to educating his readers to the value of literature and narration; and to renewing the role of literature within society, while protecting it against the impact of media consumerism” (559). Pia Schwarz Lausten (2009) has examined in greater detail Celati’s impegno, observing how “all of Celati’s work is pervaded with a constant impegno, which can be understood as a political (in the broadest sense of the term) critique of contemporary society, and as a proposal of an alternative world which he hints at in his art” (162). Schwarz Lausten distinguishes between two sides of Celati’s political commitment. In terms of themes, there is a constant critique of some dominant aspects of contemporary society which, however, finds place at a deeper level rather than simple condemnation. In terms of linguistic structure, according to Schwarz Lausten, Celati’s impegno is evident in his language and style, and his commitment is tightly connected to his idea of literature and the approach he chooses in relation to the reader. 143

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Monica Francioso has shown how forms of political commitment were present in Celati’s idea of literature in his first writings. Francioso has focused her analysis on the very beginning of Celati’s career, investigating the writer’s relationship with Italo Calvino and the debate on literature that involved the two between the 1960s and 1970s, while they were working together on the periodical Alì Babà. Francioso’s analysis shows that there was a clear common ground between the journal and the 1968 protest movement (Francioso 2009). I would add that all Celati’s novels of the 1970s can be read through this lens, as the typical features of his works of that period, such as the use of comic language and the body, are the vehicle for a critique of violent and repressive institutions and authorities of the time, such as the asylum in Comiche (Slapstick Silent Films, 1971), the family and school in Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi, 1972) and La banda dei sospiri (The Gang of Sighs, 1976), and the university and army in Lunario del paradiso (Paradise Almanac, 1978). As Rebecca West (2000) has underlined, “These semi-autobiographical works, in which anarchical young protagonists seek to make their way in a world dominated by repressive families and frightening authority figures, reflect the rebellious mood of the late sixties” (xii). A summation of Celati’s ideas of this period comes at the end of the decade, with Alice disambientata: materiali collettivi su Alice per un manuale di sopravvivenza (Displaced Alice: Collective Materials on Alice for a Survival Manual), a volume that collects student notes from the course Celati taught at the University of Bologna in 1977. 1 During this year of protests, when traditional values of Western thought were questioned, Alice disambientata is itself a representation of Celati’s political commitment and a confirmation of his involvement in the protest movements of the time. The book is itself a “survival manual,” namely an attempt to live in a different way rather the one imposed by what the authors consider a repressive society. The correspondence with the 1977 events is particularly clear in the final chapter of the book, written immediately after the conference against repression held in Bologna in September, 1977, in response to the assassination of the left-wing activist Francesco Lorusso (shot by police during demonstrations) and the presence of tanks sent to the city by the then interior minister Franscesco Cossiga (Celati 1978). Celati’s entire work can be seen as politically and ethically committed, and this represents a key aspect to be considered when reading and analyzing his writings and documentaries. Quite different from the beginning of his career is the way Celati’s impegno emerges in his works of the 1980s (and a new shift will be from the mid-1990s onwards, with a more direct critique of Italian politics and society, especially with Recita dell’attore Vecchiatto nel Teatro di Rio Saliceto [Performance of the Actor Vecchiatto in the Rio Saliceto Theater, 1996]). Marco Belpoliti has pointed out how the most important aspect of Celati’s works is its ethical dimension, which consists, he

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states, of Celati’s interest and commitment to literature for its effects on practical life, rather than for its self-referential ceremony and intellectualism. Belpoliti (2016) links this, also, to Celati’s opposition to pervasive traits of contemporary Western literature and culture, such as narcissism and the figure of the author as media star (xii). Even though Belpoliti’s observations are true for all of Celati’s works, Verso la foce shows with particular clarity this ethical approach. A crucial figure in this period of Celati’s career is the photographer Luigi Ghirri, whose work Roberta Valtorta has described as an “intellectual and human impegno” (Valtorta 2004), as it consisted in a new way of looking at things, giving importance to apparently meaningless details and places, with consequences on the way people stay together. This chapter examines a form of impegno that has to do with the environment, as Verso la foce represents a unique example in Celati's production of a direct condemnation of pollution caused by human activities and its consequences on the environment. The book, in fact, well represents the political and ethical commitment that characterizes Celati’s entire works, as it critiques contemporary society and suggests an alternative approach toward the world and others through his idea of literature. As Celati stated in a 1989 interview with Severino Cesari, language and environment are, in his view, tightly connected and both need protection: “language itself is part of the ecosphere, and its degradation has effects similar to those which affect trees and rivers” (15). CELATI’S ETHICAL AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT IN THE 1980S From the 1980s onwards Celati focuses on the description of the human and nonhuman landscape and proposes an idea of literature as everyday storytelling to contrast the effects of consumerist society on people and the environment. Celati describes the impoverishment of relationships, the lack of confidence between people, and the preference for staying closed in one’s houses watching TV, rather than helping each other. In collaborating with Ghirri, Celati transforms his writing, especially from the point of view of language (Iacoli 2011; West 2000). Leaving behind the experimental, nonstandard language of the 1970s, shaped on the model of slapstick movies (Iacoli 2011), Celati chooses for his following works a more descriptive style which he refers to, in Verso la foce, as “stories of observation” (1). The relationship with Ghirri also transforms Celati’s impegno, from the critique of institutions and authorities of the 1970s to a focus on the relationships between people and the environment. Celati, in fact, wants to recreate in writing what the photographers who share Ghirri’s ideas do with photography. This is exactly what Celati does in Verso la foce, describing in detail what he sees along the

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way toward the mouth of the river Po. Ghirri’s project Viaggio in Italia (Journey in Italy) was focused on the idea of showing the places of Italy which are usually not at the center of the immaginario (collective imagination) linked to the Italian landscape. The intention of the photographers gathered around the project was to go beyond a “postcard image” of Italy: they thus prefer to portray marginal places, “normal,” ordinary places of daily life that nobody notices, rather than scenes of monumental Italy and the famous works of architecture. Celati’s and Ghirri’s theories overtly follow what Cesare Zavattini—one of the main intellectuals of the so-called Neorealist movement in Italian cinema, and screenwriter of films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) and Sciuscià (Shoeshine)—called qualsiasità (random ordinariness), meaning that every place is important, no matter if it is famous or not, ordinary or extraordinary, marginal or monumental. Celati’s impegno in the 1980s thus follows the path indicated by Ghirri’s project: Celati describes the environment (humans, landscape, animals, and plants) without judging it, simply taking notes of what he observes, conscious that his writing, much like photography, is only one possible representation of the external world, among many. This is why he indulges in personal comments and thoughts on what he observes, mixing description with reflection. Against Consumerism The observational style leads Celati to some remarks on the external world, evident in the introductory note to Verso la foce, where the author states that “More than the polluted Po River, the sickened trees, the industrial stenches, the abandoned state of everything not connected to making a profit, and a method of construction devised for interchangeable residents with neither origin nor destination—more than all this, what is surprising is a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” (1). This passage shows the radical and explicit critique of the consumerist lifestyle and economy of profit which caused this polluted and desolate environment. Celati also suggests that the relevance of the four diaries lies in the construction of a new relationship with the environment and the others (1). The intense observation of the external world in fact leads him to fight apathy and indifference (1). Celati’s descriptions of the polluted environment has led to convincing ecocritical readings of Verso la foce (Iovino 2012, Seeger 2015), given Celati’s attention to the conditions of environment, is a direct consequence of the approach he adopts toward the external world, describing it in detail. It is also important to set Verso la foce inside a theoretical background that considers it as part of Celati’s impegno, once again realized through his idea of literature. As Iovino has demonstrated, with his writings of the 1980s Celati aims at restoring the imagination of place through narrative practices that

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openly contrast the quick consumption of things, bodies, and landscape. Celati’s idea of storytelling, on the contrary, is an effort toward the preservation and care of people and environment, as it is also clear in the anthology Narratori delle riserve (Narrators of the Reserves, 1992) that he edited in the same years of Verso la foce, first published from 1988 to 1990 in the newspaper Il manifesto. Celati’s approach to consumerism is evident in Verso la foce, for instance, in the way the author lists several names of commercial products on billboards which he highlights using capital letters. This process shows the “invasion” of products which do not belong to the environment of that area (many names are in English, as they are coming from an international market). This “invasion” has not only to do with the geographical origin of the products, but also with the idea of the economy which stands behind their names. There is a clear contrast between the old habits of rural areas in the Po valley and the idea of profit which stands behind the chemical and industrial products that Celati notes. Between the abandoned buildings and refuse along the road, there can be detected the traumatic shift from a local, familiar economy based on activities such as small-scale agriculture characterized by the recovery or reuse of discarded materials, to a global capitalist economy with myriad disposable products. Celati underlines other names by using capital letters. These are normally signs of stores, bars, or road signs that surprise the writer as they contrast in some way with the environment in the Po valley. The distance between the calm, daily life of those plains where nearly nothing seems to happen and the variety of references used by commercial activities to promote themselves creates a comic effect: this is, for instance, the case of the confusion between the English term for a light meal eaten in a hurry and a spiritual concept, evident in the name of the empty bar “SNACK NIRVANA” (10). Often, this contrast is given by the fact that the signs normally belong to the seemingly dominant consumerist mindset. Everything in these flat lands seems to be connected with profit: “MEGAMARKET” (10), “BRIO FAUCETS, ABC KITCHENS, IL PORCELLINO FRESH HAM, CASITALIA PREFAB HOUSES, ALFIERI DANIELE FIREPLACES AND VENEERS” (11), “LOTS FOR SALE ZONED FOR SMALL VILLAS” (13). In Celati’s choice of stressing the point of these names there is a critique of globalization as the passive reception of a consumerist lifestyle coming from elsewhere, which often seems to have nothing to do with these lands. This is clear, for example, in the printed t-shirt of a barman with the words “FROM THE EAST COST OF AMERIKA” (13).

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Effects of Human Activities on Environment Celati’s depictions of pollution are particularly present in the first diary, which Celati wrote immediately after the Chernobyl meltdown in April, 1986. Celati’s attention for the external world that emerges in his observational mode he adopts in the book coincides here with an ecological concern for the consequences of the nuclear disaster. Celati takes note of what he listens to and observes, and shows that the nuclear disaster dominates conversations and the news. The text thus focuses on radioactive contamination of food and soil which threatens agriculture and creates concerns among people. Pollution which derives from the nuclear disaster is not the only type of pollution that Celati describes in Verso la foce. The depiction of the contaminated Po covers many pages of the book. Celati often describes the waste that completely dominates the environment, along the streets and in the Po river itself, which seems an industrial dump site. Celati insists on the damage caused by human activities, by simply writing what he observes while passing through the Po Valley. The factories, their waste, and the dumping grounds, represent the new landscape of marginal places in consumerist 1980s Italy, where no ecological concern seems to be present. At the same time, Celati nevertheless underlines how the force of nature permits plants to continue growing on the waste of human activities, despite pollution. As Monica Seeger suggests (2015), Celati has a true awareness of the consequences of consumerism and industrialization on the environment, stating that “Celati calls society out for what we have done and are still doing to the environment, just as he simultaneously heralds nature’s persistent energy” and for this reason “he ought to be considered not just a foremost contemporary Italian author but also a foremost contemporary environmental author, Italian or otherwise” (72). I would argue, however, that a condemnation of the effects of human activities on environment is not the main aim of his writings, but a consequence of the observational style he adopts. This leads him to an anti-anthropocentric approach, which does not precede his writing, but originates from it. This same approach appears also in other Celati’s works of this period, such as the introduction to Traversate del deserto (Desert Crossings), another interdisciplinary project with photographers and writers that also involved Celati and Ghirri. Here the authors clearly state that human beings are not the owners of the planet (Rabboni, Celati et al., 1986: 9). The same considerations lie behind Verso la foce, which shows a deep rethinking of the relationship between humans, animals, and plants that are all seen as part of existence, with no hierarchies.

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STORYTELLING AND OBSERVATION AS FORMS OF IMPEGNO Narratori delle riserve shows elements in common with Verso la foce. For this anthology, Celati chose authors and texts which were “reserves,” meaning something that retained for future use, in opposition to the fact that, in a consumerist society, everything needs to be rapidly sold and used, in order to buy new goods, with nothing made to last (Celati 1992). This is a process that Celati constantly criticizes, underlining how it affects literature itself. The other important issue behind the anthology is the attempt, also present in Verso la foce, to refuse any ready-made explanation of the world. What Celati wants to do is to describe the external world and let the anonymous voice of storytelling talk, without the ambition of giving all-embracing explanations of what happens. This is a radical ethical position as it brings Celati to his “poetic of affection,” namely a sort of love for the world as it is, with its daily routines, and apparently ordinary places, people, and situations. This also draws from the non-anthropocentric approach I have mentioned, as it abandons any conviction that humankind (starting from the author himself) is more important than other species and the environment. This approach does not mean political disengagement, but on the contrary originates from Celati’s ethical considerations on the way people stay together in a community and how they relate with the environment. In fact, Celati always keeps in his works a strong critique of contemporary society and, at the same time, he proposes an alternative with his idea of literature as literature. Throughout his career, Celati is committed to a preservation of literature in its specificity, with no need for it to mix with political or social discourses in order to be political. The second key element of Celati’s impegno in Verso la foce is the “new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” Celati refers to in his introductory note as the consequence of a landscape shaped by nothing but the desire of profit (1). This “desert of solitude” is an aspect that surprises Celati even more than the incredible amount of pollution. A different comprehension of ordinary life that comes from a new observation of the landscape, in fact, also leads to a critical representation of the breakdown of human relations. Often in Verso la foce, Celati highlights the mistrust which dominates social relations along the Po Valley. The absence of a sense of community is everywhere in the description of life in the plains, with a seemingly total absence of solidarity. The narrator’s comments in the book link this relational impoverishment and mistrust to the effects of consumerist society, where only business relationships are accepted and seen as normal, while all other kinds of relations make people suspicious, and misery is not tolerated. People seem not to care about the others and poverty needs to be hidden.

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Particularly significant is a passage where Celati asks for a ride, as he has an injured foot. The appearance of a stranger (Celati) often makes people defensive and many prefer not to help him. People across the plains seem to be frightened by outsiders and close themselves inside their houses, in order to limit encounters with strangers. The countryside is often ideally seen as the place where everybody knows each other and relations are still lively, in opposition to the mass solitude of large cities and metropolises. On the contrary, Celati’s descriptions of the inhabitants’ behaviors show how urban solitude also affects rural areas: people hide themselves, ignoring others in order to feel safe. Even though the suspicious and seemingly insulated behavior of rural people that he describes here can also be due to the presence of the so-called “naysayers,” or simply to the character and education of the inhabitants of the Po Valley, Celati suggests that environmental degradation and a rampant consumerist society have had a role in the decline of the sense of community in those areas. It is a process that Celati often describes, not only in Verso la foce, but in other works of the following period, such as his films Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of Souls) and Case sparse—Visioni di case che crollano (Scattered Houses—Visions of Collapsing Houses), both set in the Po valley. From the beginning of Verso la foce, Celati suggests that in the area he is observing, only what has to do with money and profit still has attention and care, while the beguiling and even (if rarely) beautiful aspects of the landscape he describes in other passages of the book are often in a state of abandon. Commercial activities dominate human relations, and Celati observes how the nonstop dedication to daily processes linked to commercial activities leads to passivity, indifference toward the others, and lack of interest and concern. This is exactly what Celati wants to counter with his tales of observation. The author makes this explicit in his introductory note, when he states that the aim of the four diaries of Verso la foce is precisely that an intense observation of the external world serves to fight apathy toward the world itself and the others. This ethical commitment, which also has a political dimension, as it has to do with the way people stay together in a society, namely their sense of community, is the main feature of Celati’s impegno in this part of his career. In Verso la foce, this takes the form of an affectionate representation of the external world as it is, deriving from an intense observation of the environment. Storytelling, together with observation, is what can lead, according to Celati, to new forms of cohabitation, not only between humans, but also between humans and the environment, of which Verso la foce is one possible representation.

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NOTE 1. The course focused on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass and Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense. The collective materials in the book gathered many different topics, from music to cinema, and from feminist activism to the abuse of power by the government and other institutions such as the family and school.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Belpoliti, Marco. 2016. “Gianni Celati, la letteratura in bilico sull’abisso.” In Gianni Celati, Romanzi, cronache e racconti, ed. by Marco Belpoliti and Nunzia Palmieri, XI-LXXII. Milan: Mondadori. Burns, Jennifer. 2001. Fragments of Impegno. Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980–2000. Leeds: Nothern University Press. Celati, Gianni. 1978. Alice disambientata. Materiali collettivi su Alice per un manuale di sopravvivenza. Milan: L’erba voglio. Celati, Gianni, ed. 1992. Narratori delle riserve. Milan: Feltrinelli. Cesari, Severino. 1989 “L’artigiano delle parole.” il Manifesto, March 8, 1989. Francioso, Monica. 2009. “Impegno and Alì Babà. Celati, Calvino and the Debate on Literature in the 1970s,” Italian Studies, 64, 1: 105–19. Ghirri, Luigi. 1997. Niente di antico sotto il sole, ed. by Paolo Costantini and Giovanni Chiaramonte. Turin: Società editrice internazionale. Ghirri, Luigi, and Gianni Leone, Enzo Velati, eds. 1984. Viaggio in Italia. Alessandria: Il Quadrante. Iacoli, Giulio. 2011. La dignità di un mondo buffo. Intorno all’opera di Gianni Celati. Macerata: Quodlibet. Iovino, Serenella. 2012. “Restoring the Imagination of Place. Narrative Reinhabitation and the Po Valley.” In The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, ed. by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, Karla Armbruster, 100–117. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Rabboni, Vilbres, and Gianni Celati, Luigi Ghirri, Roberto Papetti, Giovanni Zaffagnini, Guido Mazzara, and others. 1986. Traversate del deserto. Ravenna: Edizioni Essegi. Schwarz Lausten, Pia. 2009. “Impegno e immaginazione nell’opera di Gianni Celati.” In Letteratura come fantasticazione. In conversazione con Gianni Celati, ed. by Laura Rorato and Marina Spunta, 161–84. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Seeger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes in Between. Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film. London Buffalo Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spunta, Marina. 2006. “Celati’s Natural Narration and the Calls of the Plains.” In The Value of Literature in and After the Seventies: The Case of Italy and Portugal, ed. by Monica Jansen and Paula Jordão. Italianistica Ultraiectina, 1: 559–73. ———. 2009. “The new Italian Landscape: between Ghirri’s Photography and Celati’s Fiction.” In Translation Practices. Through Language to Culture, ed. by Ashley Chantler and Carla Dente, 223–38. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Valtorta, Roberta. 2004. “Stupore del paesaggio.” In Racconti dal paesaggio 1984–2004. A vent’anni da Viaggio in Italia, ed. by Roberta Valtorta, 11–49. Milan: Lupetti. West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati. The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter Seven

Witnessing the Po River Disorientation and Estrangement in Primo Levi and Gianni Celati Damiano Benvegnù

A river is difficult to overlook. Especially when it is the longest in the country and lends its name to an entire plain. It is unsurprising, then, that the Po River—the longest river in Italy, flowing eastwards across the Po Valley (Pianura Padana) for 652 kilometers—has attracted the attention of writers, thinkers, artists, and politicians, from Pliny the Elder to the Northern League (Lega Nord) political party and its questionable appropriation of recent years. 1 Yet, despite the enduring attention it has received as a valuable natural resource, distinctive geographical feature, and cultural symbol, the Po River has not seen any political action capable of safeguarding its ecological well-being. For instance, the Po River has not shared the destiny of its northern European counterparts, such as the Rhine or the Elbe: as Italian geographer Eugenio Turri noted, it never became the center of a highly organized structure of human developments (Turri 2000, 67–68). This does not mean that an extensive urban civilization has not thrived around the river—quite the opposite—but it has done so by excluding the river as its main axis of life and traffic (68). 2 What Turri has called “the Megalopolis of the Po Valley,” that is to say, the uninterrupted urban formation spread between the Alps and the Apennines, has in fact dramatically grown in the last two centuries thanks to a process of fast capitalist industrialization that has neglected to take the Po River and its ecology into account. Consequently, the river and the eponymous plain are today one of Europe’s most polluted fluvial areas, as documented by the 2017 report on pesticides in the basin of the Po River by the 153

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Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale). As the report reveals, the whole area is in a state of constant environmental precariousness, primarily caused by human negligence in evaluating and adequately reacting to ecosystems’ responses to human-caused chemical pollution (ISPRA 2017, 26–27). This negligence is not limited to the dangerous but invisible presence of chemicals in the water and soil, but also concerns the very evident destruction of the traditional landscape of the Po basin during the last half of the twentieth century. Turri talks of an initial de-spatialization and de-territorialization of agro-pastoral areas, followed by their remodeling in subservience to the megalopolis, with consequent destruction of the historic link between human communities and their environments (Turri 2000, 10–11). 3 In this sense, Iovino rightly describes the current Po Valley as a “necroregion,” a “suburban countryside made of houses, industrial sites, electric power plants, and decommissioned nuclear reactors,” where “the ‘stories’ and ‘wisdom’ of places seem on the verge of extinction” (154). As Kane has pointed out, ecological destruction is indeed “as diverse as culture and as ubiquitous as biology” and the fight against it requires the invention and application of law (2012, 2). Yet, the punishment of egregious offenses like the illegal use of pesticides or the unauthorized dissemination of industrial warehouses is necessary but not sufficient: as Kane continues, “only a change in consciousness, unfolding place by place, people by people, will reverse unintentional, negligent, harmful, and ever-morphing dispositions and traditions” (2). In other words, only a proper public revaluation of the entanglement of culture and nature that characterizes the Po River and its basin can come to terms with the current ecological hazard that the whole area faces and transform what has become a highly commodified and often degraded space into a proper place filled with meaningful human experiences. 4 According to Iovino, this is possible through the labor of imagination, for only imagination helps us understand and orient “the evolutionary dynamics connected to the life of a place, involving an open and more inclusive reflection on identity, history, and ecology” (154). Yet, what kind of imaginative strategies can artists use to bear witness to the cultural and environmental trauma experienced by the Po River basin and its inhabitants? This chapter tackles the ecological, literary explorations of the Po River carried out by two writers, Gianni Celati (1937–) and Primo Levi (1919–1987), examining references to the Po River scattered in Levi’s work in light of Celati’s extensive focus on the river in Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth). My goal is to show how the differences between their seemingly opposite approaches to the river actually reveal a similar association of environmental concerns and literary strategies. Both writers in fact create testimonial narratives capable of directing the reader toward a more co-

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responsible engagement with the environmental history of the Po River and its landscape ecology. At first sight Celati and Levi could not be more dissimilar. They not only belong to different generations, but they also have contrasting intellectual upbringings: while Celati followed a quite common educational path for an Italian humanist, Levi was instead a chemist who went through the hell of Auschwitz before turning to writing as a way to bear witness to the Holocaust, and later branching out into other literary genres. 5 Indeed, their literary productions seem to have little to share, Celati’s work being ordinarily associated with experimental literature and a quasi-documentarist sensibility, Levi’s mostly with science and the Holocaust. Yet, there are a few elements that these two authors hold in common, beginning with a seemingly minor but crucial line of inquiry. Both writers felt the need to introduce the works which can be considered crucial for their respective careers—Levi’s 1947 Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) and Celati’s 1989 Verso la foce—by dwelling upon the concept of “estrangement.” In the preface of his Auschwitz account, Levi considers what happens when an entire country starts thinking that “every stranger is an enemy” as a way to understand the events that led to Nazism (Levi 2015, 5). Here Levi is considering his own sense of being alienated, first as a Jewish-Italian and then as a prisoner in Auschwitz, but this sense of estrangement becomes a potent epistemological tool for his writing in general. Celati on the other hand describes how “it is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside” to introduce the general sense of loss described in the following narrative set in the 1980s (Towards the River’s Mouth, 1). As another Italian writer, Antonio Tabucchi, wrote about reading Celati’s 1985 Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains), even the journey toward the delta of the Po River is characterized by a general sense of “disorientation and estrangement” (in Barron 2007, 329). Although being perceived as a foreigner or outsider in Italy in the early 1940s had much more tragic consequences than forty years later, my aim is to demonstrate that in both Levi and Celati disorientation and estrangement are not simply accidental feelings caused by historical circumstance. Instead, they are strategic literary devices aimed at giving birth to testimonial accounts that are both familiar and unfamiliar, unheimlich, 6 uncanny, and which therefore challenge readers to re-imagine their own identity, history, and sense of place. Testimony is in fact a singularly hybrid literary genre because it imposes over its readers a different understanding of the process of interpreting the relationship between the text and the often-traumatic events that lie behind it. In leading readers “to identification and away from it simultaneously” (Eaglestone 2004, 43), testimonial accounts question our epistemological assumptions and create what Carter-White—in his geographical study of Levi’s prose—has called “historiographies that disrupt the smooth operation of reading and interpretation toward cultivating a sense of

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a shared world between the reader and these extraordinary, extreme and otherwise exterior events” (2009, 288, emphases in the original). To achieve this disruptive duplicity, writers utilize several textual and meta-textual tropes and strategies: as I will demonstrate, both Levi and Celati use disorientation and estrangement to give birth to testimonial structures that connect the environmental transformation of the Po River and its Valley as convened by the text to the identity and history of those, humans and nonhumans, who inhabit it. In Verso la foce, Celati claims that the sense of estrangement he articulates with such acuteness in the preface of the book stems more from what he calls “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” than from the constant sight of “the polluted Po River, the sickened trees, the industrial stenches, the abandoned state of everything not connected to making a profit, and a method of construction devised for interchangeable residents with neither origin nor destination” (1). Yet, the first section of the book—devoted to the misleading Italian media representation of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl and the consequent oftentimes irrational reactions of the people Celati meets—is instead filled with several images of fluvial pollution and environmental negligence. 7 As Seger has pointed out, in Verso la foce these images of ecological degradation display “Celati’s approach to environments both natural and social” (Seger 2015, 80), that is to say the writer’s willingness to build observations that are not “part in a solitary narrative process,” but speak “for the interchange of landscape, communication, and community” (or loss of it) (73). This is particularly apparent in one of the descriptions of the relationships between human waste, landscape, and nonhuman animals that occurs at the opening of the last section of book. Celati describes the astonishment of his traveling companion, the German filmmaker Reinhard Dellit, in seeing along the river a “field completely full of garbage, plastic bags, bottles, cans, pieces of discarded furniture; a vast array of garbage, with hundreds of seagulls flying wildly about” (56). Such a scene, familiar for those who currently live along the Po River (and to which I will return when I compare it with Levi’s seagull narrative) exemplifies a central feature of the book. The exchange between the narrator and his foreigner friend as well as the bewildered reaction of the latter function in fact as a model for the effect the writer hopes from/for his readers. As he claims in a 2003 interview with Marco Sironi, only in a moment of extreme estrangement (massima disambientazione, o straniamento) can we actually see all the complex phenomena that constitute the reality of a place (Sironi 2004, 228). The “strangely unelegiac” image of a landfill as “post-humanist environment” (Harrison 2011, 277) is thus not an isolated occurrence, but part of Celati’s literary strategy. The narrative of something that resists memory and suspends familiarity such as the uncanny landfill is not only the representation of an ecological trauma that the extradiegetic writer, the intra-

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diegetic companion, and the readers are all meant to experience, but also further complicates the already “shaky boundaries between fiction and nonfiction” of Celati’s previous prose (Barron 2007, 329). We may actually think of Celati’s 1989 work as a move beyond mere observation to bear witness to such a sense of disorientation and estrangement caused by the several ecological disruptions which occurred between Celati’s childhood and the time of the journey recorded in the book. 8 This testimonial structure seems confirmed by the historiographical tension between the direction suggested by title and the non-linear chronology of the four chapters that constitute Verso la foce. Although we are explicitly told that the following narratives are “travel journals” or simple “stories of observation” (1), throughout the book we move instead in time between the 1986 of the first chapter and the 1983 of the eponymous last one. We thus have two different axes: spatially, the book indeed follows the river’s flow and travels linearly from west to east, but chronologically such a linearity is broken as we have a quite erratic timeline that moves backward twice. As Peterle and Visentin have pointed out in their performative reenactment of Celati’s book, this tension between geographical movement and chronological time highlights the Po River as “a liquid chronotope” that organizes the journey on a narratological level—affecting “the writer’s wavering gaze, and his drifting narrative voice”—as well as on a geographical level—influencing “the landscape configuration, and its socio-economical organization” (Peterle & Visentin 2017, 474). Yet, in its very title, the book suggests a movement toward the mouth of the river that mirrors the change in status of the narrating subject. Verso la foce ends in fact with a change in pronouns (from the “I” of the narrator, through the “we” of humanity, to a final “you” which seems to be a hypothetical doppelgänger of the narrating self) that can be interpreted as the linguistic counterpart of the water of the river losing its firm identity in encountering the open waters of the sea. Nothing seems to redeem such loss of individualization and belonging: “Our souls have been mixed up, and by now we all share the same thoughts. We wait but nothing awaits us, neither a spaceship nor a destiny” (75). The last two sentences of the book are thus a surprising distich, half ontological reflection, half longing for what might be lost forever: “Every phenomenon in itself is serene. Call to things because they will remain with you until the end” (75). 9 On the threshold between two waters, Celati constructs a final friction: on the one hand, he seems to accept the destiny of the fluvial landscape as well as his cultural and psychological identity as the same manifestation of a cosmic, almost impersonal, recognition of the goodness of all things; on the other hand, he invites us to hang on to the memory of them before we disappear into a sea of impersonal nothingness.

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A comparable historiographical tension between impersonal observations and the memory of individual experiences can be found in Primo Levi’s work. Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, the first major city traversed by the Po River, more than 400 kilometers from its mouth on the Adriatic Sea. Between 1944 and 1945 he lived through the unutterable horror of Auschwitz, undertook a long and dangerous journey back to Italy mostly on foot, and then spent the rest of his life in his hometown, working until 1975 as a chemist for the paint industry and occasionally traveling to talk about Nazi Germany (especially after the re-publications of Se questo è un uomo in 1958). Levi is thus mostly known for the testimony of his imprisonment in Auschwitz or for his scientific autobiography, Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table); however, he actually worked across a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and science fiction to journalism. Yet, in all his writings Levi claimed to have always maintained the objective gaze he had acquired during his scientific academic training, never giving up “the curiosity of the naturalist” (Roth 2001, 8). Present in his early testimonial account, this scientific attitude reaches its full potential in his later writings, where his ethological interests focus less on the internal “nature” of humanity and more on the external “nature” that surrounds us. For instance, Levi’s fascination for the so-called human-animal divide so evident in Se questo è un uomo develops later into an interest toward the ecological relationships between human communities, nonhuman animals, and the environment. 10 This is also the case in the three examples of his work that I discuss, in which the environment is the fluvial landscape of the Po River. The first is a short story entitled “Ottima è l’acqua” (“Best is the Water”), included in Vizio di forma (Flaw of Form), a 1971 collection of twenty short stories, unified by a quasi-apocalyptic sense of what humankind will face in the near future. 11 The title itself reflects Levi’s pessimistic disposition at the end of the sixties: in a television interview just after the publication of Vizio di forma, Levi explains that the “flaw of form” refers to the failure of technology as an element of progress and development. In the same interview, he also claims that the title of the whole book was decided by the publisher, while he would have instead preferred to use the title of the last short story of the collection, “Ottima è l’acqua” (Best is the Water). 12 In “Ottima è l’acqua” we follow the events from the perspective of a human character named Boero, who is a chemist and lives in Turin, but the protagonist of the story is the water, or rather its fundamental role for the planet and, at the same time, its precariousness. Levi vividly describes for us the natural flow of water being suddenly corrupted: first little streams near Turin such as the Sangone, next the Po, and then finally the rain and all the seas become monstrously viscous. As a result, every form of life slows down and eventually ceases. The end of the story is traumatic, with a final image of the Caribbean Sea that “no longer has waves” (Levi 2015, 747). While “Otti-

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ma è l’acqua” is clearly about the conflict between humans and the environment, the last paragraph begins instead with an analogy—“Like the rivers, we, too, are sluggish” (746)—that stresses something slightly different: the intimate connection between water and humankind. This connection is based upon the obvious reason we need water to survive, but it also hints at something akin to Commoner’s idea that “everything is connected to everything else,” namely, that there is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all (Commoner 1971, 33). In a way, in this story Levi recalls twenty-five years after Auschwitz that “part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us” (Levi 2015, 164) and expands it to include an environment every day more threatened. Although we are not told what caused the transformation of the water, this strange story in fact begins with the corruption of the familiar water of the Sangone stream, and, as the polluted water moves to the mouth of the Po and then into the sea, suggests that we belong to a larger ecosystem in which the pollution of one element means inevitably a radical transformation of our own human identity as well and, ultimately, our death. With an ironic strategy characteristic of Levi’s short stories, our (ecological) sluggishness vis-à-vis the environment becomes instead the consequence of its degradation. This entanglement between degradation of the fluvial environment, loss of identity, and ironic inversion is articulated more forcefully in both “I gabbiani di Settimo” (“The Gulls of Settimo”), a poem published in 1984 but written five years earlier, and in “Il gabbiano di Chivasso” (“The Gull of Chivasso”), an imaginary interview on a similar subject published in March 1987 in the Italian science magazine Airone. “I gabbiani di Settimo” is a short poem about a group of seagulls living in the suburban town of Settimo Torinese, near Turin. During the Italian economic boom which began in the late fifties, Settimo witnessed a major industrial development that took advantage of the Po, becoming the location of several factories, including the paint factory where Levi worked for most of his life. However, it was only in the seventies with the opening of two new factories producing tires for Pirelli and of the so-called FIAT village (Villaggio FIAT) that the little town saw a radical transformation: by the time Levi wrote the poem on April 9, 1979, Settimo had become enveloped by the Po Valley Megalopolis. 13 In this poem Levi witnesses this radical transformation and combines it with literary parody, implicitly alluding to one of the most iconic poems of modernity, Baudelaire’s “The Albatross.” Similar to Baudelaire’s albatross, the gulls of Settimo are in fact still “the lords of the sky,” but now live in a twisted postnatural environment, infested by our ignoble waste (“le nostre ignobili discariche”), and covered with tar and leftover polyethylene (Levi 2015, 1924). Even more remarkably, the poem recalls a long trip along the Po River, naming places that also belong to the geography of Verso la foce (Ostiglia, Viadana, etc). Yet, in Levi’s work the gulls have gone upstream, from the

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mouth of the river to an industrial city more than 400 kilometers away from the sea. In this inverted journey, the birds have been drawn by what Levi calls “our human abundance,” but the outcome is quite tragic: as the last two lines read, the gulls, once admirable creatures, have lost their identity and now drift restlessly over Settimo Torinese: “past forgotten, they pick over our waste” (Levi 2015, 1925). This distressing change of both the environment and the behavior of the seagulls is reiterated in one of the imaginary interviews with nonhuman animals Levi wrote for “Airone” shortly before his tragic death, “Il gabbiano di Chivasso.” Levi slightly alters the geography of the story, from Settimo Torinese to Chivasso—another little town near Torino which in 1963 became home of the main factory of Lancia automobiles—and increases the ironic undertone. Levi imagines interviewing a Yellow-legged Gull, usually a common bird along Italian shores, who instead has been now displaced to Chivasso. Asked about such a change of environment, the gull replies that he was forced to leave the seashore because the water was too polluted and therefore there were no fish anymore (2768). However, the decision to follow a relative of his who had flown up “the Po River, in stages, all the way to Chivasso” is a direct consequence of the new Lancia factory, which—the bird remarks—does not produce fish, “on the contrary, it causes many of them to die, but it produces trash. It hires people who produce an incredible quantity of trash, three of four hundred tons a year” (2768). 14 With trash, the gull almost shamefully confesses, come mice and rats, and therefore food, though to catch a rat is quite a difficult enterprise. So, when the rats are too fast or smart, “nothing is left but the trash” and even those who were used to fly high in the sky are now forced to eat any kind of garbage: “dead kittens, cabbage stalks, fruit peels, and watermelon rinds” (2769–70). As this summary displays, Levi’s imaginary interview mixes together parody and real science (mentioning, for example, the importance of fish for birds’ eggs), but the underlying message is of disorientation and estrangement. Even in this imaginary interview Levi’s ironic naturalism uncannily addresses the interconnections between threatened ecosystems and the identity of the creatures who live within in, with the gull predicting frightful future mutations for its species: “The next generation scares me; there is no restraint anymore” (2770). Yet, this is not the last word, because “Il gabbiano di Chivasso” ends with a reflection of the interviewer who blames the bird for being too pessimistic, claiming instead that somebody will eventually clean up the rivers and thus return the sea to go back the way it was (2770). This bittersweet hope, though, seems only a prelude to a more radical comparison between humans, animals, and their environment. In fact, the interviewer finally invites the gull to “console yourself: even among us men there are those who could fly and swim but who instead . . . wander around

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garbage dumps and pick up filth. We must give them, and you, the opportunity to regain their dignity. I beseech you, do not forget the sea” (1770). This concluding sentence can be read as an invitation to the seagull—and by extension to all creatures, human animals included—not to forget one’s dignitas, namely, one’s proper place within a specific ecosystem. 15 No matter how much said ecosystem has changed, how much one’s identity has mutated, the seagulls cannot forget that they belong to the sea, and their survival depends on re-inhabiting the link between the memory of a place and its future. Somehow evoking the ending of Celati’s Verso la foce, even Levi seems to invite the seagull to call out to the sea because it will remain with him until the end, or, in other words, to bear witness to that original ecological entanglement between a creature and its habitat before both its memory and its reality disappear. Yet, Levi’s testimonial accounts also stress an element that the flow of Celati’s work makes less apparent, namely that there is no re-inhabiting without disorientation, no origin without loss. Both “Ottima è l’acqua” and the companion stories about the seagulls in fact display habitats whose identities rely on ecological relationships that have been disrupted due to a change in direction imposed upon the inhabitants. In both cases, the inhabitants can neither simply restore a sense of past familiarity nor imagine what they will look like in the future: their disoriented testimonies somehow interrupt or suspend representational closure. Going upstream, exploring the river in what should be its fixed origin but is instead a further pollution of identity, Levi’s stories concerning the Po paradoxically incorporate the loss of a familiar past into an unfamiliar and almost incomprehensible present/future to bear witness to an ecological trauma. As CarterWhite has pointed out for Levi’s writing, only this “jarring disruption of knowledge and comprehension in the text, and the disorientation this induces in the reader” can preserve the trace of the event as an ecologically “rapturous phenomenon” (Carter-White 2011, 288). Moreover, it triggers the possibility of an “historiography of co-responsibility,” that is to say the “forced recognition of a shared world” between witness and reader, past and present (298). In a way, Levi’s stories alert us that such a testimonial structure works for Celati as well. While it may be true that “Celati’s work in the Po Valley is an exploration of home” (Barron 2007, 332), such familiarity with a specific place can—and, in some way, must—become unheimlich and expose its own estrangement to function as a true testimony to the present condition of such an ecological disruption. From this perspective, even Verso la foce can thus be read as an ecological testimony, for it does indeed exemplify “a testimonial structure of complexity and indeterminacy hidden behind a seemingly straightforward constative relation to the events and places recollected and described” (Carter-White 2011, 287), while forcing readers to both reconsider what they (think they) know about themselves and the Po River, and make a decision about their common ecological future.

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NOTES 1. For a quite exhaustive reconstruction of all the myths surrounding the Po River see Conti 2012. 2. Turri claims that the river was a civilizing catalyst during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but lost its importance during Italian industrialization. For a synthetic survey of the historical reasons for such an exclusion, see Turri 2000, 68–98. 3. Turri uses the term “de-spatialization” as the opposite of “spatialization,” that is the spatial forms that social activities and material things, phenomena, or processes take on. In this sense, “de-spatialization” would be the loss of the overall sense of social space typical of a time, place, or culture. “De-territorialization” is instead opposed to “territorialization” and therefore in Turri’s text refers to the disappearing of those cultural, social, and political norms and boundaries that make a territory proper. 4. On the differences between “space” and “place” see Tuan 1977. 5. Celati’s biography can be found in Celati 2016, LXXIII–CXXIV; for Levi, see Levi 2015, xxv–lviii. 6. On the idea of the unheimlich as the “estranged familiar” see Freud 2003. 7. See, for example, Celati 1989 (20; 33; 56) where the writer explicitly mentions the amount of garbage and pollution he observes along the river. 8. On testimony as a geographical practice, see Anderson and Harrison 2011; Carter-White 2009 and 2011; Dewsbury 2003. 9. Quite surprisingly, Celati quotes quasi verbatim a line from Dino Campana’s 1914 Canti Orfici: “Ogni fenomeno è per sé sereno” (cfr Campana 1994, 207). 10. For an analysis of the complicated presence of nonhuman animals and animality in Levi’s work, see Benvegnù 2018. 11. All the English translations, titles included, of Levi’s work are taken from Levi 2015, unless otherwise stated. 12. Taken from the Italian translation of one of Pindar’s Olympian Odes, this sentence addresses a discontinuity between a previous world in which such a statement was true and the defected present—a theme that confirms the general inspiration for the book. 13. The “Villaggio FIAT” is a neighborhood built by the Italian automobile industry FIAT for its workers in Settimo Torinese. It officially opened in 1970. For its history see Silvetti 2010. For the broader industrial history of Settimo Torinese, see Bertotto 2009. 14. In Levi’s imaginary interview, the seagull comes from Liguria. Yet, the text acknowledges that the decision to move to Chivasso was triggered by the upstream journey of “a distant relative of mine who lived in Chioggia” and indeed followed the Po River upstream up to Chivasso (Levi 2015, 2767). This inter-textual reference confirms that, although the 1987 seagulls did not follow the full length of the Po River as instead its 1979 counterparts did, one interpretation is possible for both works. 15. The Latin term dignitas is often mistranslated as “dignity” or even “human dignity” altogether. Agamben reminds us that it “simply means ‘rank’” and refers to the proper place of each creature, not merely human beings (Agamben 2004, 29).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Ben, and Paul Harrison. 2011. Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. London: Routledge. Barron, Patrick. 2007. “Gianni Celati’s Poetic Prose: Physical, Marginal, Spatial.” Italica 84, no. 2/3: 323–44. Benvegnù, Damiano. 2018. Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bertotto, Silvio. 2009. Di verde e di mattone. Alle origini di una città Settimo Torinese (1845–1975). Savigliano (CN): L’Artistica Editrice.

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Campana, Dino. 1994. Canti Orfici. Milano: Rizzoli. Carter-White, Richard. 2009. “Auschwitz, ethics, and testimony exposure to the disaster.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12: 579–93. ———. 2011. “Primo Levi and the genre of testimony.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, no.2: 287–300. Celati, Gianni. 1989. Verso la foce. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 2016. Romanzi, Cronache e Racconti. Milano: Mondadori. Commoner, Barry. 1971. The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New York: Knopf. Conti, Guido. 2012. Il grande fiume Po. Milano: Mondadori. Dewsbury, John-David. 2009. “Witnessing Space: ‘Knowledge without Contemplation.’” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 35: 1907–32. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books. Harrison, Thomas. 2011. “A Tale of Two Giannis: Writing as Rememoration.” Annali d’Italianistica 29: 269–89. ISPRA - Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale. Sostenibilità ambientale dell’uso dei pesticide. Il bacino del fiume Po. Accessed December 30, 2017. http://www. isprambiente.gov.it/it/pubblicazioni/rapporti/sostenibilita-ambientale-delluso-dei-pesticidi.il-bacino-del-fiume-po Kane, Stephanie. 2012. Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Levi, Primo. 2015. The Complete Works of Primo Levi. NY-London: Liveright Publishing. Peterle, Giada, and Francesco Visentin. 2017. “Performing the literary map: ‘toward the river mouth’ following Gianni Celati.” Cultural Geographies 24, no.3: 473–85. Roth, Philip. 2001. “A Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi.” In Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 1–17. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Seger, Monica. 2015. Landscapes in Between: Environmental Changes in Modern Italian Literature and Film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Silvetti, Paolo. 2010. Il villaggio FIAT a Settimo Torinese. La storia, le immagini, le parole. Savigliano (CN): L’Artistica Editrice. Sironi, Marco. 2004. Geografie del Narrare—Insistenze sui luoghi di Luigi Ghirri e Gianni Celati. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2004. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Turri, Eugenio. 2000. La megalopoli padana. Padova: Marsilio.

Chapter Eight

A Tale of Two Giannis Nihilism, Appearances, and Writing as Rememoration Thomas Harrison

The most influential argument of the literary historian Hippolyte Taine was that creative writing bears indelible marks of the epoch and culture that produced it. 1 The obverse principle holds that texts arising from the same time and space cannot but share features in common. In some cases they will resemble each other as closely as siblings. Like siblings, they will illuminate traits in one another that would otherwise seem idiosyncratic. It is a hunch of this sort that motivates the present study. Looking at the work of a philosopher and a writer from the same decade and the same country, this chapter suggests that the philosophy finds expressive correlations in the fiction and the fiction its rationale in the philosophy. The narrator is Gianni Celati, the philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Born in 1937 and 1936, respectively, both are northern Italians and among the most highly respected practitioners of their arts in Italy in the past half century. In this context it may appear to some readers that the philosopher is playing an ancillary role to the narrator, or even that other Italian thinkers illuminate Celati’s fiction as brightly as Vattimo—in particular Giorgio Agamben. There is some truth to this; however, the reflections of Agamben that are most relevant to the fiction are more recent than those of Vattimo, whereas this chapter is concerned with a specific moment—the 1980s—and especially with a particular work of that decade: the four philosophical stories collected as Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (1987c; Appearances, 1991a), a work with whose logic Vattimo’s thinking of the time keeps very close step. 2 In fact, it is only in the eighties that a strong resemblance develops between these two writers, revealing a convergence of paths advancing from quite different directions and separating just as quickly again in the nineties. 165

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There is no easy way to characterize the place or ground of this convergence, which cultural historians of that decade in Italy often describe by way of the descriptor term riflusso. Designating a broad current of moral and intellectual revisionism, riflusso literally means reflux: the ebbing of a sea-tide sucking the waters of estuaries and rivers out and away with it. The tide that turned back in the 1980s, dispersing vast creative energies into the open sea, was one that had swelled throughout the sixties and seventies with the forces of militant cultural theory. These were the decades in which the positions of the Frankfurt School were advancing beyond the bases of the aesthetico-political maitre à penser, Georg Lukács, making Italian intellectuals sensitive to the fact that even their most earnest intentions could be absorbed and co-opted by cultural and commercial institutions. Influenced also by French structuralism and the modernist Pound-Eliot-Joyce-Beckett lineage, many Italian writers of the 1960s and 1970s turned audaciously experimental, contesting realist paradigms of reading and writing which were as short on utopian drive as complicitous with conventional understanding. Hence arose, among other self-conscious movements, the Italian “neo-avant-garde” (with which Celati himself was associated), sanctioned by a group of writers in Palermo in 1963 thence known as Gruppo 63. Within a decade or so, neo-avant-garde circles, abetted by very radical gestures in Italian politics, appeared to have stretched the conceptual tensions in writing to a breaking point. 3 By the beginning of the seventies Italian culture had become beleaguered by non-dialogical and ungovernable factions of Right and Left, vying among themselves to see who best could destabilize written and unwritten consensus. The 1980s saw this tidal pressure burst. With the anni di piombo (years of lead) of the previous decade, the tensions had taken on the form of street fighting, sabotage, bombings, political terrorism, and a calculated strategy of stress in which the stakes were nothing less than civil order. Pulling back appeared to be a necessary, emergency measure. Many intellectuals cried mea culpa, thinking their own passions to blame. An equal number thought that this colonization of moral commitment by extremist violence, accompanied by a conservative retrenchment of the mainstream public, spelled an epochal and definitive failure of the Left. Literal applications of political theory only provided evidence that everyday life could never be reformed by thought alone; that the ideal potential of things could not easily be extracted from inertial historical conditions. Incidentally the great theorist of this moment in Italian history was Massimo Cacciari, especially in Krisis (1976) and Pensiero negativo ([Negative thought] 1977), but that is the subject for another essay. The outcome was the 1980s—the most disillusioned decade Italy had known since the 1930s. One of the most interesting intellectual elaborations of the riflusso occurred in the pensiero debole (weak thought) of Gianni Vattimo. This demys-

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tifying philosophy held that the age of ideological contention was over, that defensible and righteous causes were at best products of insufficient reason, at worst guises of will to power. Il pensiero debole invoked an end to all categorical pronouncements about the nature of reality and the structure of history, proposing instead sensitivity to the fragile foundations of human projects, where all judgments of value were outcrops of care, and differences among them had to be negotiated by discursive exchange and interaction (see Vattimo’s 1982 interview). 4 The narrator Gianni Celati enacted the riflusso less explicitly than the theorists and philosophers, and mainly by a shift in literary style. Taken early under the wing of Italo Calvino, he was an active participant in Gruppo 63’s collective exposition of new strategies of scriptorial practice and contributed his own manifesto to their project with the 1976 essay “Parlato come spettacolo.” He brought a number of these strategies to fruition in strikingly inventive and ironic narratives peopled by characters jostling allegorically with the conditions of late modernity (Comiche, 1971 [Slapstick Silent Films], Le avventure di Guizzardi, 1973 [The Adventures of Guizzardi] 1973, and Lunario del paradiso, 1978 [Almanac of Paradise]). He wrote far-ranging essays in narrative theory assimilating the lessons of Walter Benjamin, Bakhtin’s “carnevalization” of literature, French poststructuralism, and the teachings of fellow Bolognese phenomenologist Enzo Melandri (Finzioni occidentali, 2nd edition, 1986 [Western fictions]). And then followed seven years of near narrative silence. When a new collection of tales did appear in the mid1980s—Narratori delle pianure (1985; Voices from the Plains, 1989)— it seemed to mark a radical abandonment of what had come before. Voices from the Plains was a ponderous, muted, minimalist set of stories with the quizzical brevity of parables. It lacked the exuberance and comic grossness of Celati’s earlier works, presenting itself in the pseudo-realistic guise of contemporary hearsay, the narrator purporting to have gathered many of these stories from everyday voices on the banks of the Po Valley. It was in accounting for the novelty of Voices from the Plains that Rebecca West noted affinities between these stories and principles articulated by contemporary Italian philosophy. The full extent of these ties, however, would not become clear until two years later, in 1987, with the publication of Celati’s Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (Appearances, 1991). It was here that the logic of his new narrative turn was most clearly revealed, and with that its kinship, not simply to the philosophical spirit of the times, but to its most popular spokesman, Vattimo. Appearances is entirely enveloped in that intellectual reflux of the 1980s which Vattimo was transforming into a philosophy and Celati into a new type of tale-telling. Certainly Celati’s most theoretically articulate fiction, the four novellas exemplify an aesthetic and an ethic that are still partially in evidence in Italy today.

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The “appearances” of Celati’s title name various phenomena: the plethora of signs circulating in postmodern culture; social ceremonies and gestures, prevailing increasingly over committed and effective action; the thick and often impenetrable guises of things and events; the ostensible intentions of books and poems, along with critical readings of them. Most importantly from the dramatic point of view, these “appearances” are the commodified specters of lives wasted on the margins of modern metropolises, spent admiring the chrome work on Yamaha motorcycles and robotically rehearsing television jingles. So ubiquitous are appearances in these stories that they cling to every aspect of life like a viscous skin, enclosing nothing. Just as ubiquitous are “appearances” in the post-Heideggerian thinking of these years. Their ontological ascendancy can be glossed by just a few principles of Vattimo’s weak version of that thinking. The most important is that the twentieth century has witnessed the end of metaphysics, defined as a mode of conception “dominated by simple presence, by the ideal of objectivity, by language as a pure instrument of communication” (Vattimo 1993, 88). As we know from Max Weber, Lukács, and most importantly Heidegger, such objectifying thought had been a long time in the making and finally culminated in technology, science, and industrial capitalism. Being, in the universal and ontological sense of the word, finally came to be identified as a collection of mere things that humans manipulate in the interests of profit, technological advancement, and the control of resources. The final outcome of metaphysics as a “science of Being,” or viewpoint in which beings are essentially what we humans take them to be, is the paradoxical conclusion that nothing truly lies beyond or beneath the sensory appearance of things— neither a “thing in itself” (noumenon), nor God, manifest destiny, historical purpose, nor a state of nature. The history of metaphysics reaches its end in the story of an inexorable indebolimento dell’essere—weakening of Being— by which essence is lost (there are only appearances: things as they appear to us) and Being is reduced to nil (Vattimo 1985, 27–56, 121–37, 172–89; 1988, 19–47, 113–29, 164–81). Lost, too, is any faith in that traditional access to ultimate reality which was the intellect. In this post-Heideggerian philosophy, the history of metaphysics is essentially a history of nihilism, affirming at last that what defies appearances— what lies behind them—is Nothing. “The substance of the desert mirages now glimmers everywhere,” notes a character in Celati’s Appearances (A 100). 5 “Where exactly has God gone and hid himself?” wonders another (A 120). The grand history of philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche, is a tragicomedy, humorously evidenced by Celati’s characters’ reactions to the dazzling mirages that surround them, one of them flipping through pornographic magazines in the hope that “by examining the glance of these almost too naked women I may be able to understand their soul” (A 104).

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Celati, no less than Vattimo, proposes more credible responses to this depletion of Being. Very simply, he imagines it preparing the way for a rare equation of truth with the reign of appearance, where the sheer “occurrence of all facts,” however meaningless on the surface, can be seen as “something marvelous” (Celati 1988a, 8). It may well be that no Identity is left standing in this weak ontology—no ego, no interior subjectivity, no History in the grand sense of a governing social plan. But what this “negative” development enables is an awareness of what Nietzsche thought of as the innocence of becoming, where things have no guilt and no hackneyed, false meanings. What can also be recuperated at this point is compassion for the passing on and away of things, along with a new task for the intellect: recollective, or “rememorative,” thinking. As far as I know, Celati has never expressed any sympathy for Vattimo’s thought; in fact, in person, in Philadelphia in the early 1990s, he suggested quite the opposite. Still his Appearances reads as a parable for problems to which Vattimo and others have given more lofty names. This four-novella study in the ramifications of appearance offers (1) a historical reason for them (late industrial society, where action and understanding do not coincide, leaving us with no good reason for much of what happens); (2) a physiognomy or phenomenology through which they are given (which is spectral and phantasmatic; which is noetically, geographically, and ecologically specific); and (3) an explanation of why such appearances, with nothing behind them, prove so unnerving. Most significantly, and this is the most interesting and important contribution to thought of both Celati and Vattimo, the writing advances (4) recommendations for how to respond to such appearances, or an implicit poetics and ethics. 6 “Conditions of Light on the Via Emilia,” the second story, is the most philosophical of the four and the most appropriate one with which to begin. The motor highway of the Via Emilia, running through several cities of the Po Valley, has become so fouled by congestion, industry, and vehicle traffic that it has been reduced to a place of dazzling blindness. Refracted through thick layers of smog, its light causes “a tremor in the air which made everything unstable” (A 42). This light, conventionally the medium of sight, dissolves and diffuses all known identities (A 42). In this industrial wasteland “the light confuses things rather than illuminating them” (A 53); “to look at and see something was almost impossible” (A 43). Worse still—and not incidentally—it is impossible to think about anything, for “the tremor in the air immediately carries off the thought of what you have seen” (A 43). On the Via Emilia (as also in Los Angeles and Birmingham, the narrator adds) illumination “had become a strangely opaque filter and more visible than that which it ought to reveal outside of us, far off in the world” (A 54). All that one can see are filters upon filters of appearance, which were once the indications or forms or “ideas” of something else.

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This dispersion of light implies a dispersion of identity and place. Aghast at the Arizona cypresses transplanted beside the entrances to the Via Emilia’s acrylic-colored houses, the landscape painter Emanuele Menini notes only their negative connotations: “these trees there are lost and dispersed because their place is on some mountain. They plant them here because they are lost and dispersed like me . . . and almost everybody I see near where I live” (A 46). “We no longer know,” says Celati in his own voice, in another text (Verso la foce), but of the same landscapes of the Po Valley, “where cities end: neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, one-way streets, and stoplights, slowing down and accelerating according to the traffic; the ending of a city is no longer a territorial limit but a change in the motions of driving, while waiting to be consigned to our destinations” (1989a, 53). Boundaries and determinable places have been overrun by a universal circuit of errancy, by a being in motion and on the way. In these places that are no places, thinks Menini, “we live like drunks.” (A 44 and 49) The interminable play of appearances also takes a toll on human subjectivity, once defined as the fundamentum inconcussum of the world. The ostensible spectators of this elaborate display, human beings are themselves no more than appearances—“figures and letters in some catalogue, obscure matter of which no one knows the essence” (A 103). They are marks in an alphabet, variables in a signifying nexus they cannot master. Indeed, the post-humanistic characters in Appearances have none of the trappings of character; they possess neither psychological depth nor dramatic purpose. History falls prey to the same volatization of purpose and essence, becoming only a haphazard and unguided unfolding of events, or rather an unfolding of media and stories in which such events are reported. Here we must feel a certain air of parody. “Language,” in the famous statement of Heidegger, “is the house of Being” (1977, 213 and 1975, 132; Vattimo 1988, 23–29). As Vattimo glosses this principle, the intelligible occurrences that constitute the history of Being (the totality of events that can be understood) are produced and generated by cultural tradition (tra-ditio), or by semiological structures passed on from one generation to the next. Being would be the result of a certain “dictation,” of oral, scriptorial, and behavioral modules generated by those in a position to do so (and more often than not, as both Celati and Vattimo learned from Walter Benjamin, in order to legitimate their own power). 7 This equation of comprehensible Being with “traditional” (or, loosely speaking, mass-mediatic) stories and explanations sets writers like Celati a task: to recuperate, for the sake of tradition, the intellectual and theoretical detritus rejected by official culture; the subcultural jargons and voices of those on the fringes of history, or accepted tradition. While Celati recognizes this reduction of Being to language, he hardly looks on it kindly. There is less “reason” at work in this tradition for him than there is for Vattimo (who, like his teacher Hans Georg Gadamer, risks being

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seen as tradition’s apologist). Prior to Appearances Celati had nearly thought of this historico-linguistic transmission as a vast, Deleuzian “non-sense of surface” (Boselli 1986, 86). Later, in the 1980s, it has become something more like “a world deficient in stories we can make use of, just as it is deficient in trees and oxygen” (Celati 1987b, 239). Given the late twentiethth-century tendency to write on everything from T-shirts to the façades of buildings, an inverse relationship now obtains between signic proliferation and semantic depth. “Lately,” says the same character who sought the souls of women in images of their bodies, “I have allowed [my son] to wear jerseys with American slogans, hoping they may help him to learn English” (A 104). Beneath the humor Celati is more visibly alarmed than Vattimo by the “motivation” of these forms, appearances, and idées reçues composing the only known world of Being, driven by a “free market economy” that is all too happy to dispense with the idea that things have a fixed, natural, or unalterable “essence,” and perhaps even inherent or inalienable value. The first consequence of this subsumption of Being by language is a reduction of the import of language itself. The protagonist of Appearances’ first story, Baratto, simply decides to quit speaking. While he cannot quite put his finger on why, what seems to make speaking futile is a reversal in the order of the understanding: Thoughts no longer follow experience; they precede and inform it. Worse still, these thoughts are not articulated by Language in the grand Heideggerian sense but by platitudes, fillers, meaningless exclamations, clichés, and ready-made phrases—graveyards, not houses, of Being. The beginning of the first story thus finds Baratto withdrawing from the rugby game he has mastered so well. He feels that this symbolic game “has nothing to do with him”; it is just another element in “an immense piece of make-believe . . . [a] whole comedy of appearances that makes us believe all sorts of things and instead none of it is true” (A 9, 31). No wonder he ends up tuning his television to empty channels and walking about his apartment “fanning his head” (A 13). Story four, “The Disappearance of a Praiseworthy Man,” features a comparable crisis on the part of the viewer of pornography. The story begins with him intent on writing his memoirs (in the “language of his fathers,” for that will presumably ground him in a tradition and help validate an identity he experiences as precarious). But it is not long before he wonders how he can express himself in a language that was never his to begin with. Couldn’t it be just as easily that anonymous stranger observing him from a window (with the exact same moustache) “who was writing my memoir, or at least a memoir similar in all ways, based on the script that unites us and makes us so alike” (A 114)? The greatest distrust in language arises in story three, whose protagonist is a student of literature. The fruit of all his years of study is this: that no readers or writers understand a single word of the books they spend their time on. Eventually the student writes a

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story of his own about a literary critic who awakes one morning with a horror for his calling because he realizes that “everything words say has nothing to do with whoever utters or writes them” (A 91). At this level, the semiotic overload of Appearances amounts to a parody of that society of communication to which Vattimo attached such hope in the same 1980s. After all, for Vattimo the discovery of the linguistic nature of Being acted as a tacit invitation for speakers to enrich their rhetorical resources. 8 His belief that discursive exchange might emancipate an unprecedented play of social, artistic, and communal interpretation found its Celatian retort in the vision of an overwhelmingly trivial, diminished, and impoverished circuit of inessential utterance. “Where do these thoughts come from?” Menini wonders. “Who knows!” (A 50). Nor can anyone say where they are going. Just look at the tremor of appearances on the Via Emilia, says the painter, “and then tell me if someone feeling the tremor can think of the horizon and have the wish to live in its company. Impossible!” (A 52). To think of the horizon, figuratively speaking, is to reflect on the very contexts of thinking, to understand the “hermeneutics” in which words and images are gathered; to question the very bases and preconditions of meaning, which may themselves amount to the history of Being or “God,” whose absence is so often invoked in these novellas. This is what the tremor makes impossible. One is all wrapped up in appearances without knowing what horizon they belong to. The consequences for art are dire. Menini, the painter, is one of several creative types in Appearances. A half-dozen others are writers. Almost all are tellers of tales. The painter’s difficulty in seeing beyond the light’s “myriads of rays” is the problem of both artist and intellectual. If Menini “doesn’t see immobility, he certainly can’t manage to paint it” (A 39–40, 47). Nor can Celati’s storytellers see how communication can be put to any meaningful end. This problem is not new to modernist European fiction. However, the problem is compounded in the late twentieth century by the realization that not just everyday discourse, but creative writing itself, is vitiated by the mechanicity, abstraction, and anonymity of language at large. No extra-linguistic insight, as it were, originates and determines intellectual constructions. Vattimo has an apparent answer to this impasse. As essentialist metaphysics reaches its end (reducing things to appearances), the destiny of art turns destructive rather than constructive. It is not true, as it once was for the nineteenth-century Romantics, that poetry “establishes that which endures.” Art does not found and legitimate the structures of human belief. Rather, since at least the Futurists, the prime function of creative writing has become something more like the opposite: to expose and underscore the weakness of language, the fragility of each word or appearance in which Being is housed. 9 This is the appropriate task of art during the “weakening of Being,”

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or the end of metaphysics. Some neo-neo-avant-gardists still see this as their mission today. Like the illumination on the Via Emilia, even the light of poetry shatters, creating tremors in perception. Nor is this a preliminary, deconstructive move, to be followed by a more “constructive,” rebuilding project of art. The shattering of the word is not proleptic to a rebirth of myth or a reinvigoration of language. It is the distinguishing mark of twentiethcentury art tout court, the very modus operandi of aesthetic revelation at the end of modernity. Creative writing remains the best place to see the inner nature of Being-as-language revealed. This aesthetic scenario works only partially well for Celati. With him we do not inhabit the tongued-tied world of Adorno’s Schoenberg or Bloch’s expressionists. We are in places where people appear compelled to speak despite their linguistic insufficiency, proffering their banal stories to one and all. And this makes Celati’s responses to the linguistic crises even more interesting than the ways that he registers them. The negativity of knowledge in Appearances becomes a vacuum sucking words into it, pulling them out of spaces we did not think they filled. To see how this works, let us turn to the evidence of style. Celati’s narrator, in Appearances and often elsewhere, is strangely unelegiac toward the post-humanist environment that is his subject. He shares a manner with two masters whose lessons he has learned: Franz Kafka and Robert Walser. Celatian characters such as Baratto, the passionate reader of books in the third story, and the “praiseworthy man” of the last story only half-suffer their living conditions. They do not come across as victims of an emptied-out world (but nor are they as light as the characters of Walser and Kafka). Fallen philosophically though their destinies may be, dramatically these destinies are casual rather than tragic—outcomes of processes the characters themselves hardly understand. Their lives nag them in ways they only vaguely intuit. In fact, they are of a family with those half-conscious simpletons incarnated by the new generation of Italian film comics in the same decade— Massimo Troisi, Roberto Benigni, and Maurizio Nichetti: bumbling, naïve, and disadvantaged human beings, who paradoxically get on quite better than those more advantaged. (A fourth modern comic, Nanni Moretti, may offer the best metaphor of all for the Celatian narrator. 10) Except for Menini’s somber meditations in story two, the situations embodying the philosophical dilemmas of Celati’s novellas are comical, light, and grotesque: Baratto walking through his apartment holding his penis (the only apparently real thing left) and fanning his head; the praiseworthy man scheming to rid his house of his generation-X son; the student who is bad at selling books because he believes they should be read. Celati’s world of action, presented as though it were perfectly normal, is marked by a deformation of the norm and a logic of inconsequence: “Lately Baratto’s wife has been coming back late in the evening and maybe has another man, but Barat-

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to hasn’t asked her because it doesn’t interest him” (A 11). Yet there is something strangely therapeutic about these negative actions and characters, these “weak thinkers” in flesh and blood. Things that readers would consider of great import and weight do not matter to them. Deprived nearly of human intention, the subjects of Appearances seem to exist in a state of suspension, acting as they do without any apparent will to do so. 11 In Celati the abnormal wears the guise of the normal. Such ethical detachment offsets the “nihilism” to which these characters are historically condemned, tempering what would otherwise be a cause for elegy. There is no missing full life to which these depleted ones can be contrasted; there is only the diminished life. And, being all there is, it is not felt as diminished. One of Vattimo’s favorite parables explains why. Once the metaphysical—or “essential” and “true”—world has lost its credibility, writes Nietzsche, we are left only with a world of surfaces, illusions, and appearances. However, since we no longer have a “true world” to contrast it with, this “apparent” world is no longer a world of mere appearance; it is Being pure and simple, Being in all its rich ambiguity and innocence of becoming, in its perceptible form. Celati places a similarly intentioned parable from Kafka as the epigraph to Appearances (an epigraph curiously dropped from the English translation): “For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they stand sleekly above it and a little push would be enough to make them fall. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But look, even this is only an appearance” (Kafka 1983, 382). What both parables claim is this: Belief in secure, metaphysical foundations beneath what we see is only one prejudice among many others. To lament the absence of such foundations, at the “end of metaphysics,” is just to react unreflectively to the world as we have it, in its apparent self-evidence. A more mature response to this absence would consist in recognizing that this very expectation—that appearances should have a foundation—is just one more illusion, another “appearance.” The new issue at stake is this: Can the sheer appearances of the world, when bereft of support, be experienced as anything more than fallen, empty, or superficial? Can we see wavering thoughts and forms as deep if they are all there is to the significance of Being? In still other terms, can what Vattimo calls the sfondamento—the “foundationlessness”—of phenomena be seen as a positive feature, instead of an index of what they lack? Celati’s answer, like Vattimo’s, is yes, and this is what makes his appearances more than Baudrillardian simulacra. This is the answer to nihilism. Nihilism, that sense of vacuity produced by a feeling of missing foundations, can be overcome by embracing this very foundationlessness (or the sensation that appearances are founded only in more and more appearances). This is the only way to recover

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from a feeling of intellectual shame, and all the main characters of Celati’s four stories do it in one way or another. The story that most strongly denounces the tyranny of appearances ends up revalidating them. “Conditions of Light on the Via Emilia” suggests that when strong, metaphysical beams of evidence or revelation no longer shine, something else comes into the light: the very coming-into-appearance of things, with nothing behind them: the coming to pass and the passing away of phenomena. An implicit intertext here is a celebrated passage of Heidegger according to which primordial truth—not the truths of science or organized religion, of evidence or of revelation—unfolds in the manner of a Lichtung: a clearing in the forest where illumination is filtered through shadows. 12 As Vattimo explains it, this coming-into-view-of-appearance-itself, as phenomenal happening, is what the nihilistic, postmetaphysical age makes possible, and perhaps for the first time. This is what Menini sees in the absence of transparency, immobility, and firm identity on the Via Emilia: significance without signified. In the hazy half-light Menini sees truth in the sense of aletheia (un-concealedness): the arising of things out of that basic hiddenness or recessiveness of their origin which the Greeks called lethe. Refracted by pragmatics, smog, and semiotics, by the filters of cultural transmission, the illumination on the Via Emilia half lights its contents and half withholds them. It is wavering and broken, irreducibly ambivalent and ambiguous. Each something that comes into this light also appears to be nothing; all clarity is partially obstructed (cf. Vattimo 1985, 27–38; 1988, 19–30). Menini’s distinction among other observers is really this: that he sees the light that others do not. Within this light insubstantiality comes into appearance. Menini says: “everything that is there—if it stays still—you at once see what it is. What is it?” Luciano did not know and Menini told him: “A mere nothing in the light, a mere nothing which comes into the light.” (A 52)

This is as close as we can get to that Being, that Essence, from which things proceed, that locus of “God,” the sole creator of something from nothing, whose absence is so frequently noted in these pages. The fundamentality of this Nothing is discovered by nearly each character in Appearances. Isn’t this what causes the young woman in “Readers of Books are Ever More False” to tremble with trepidation whenever she opens a book? Printed words always gave her an impression of voices “emerging from a door opened on to the darkness” (A 80). In each voice, gesture, and word she gets the feeling that something is trying but failing to reach the surface, as happens when certain streets, houses, or shadows “mean something or other” to children, but they cannot say what. “May it not be that all these things cause trepidation,” she wonders, “precisely because they are

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nothing at all?” (A 84–85). They are nothing in the positive, metaphysical sense. Surely that is why people cling so obstinately to the very surface of things, the young woman starts to realize. In fact their most effective shelter from the terror of depths is speech itself, meaningless speech. For when discourse is reduced to “idle talk [Gerede],” language “serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us . . . as rather to close it off”; small talk perverts “the act of disclosing into an act of closing off” (Heidegger 1962, 213). What might have been disclosed in language—in its a-letheia or Lichtung—is precisely the Nothing. Celati’s Appearances raises the question as to whether a postmetaphysical truth might consist in a recognition of the Nothing at the bottom of our appearances. The woman walks down a street immersed in a surfeit of billboards, sounds, and voices (an analogue of Menini’s Via Emilia). It gives her the impression of “a huge mind in which words and thoughts of shadows wandered, but where the shadows going about seemed to be ashamed to be shadows” (A 86). Such a “mind” is a defense against Mind, a barrier to recognition of the umbral nature of human existence. The woman, like Menini the painter, peers into these shadows. Whenever she truly gives herself over to reading, she “thought she made out in the printed lines something uncertain and indistinct—like a mute apparition against which the words moved restlessly” (A 88). Whether on the page or in the streets, words seemed always to be “standing in the way of a strange apparition, which lacked the power of speech and which was emerging out there” (A 88). Could it be that “all the sentences in books and newspapers and posters had only this aim: to prevent this mute apparition from appearing and to keep away the embarrassment which the thought of it might have caused” (A 88)? In a book that inflects the word apparenza in so many ways, these last three uses of the term are so unusual that the translator Stuart Hood feels compelled to render the word “apparition” instead of “appearance.” The apparition suppressed by appearances is Appearance itself—the phenomenal occurrence of life, the coming-into-view of things with nothing visible within or outside them. We might then speak of two orders of appearance here, or of two levels to its operations: One is the everyday phantasmagoria of what we perceive as we function unthinkingly, which serves to veil a void. The other is the apparition of that void itself, its self-manifestation. The important thing, however, is that this second order of appearance can be sensed only in, and by means of, the first—but only on the condition that we do not take the first literally. This is what it means that the woman senses “apparition” only “in the printed lines,” “in these little black marks” (A 88, 87)—in the signifiers rather than the signifieds of language. The apparition is not in what the words “say,” but in the form by which they say. If truth still has meaning, it lies in the venues of linguistic disclosure, in the nature and manner of linguistic pronounce-

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ments, not in what they purport to communicate. Being is truly only Language, the manner in which meaning is presented. The praiseworthy man of story four stumbles on the same Nothing that he and others had been at such pains to suppress throughout the stories. By profession a corporate salesman of “containers” (empty forms), he has never laid eyes on a single specimen of the items he sells; he orders these containers for his clients entirely from catalogues. One day it begins to dawn on him that his catalogues and containers are no different from the morals and conventions he unthinkingly follows. One day he goes off to Switzerland to persuade some ordinary Swiss of the goodness of our containers, and there I at last saw something that seemed to me the opposite of our catalogues. Cows at pasture looked at me as if to say: “Oh look, there’s something out there in the world.” I saw from their glance that that was what they were thinking. They were thinking with surprise, “Oh look, there’s something out there,” thanks to the lack of catalogues. What did these cows see? Something indistinct and without a code, perhaps they saw the essence of the great void. That was why they had such a relaxed and relaxing air, I imagine. (A 102)

Most characters in Appearances achieve something of the cows’ relaxation. They gaze on the great void with what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, letting things happen, accepting rather than rebelling against their apparent vacuity. An Eastern type of logic is at work here, whose high point is Zen. In a Western version of that logic, Gianni Vattimo argues that one “overcomes” metaphysical nihilism not by way of a Hegelian Ueberwindung (supplanting one condition by another, in a dialectical sublimation), but rather through a Verwindung (transforming it from within, as when one convalesces from an illness or a state of mourning by working through it). 13 Nihilism is overcome by accepting the ineluctable recession, in our time, of essences, foundations, and Being, the reduction of certainty, identity, and permanence to volatility, nothingness, and being-unto-death. That is when all that is lost, repressed, or suppressed can come back to life. The “convalescence” of the praiseworthy, retentive, moral man begins when he abandons his strategies of containment and order. He dons his son’s loathsome Walkman, picks up his office secretary (the “no longer young Mme Agnès,” dressed in pink with patent leather boots and a blond wig), and, wearing the “happy expressions of expectant tourists,” the two set off toward snow-capped mountains in the distance. These are the last lines of Celati’s volume, appropriately envisioning a hope—a desideratum—which is signaled by the narrator abandoning the first-person, present tense of the narration for a more philosophical, third-person future:

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Thomas Harrison They will walk at a good pace and always with happy expectation—to go where? Where? But who can say where a man is going? Often one thinks he knows but it is a mistake. All that one knows is that one must go on, go on, go on like a pilgrim of this world, until the awakening, if the awakening ever should come. (A 125–26)

This final sentence is the most important in the collection. Its hypothetical “if” suggests that a spiritual or philosophical awakening—where one condition is converted into another—may never occur in historical fact. If such an awakening is possible, it would probably consist only in a new perspective on something that has always been the case—the being-on-the-way of a “pilgrim of this world.” It would envision a quest predicated on the relinquishment of all prior quests. Acquiescing now in shimmering appearances (pink clothes, patent leather boots), the “praiseworthy” man is on the verge of becoming conscious of an ineluctable destiny, coming finally to feel himself to be “like other people, and like the others on the road to an unknown future of innocence” (A 125). A condition of Being has given way to Becoming. Thus do the characters in Appearances adapt to the conditions that once caused them anguish—adapt and thrive, transforming their malaise into something closer to bliss. Even the mute Baratto, after recognizing that he has no thoughts of his own, comes to exude an air of religiousness, like a type of holy fool or the “poor in spirit” of the Bible. “He’s someone who doesn’t worry,” marvels his employer, “not even about people’s worries about him. What do you bet that this individual has been touched by grace?” Unlike other passersby, who mask their shadowy nature, Baratto is “like a shadow that passes without worrying that he is a shadow. An appearance which is already a disappearance” (A 23, 25). He takes to wandering through Europe with Japanese tourists, in a development that prompts the narrator to remark, “You would think he has finally found his own people, and feels himself like those foreigners who are led about in flocks, looked after by guides who recite strange litanies of names, lost in the great tourist mystery of the world” (A 27). Tourists are like the pilgrims in Celati’s last lines, but with secular intent, reveling in the world’s strange and incomprehensible phenomena. Tourism is where speechless displacement finds its modus vivendi as well as its redemption. By the end of this tale the tourist becomes our guide. When he finally resumes speech it is with a voice that seems to belong to a person long dead: “come la voce fievole e impastata d’un morto che non parli da secoli” (like the weak soft voice of a dead person who has not spoken for centuries, [A 34]). In this appearance too lies another appearance: the succoring function of the guide Virgil, converting Dante’s errancy into a metaphysical journey: (“Mentre ch’io rovinava in basso loco,” writes Dante, “dinanzi agli occhi mi

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si fu offerto/ chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco” [Inferno 1.61–63]). And what wise words does this strange and improbable guide now share with his listeners? He declares that “his thoughts aren’t there but elsewhere . . . that time goes by and thoughts go by and who knows where thoughts go . . . ‘Phrases come and go and make the thoughts come which then go. Talk and talk, think and think and then there’s nothing left. The head is nothing—it all happens in the open’” (A 35–36). If we take these words literally, as I think we must, Baratto is saying that thoughts follow the coming and goings of phrases, the meanderings of time, which reduce all presence to absence (“there’s nothing left”). These thoughts are offshoots of “in-formation,” shapings of the inner by the outer. Baratto resumes speech because he has abandoned his faith in words, and is ready to speak in another way. And it is a comparable wisdom that leads Celati to write stories like these, disabused of belief in human inwardness, in subjective knowledge and semantic depth. At this point it becomes clear that the proper post-nihilistic topic of speech is outsideness, the horizon in which life is lived, the estrangement of humans in language itself. A poetics is implied by these stories and it is very close to the one Vattimo reaps from his own weakening of Being. As we know from different turns in post-Heideggerian philosophy, time is the most intractable of all obstacles to any essentialist metaphysics of presence. What churns the fine “dust” that fills every nook of Appearances (A 29–30, 40, 48, 65, 86, 96, 119) is the temporal distension of phenomenal occurrence, spread out over a process in which things do not last and one moment is replaced by another. Coming-into-appearance is also perpetual dying. What could possibly be the function of storytelling in a life such as this? For Celati it is the same as the function of thinking in Vattimo: to commemorate, “rememorate,” perhaps even redeem, being-unto-death. “Everything that is written,” says a poet reminiscent of Eugenio Montale who is interviewed by the student in story three, is already dust at the very moment it is written and it is right that it should be lost with all the other dusts and ashes of the world. Writing is a way of consuming time, paying it the homage that is its due: it gives and it takes and what it gives is only what it takes, so that its sum total is always zero, the insubstantial. We wish only to be able to celebrate this insubstantial thing, and the void, the shadow, the dry grass, the stones of crumbling walls and the dust that we breathe. (A 96)

This kind of writing (practiced, I submit, by Gianni Celati) takes time as its raw material—time not as a medium in which things happen (things taken as the “subjects” of traditional art), but time as the stream of their happening. Here time is itself the “substance,” as it were, of dramatic occurrence. Writing as a consuming or passing of time adds nothing to it. What all words total

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is always zero—“the insubstantial.” Writing, with a sense of language’s utter superficiality, is a rhetorical correlative to the dust lifted off everyday shelves. It draws attention to what is dying, to what is generally repressed by pragmatic, progressive consciousness. Useless as such post-nihilistic writing may seem to be, it is, in Celati’s words on Walser, a vast celebration of “all that escapes us” (1988b, 11). Assuming that presence is also and inevitably a transmission of absence, any writing which takes note of such presence can only be recollective. To celebrate the shadows and the stones of crumbling walls is to draw attention to appearances that are dispersed, forgotten, or dead. Vattimo assigns a comparable task to post-metaphysical philosophy. He calls it thinking about absential presence, or An-denken: thinking back on, or rememorating, the frailty of living appearances. 14 The real topic of thinking at the end of metaphysics is the oblivion of Being—not beings as they appear, but their being in the way they appear. This kind of thinking “recalls” that difference between Being and beings which occurs naturally and linguistically in time. It speaks of how our forms of experience are culturally, historically, and linguistically mediated, and thus mortal and evanescent. This poetics entails an ethics, and this is the last important convergence between Celati and Vattimo. The proper word for this bearing toward things that crumble, writes Vattimo, is “pietas” (1985, 184; 1988, 175–76). A preChristian word, pietas implies respect toward a source of authority (which is here “apparition,” the coming-into-appearance of things) as well as compassion toward the “subjects” of this authority (what appearance casts our way). This means sympathetic understanding of our cultural horizons no less than openness to those of others. Celatian pietas is particularly concentrated on historical loss, enacting recuperative attention to what is barely articulate, not to mention sensitivity toward weakness, respect for nature, affectionate irony, and caritas toward what merely exists (characteristics noted also by Lumley 1993, 57 and West 2000, 247–48). Writing is a “deposit field” where we examine how understanding relates to experience. Yet as soon as we do so, “all we succeed in seeing is the ever unsubstantial and fleeting nature of experience and thought. Hence this deposit field is a place where our own indigence appears, our limitations and the precariousness of our roots in habits. . . . In this sense, writing can be an activity that makes a difference, valuing (or honoring) our misery” (Celati 1987a, 53). A final few words are in order about how this poetics achieves some of its philosophical and ethical purposes. If meanings are stories that we tell ourselves, or tradition-bound “fabulations,” then the Celati of Appearances is hardly interested in adding to these fabulations. Rather, fabulation-as-a-process is what he intends to display and examine. His stories are interested in the ways we tell stories, in the needs and the functions that those stories

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serve, in how they bring nothing to light in jargons and idiolects, in places that are no places. Heideggerian “facticity”—the givenness and constructedness of everyday life—becomes more interesting a matter for thought than new plot inventions. If traditional narrative fiction takes strong, unique, dramatic events as its main nodes of significance, the narrated events of Celati’s stories are instead incidental; casual to the point of dramaturgic irrelevance; driven by no strong existential motivation. The more perplexing the events, notes Carla Benedetti (1993, 31–35), the fewer the authorial elucidations of them. Appearances is thus as anti-literary a book as it is anti-philosophical. Freed from the will to fabulate truth, it engages in a narrative hermeneutics, exploring the ubiquitous sway of signs and language, the foundation of knowledge in hearsay, or sentito dire (see Celati 2005 and Porretto 2009). Writing comes to approximate reading, investigating, as it were, “the mind’s natural cinema” (Celati 2001, 5). Protagonists remain appropriately nameless. The “impassible I” of Celati’s narrator (Boselli 1986, 79) is as vacant as the I of his characters—no more than an eye, a recorder of evanescence, compiling strange cases for thought. Most of such cases occur on the fringes of civic waste, spawned but neglected by culture. Celati tends to illuminate these cases through a free indirect subjective discourse, where the narrator’s idiom cannot be disentangled from that of his characters, as is appropriate to a poetics of pietas. The import of words lies mainly in how they are delivered, not to mention in what they don’t say. Disclosure takes place in the textures of discourse, between the lines, in “hints” and winks, and lures (A 80, 81). As Celati tells himself in a rare personal moment, a writer like him is not “the master of a ‘more correct’ vision of the world”: “You are exposed to the air like the other creatures, and your words are those of others, emission of breath. Rather, listen closely to others: the sound of the voices that reach the ear, all these emissions of breath that rise to the sky” (1989a, 18). In a post-metaphysical age, voice is the ultimate interest of voice—voice understood as an appeal to a listener, a form or sign of intention, a will to communicate. Engaging in such a poetics of voice is like going to visit a friend only to find that he is not home: “You realize you are there, you’d like to build bridges with words, but it’s impossible” (1989a, 134). You’ve brought a voice, but no dialogue follows. Still you do not leave emptyhanded, for it was already in response to a sensed appeal that you paid your friend a visit. Writing, in this sense, would be a response to a vaguely experienced appeal. And it voices, in turn, another appeal—to the very silence invoking the speech. As Celati puts it in an essay on Calvino, it is “the implicitness and silence of experience that gives birth to the prose of the world” (1987b, 238). Celati’s fiction rememorates this silence from which it springs, tracing circuits of appeal that are heard and then voiced again, celebrating the “noth-

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ing” words vainly attempt to say. This is how it aims to offset those dispersed relationships which the painter Menini finds threatening our powers of articulation. “Appeals of seagulls resound,” observes Celati, one calls and others reply. Even words are appeals, they do not define anything, they call something to make it stay with us. And what we can do is call things, invoke them so that they may come to us with their stories: call them so that they don’t become so estranged as to depart each on its own in a different direction of the cosmos, leaving us here unable to recognize a trace by which to orient ourselves. (1989a, 134)

NOTES 1. A version of this chapter previously appeared in Annali d’Italianistica: Italian Critical Theory (2011) 29: 269–89. 2. Ties between Agamben and Celati have been noted by our foremost Celati scholar, Rebecca West (2000, 51–54), also the first to point out general affinities with Vattimo. Less compelling links between Celati and Agamben have been drawn by Novero (1992). 3. Thus concluded both Eco and Calvino, reflecting that the problem with the neo-avantgarde was not only that it was politically feckless, but that it exacerbated the very fractures that required social mending. See Eco (1981) and Calvino (1984). 4. The best samples in English of weak thought have appeared in the first nine volumes of the journal Differentia. For introductory expositions of this aspect of Vattimo’s philosophy see Borradori (1988) and Antiseri (1996). More recent books on the contexts of contemporary Italian philosophy include Benso and Schroeder (2007, 2010), Chiesa and Toscano (2009) and Calcagno (2015). 5. The pagination of the Italian original and the English translation being virtually identical, I will reference them both as A and, unless specified, use Hood’s translations. 6. The word appearance is used on pages 25, 31, 35, 66, 71, 80, 84, 88, 95, 105, 118, 122, 123. 7. On Vattimo’s central tenet of Being as tradition and linguistic transmission, see The End (1993, 119–21, 151–55, 160, 174); Transparent Society (1992, 40–41); The Adventure of Difference (1993, 110–21). For his and Celati’s affinities with Benjamin see The End (1993, 9, 103); Transparent Society (1992, 2–3, 81); Celati (1975) “Il bazar archeologico”; West (2000, 81–85); and Benedetti (1993). 8. See Vattimo 1989, 11 (1992, 4), where he prefigures an entire generation’s enthusiasm for the discursive opportunities of the Internet (without anticipating, however, the concomitant consolidation of media ownership in the hands of a few). “For us, reality is . . . the result of an intersection or ‘contamination’ (in the Latin sense) of a multiplicity of images, interpretations and re-constructions circulated by the media in competition with one another or at least without any ‘central’ coordination. The view I want to put forward is that in the media society, the ideal of emancipation modeled on lucid self-consciousness . . . is replaced by an ideal of emancipation based on oscillation, plurality and, ultimately, on the erosion of the very ‘principle of reality’” (15). 9. See Vattimo, 1980, 97–122 (1993, 85–109); 1981, 54–68; 1983; and 1985, 59–117 (1988, 51–109). The philosopher hence endorses modernist and avant-garde trends in aesthetic theory “according to which the negative cannot be included and liquidated in the perspective of a possible final ‘redemption.’ Examples would include . . . Bataille and Breton . . . Adorno and Marcuse, and . . . Benjamin and Bloch” (1993, 131). By the twentieth century, Vattimo concludes, art becomes a “mode of infinite analysis” (1993, 132). 10. In his film Caro diario (1994) Moretti embodies the same dry, speechless spirit that Celati musters up in response to the hollowness of surface meanings. The everydayness that interests the wandering Moretti bears witness to the same “mute ‘thereness’” (West 2000, 22)

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that Celati, the itinerant writer of the late 1980s and 1990s, is bent on documenting. As in Appearances, Moretti’s film even has a critic eating his words, cringing in bed as he hears his fulsome lines read back to him. West shares this vision of Celati and Moretti as analogues on the back cover of Celati’s 1998 Avventure in Africa. 11. The ultimate prototype for these characters is Melville’s “Bartleby,” a tale that Celati (1991b) has translated into Italian and introduced with a luminous essay. See West’s detailed analysis as well as Benedetti 1993, 36–37 and Agamben 1993, 35–37. 12. The passage is this: “In the midst of Beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting [Lichtung]. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know” (Heidegger 1975, 53). Primordial Truth may therefore be understood as “a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself” (1975, 223). 13. See Vattimo 1985, 179–84 and 1980, 126–29 (1993, 113–16). Vattimo stresses the semantic connection between Verwindung and convalescence, and proposes that metaphysics can be “overcome” not by pretending to do without it (or without reason, binary logic, and a belief in “truth”), but only by living out and through the frustration of the metaphysical urge, the relative failure of truth and identity-discourse in contemporary thinking. On the logic of conversion and convalescence in Celati (which is also reminiscent of Zen) see West 2000, 271–85. 14. Sustained reflections on An-denken can be found in Vattimo 1980, 123–49 (1993, 110–36), 1981, 59, and 1985, 123–29 (1988, 115–21). Since “the oblivion of Being [or the very fact that passing things are forgotten] is . . . inscribed in Being itself,” such Being can only “be thought as gewesen, only as what is not present (any longer).” Rememorative thinking “does not reach back to the origin and appropriate it; it only retreads the ways of errancy, the only richness, the only Being, we are given” (1985, 182–83 [1988, 174, trans. slightly revised]).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Antiseri, Dario. 1996. The Weak Thought and its Strength. Trans. Gwyneth Weston. Brookfield, VT: Avebury. Benedetti, Carla. 1993. “Celati e le poetiche della grazia.” Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana 1: 27–53. Benso, Silva, and Richard Schroeder, eds. 2007. Contemporary Italian Philosophy: Crossing the Borders of Ethics, Politics, and Religion. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2010. Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo. Albany: SUNY Press. Borradori, Giovanna, ed. 1988. Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Boselli, Mario. 1986. “Finzioni di superficie.” Nuova corrente 97: 75–88. Cacciari, Massimo. 1976. Krisis: saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1977. Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione. Venezia: Marsilio. Calcagno, Antonio. 2015. Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Calvino, Italo. 1984. “Rievochiamo la vicenda e il significato del ‘Gruppo 63’: gli ultimi fuochi.” La Repubblica, 9 October. Celati, Gianni. 1975. “Il bazar archeologico.” Il Verri 11: 11–35. ———. 1976. “Parlato come spettacolo.” In Gruppo 63. Ed. Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi, 226–35. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1985. Narratori delle pianure. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1986. Finzioni occidentali: fabulazione, comicità e scrittura. 2nd edition. Torino: Einaudi.

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———. 1987a. “Conversazione con Gianni Celati.” Ed. Antonietta Lapenna. Gradiva 4. 1: 53–57. ———. 1987b. “Palomar, nella prosa del mondo.” Nuova corrente 100: 227–42. ———. 1987c. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1988a. “L’angelo del racconto.” Il Manifesto, 30 October: 7–8. ———. 1988b. “Robert Walser, lezione di scandalo.” Il Manifesto, 13 November: 11. ———. 1989a. Verso la foce. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1989b. Voices from the Plains. Trans. Robert Lumley. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 1991a. Appearances. Trans. Stuart Hood. London: Serpent’s Tail. ———. 1991b. Introduction to Bartleby lo scrivano, by Herman Melville. Trans. Gianni Celati. Milano: Feltrinelli. VII-XXVI. ———. 1998. Avventure in Africa. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 2001. Cinema naturale. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 2005. “Dialogo sulla fantasia. Gianni Celati risponde a Massimo Rizzante.” http:// www.griseldaonline.it/temi/a-rovescio/celati-dialogo-sulla-fantasia-con-massimo-rizzante.html Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano, eds. 2009. The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Politics. Melbourne: Re.Press. Dante Alighieri. 1980. Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press. Differentia: Journal of Italian Thought. 1986–1999. Flushing, NY. Vols 1–9. https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/ Eco, Umberto. 1981. “The Death of the Gruppo 63.” Twentieth Century Studies (September): 60–71. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1975. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1977. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell, 189–242. New York: Harper & Row. Kafka, Franz. 1983. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books. Lumley, Robert. 1993. “Gianni Celati: ‘Fictions to Believe In.’” In The New Italian Novel. Ed. Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, 43–58. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Novero, Cecilia. 1992. “‘Baratto’ di Gianni Celati e l’affermazione passiva del pudore.” Romance Language Annual 4: 314–18. Porretto, Elizabeth Webber. 2009. “Gianni Celati’s Position as Storyteller in Costumi degli italiani.” In “Scrittori inconvenienti”: Essays on and by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gianni Celati. Ed. Armando Maggi and Rebecca West, 199–207. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Vattimo, Gianni. 1980. Le avventure della differenza. Milano: Garzanti. ———. 1981. Al di là del soggetto. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1982. “Bottle, Net, Truth, Revolution, Terrorism, Philosophy.” Trans. Thomas Harrison. Denver Quarterly 16: 4 (Winter): 24–34. ———. 1983. “The Shattering of the Poetic Word.” In The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry. Trans. and ed. Thomas Harrison, 223–35. New York: Out of London Press. ———. 1985. La fine della modernità. Milano: Garzanti. ———. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1989. La società trasparente. Milano: Garzanti. ———. 1992. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1993. The Adventure of Difference. Trans. Cyprian Blamires with the assistance of Thomas Harrison. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vattimo, Gianni, and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds. 1983. Il pensiero debole. Milano: Feltrinelli.

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West, Rebecca. 2000. Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chapter Nine

Walking in the Open Enchanted by the Overheard Two Reflections on Towards the River’s Mouth Massimo Rizzante

In the 1980s Gianni Celati, like the protagonist of Robert Walser’s 1919 Der Spaziergang (The Walk), was overcome by a wandering urge to exit the house, to leave behind his “writing room, or room of phantoms” ([1957] 2012, 13). 1 He treks about the Po Valley, at times with photographers, more often alone, almost always on foot, carrying pen and notebook. He walks in the fog, under the sun, when it rains: a traveler similar to the Henry Thoreau of “Walking,” unable to stay in his “chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust” ([1862] 2002, 182). He is not fond of expeditions, of organized tours, of literary tourism. He is a restless being, melancholic, with manias, fixations, humorous outbursts, irritations. He is familiar with the tastelessness of the present, but doesn’t brood over lost steps. He prefers to advance toward the unknown, which doesn’t mean exploring a distant or exotic place. That which is unknown is close at hand: the problem is that we are often unable to observe it. In the “Note” that precedes the four diaries of Verso la foce (Towards the River’s Mouth), he writes: “The four journeys here presented thus recount the crossing of a type of desert of solitude, which is however also everyday normal life. If they have some meaning, at least for the writer, depends on the fact that an intense observation of the external world makes us less apathetic (dafter or saner, more cheerful or more desperate)” (1). 187

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Thanks to “an intense observation of the external world,” Celati discovers that love for the unknown may arise even in relatively familiar places: the Po Valley thus becomes Walser’s “lake country” (Seeland). The adventurous aspect of a familiar place, however, can be graspable only if the intensity of the observation produces a suspension of judgment that supports an absolute receptivity putting into play vision, hearing, and all the other senses. The walker, as Walser affirms, whom everyone takes for a deadbeat and hopeless skulker or irresponsible idler, in reality is endowed with a zeal enabling him to “touch the fringes of exact science” ([1957] 2012, 62). The “science” of which Walser speaks is “exact” to the degree to which it is able to open, “unselfish and unegoistic,” to the observation of all things: The highest and the lowest, the most serious as well as the most hilarious things are to him equally beloved, beautiful, and valuable. He [the walker] must bring with him no sort of sentimentally sensitive self-love, but rather must let his careful eye wander and stroll where it will, unselfish and unegoistic; he must be continuously able to efface himself in the contemplation and observation of things, while understanding how to put behind him, little consider, and forget outright like a brave, zealous, and joyfully self-immolating front-line soldier, himself, his private complaints, needs, wants, and sacrifices. . . . He must be able to launch himself up into enthusiasm but just as easily sink down into the smallest everyday thing—and it is probably that he can. Faithful, devoted self-surrender and self-effacement among objects, and assiduous love for all phenomena, also make him happy. ([1957] 2012, 61–62)

Celati, following the steps of Walser, discovers in the course of his explorations of the Po Valley, an “exact science” of the enchantment with the infinite fullness of every thing, whether a little “geometric house,” an animal with a “powerful gaze,” or an old man sitting at a country bar waiting for time to pass (Towards the River’s Mouth, 10, 14, 13). 2 This enchantment stirs in Celati an awareness of the volatile multiplicity of the world, the “highest and the lowest, the most serious and the most hilarious things,” as Walser writes, going beyond even the fragile boundaries of the human. This “exact science” of the enchantment, just as it keeps at arm’s length murky “self-love,” is also humble and enthusiastic in the face of things outside of ourselves, as Celati puts it in a passage from the first section of Verso la foce, “when we see things for the first time, coming into contact with their appearances” (5). It is a science of “faithful . . . self-surrender among objects,” of an attentive opening of ourselves to that which appears to us and touches us, and in touching us allows us to imagine, to daydream (fantasticare, a verb dear to Celati), to recount stories and pose questions (questions that produce other images and daydreams to ourselves) about our communal existence here—not so much as individuals in possession of knowledge, but rather as suffering and sensitive beings who share with other

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beings a life in which everything is connected and animated. Humans, for Celati, are beings above all affettivi (sensitive), or in other words touched by “attractions,” “intensities,” “moods,” and “whims,” and who walk in the fog of the present: they are, moreover, affecté, or naturally conditioned by the external horizon. He does not seek protection in a rational vision of the world. On the contrary, Celati admires qualities of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, a text “that moves ahead in jolts, along waves of thought, toward momentary and fragmentary beckonings to an external horizon,” reminding us “how a natural vision can never contain the limits of our gaze, delimit its field, or prescriptively determine that which can be seen around us” (Celati 2003). For Celati, at the bottom of observable reality there is no noumenon; everything that is anonymous and common of living beings is for him more important than that which renders each being original. For this reason, Celati doesn’t belong to that category of travelers or tourists who chase after the different, extraordinary, exotic, or supernaturally wondrous (the monstrum), nor to the category of new pilgrims, who travel the world in search of an exemplum, capable of bringing back what Benjamin ([1936] 1968) once called “the epic side of truth”: wisdom (87). The wisdom of the “natural vision” of those who walk in the fog of all that which surrounds them is paradoxically one that exposes the self without protection. Celati the walker doesn’t think about returning to hearth and home. How can we truly contemplate what surrounds us if we are afflicted by a sentimental desire to return home? Walking for Celati is not a rational exercise, nor a philosophic or a peripatetic one. He doesn’t walk in order to solve metaphysical problems, discover the meaning behind history, or enter into the psychologies of those he meets. He trusts more in the blindness of inclinations and hunger than in intellectual yearnings and analyses that dig always deeper out of the “want to see clearly.” The blindness of inclinations is productive: it evades the myths of clarity and in so doing beckons to him—a living being affected by all that surrounds him—to produrre fantasmi (generate phantasms) capable of putting him in contact with other beings. Celati’s diaries or “stories of observation” are drawn to a territory far from most critical awareness. His attention is wandering, erratic, divertita (diverted) in the etymological sense of the Latin root divertere: always ready to turn one’s gaze somewhere else. He loves appearances. He doesn’t linger on essences. His crossing of the landscape at times recalls the sense of fate in the romantic Wanderung (hike) which Schiller, in the 1795 poem “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”), defined, in an artistic gesture weighted with the future, within the ideal limits of a “stroll.” Karl Gottlob Schelle, a contemporary of Schiller’s and long unrecognized scholar of classic languages who died forgotten in an asylum, affirmed in his 1802 study Die Spatziergäenge oder Die Kunst spatzieren zu gehen (Promenades, or The Art of Walking) that Schiller’s poem is not that of the “free walker.” According to Schelle, the “free

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walker” would need to possess sensations and ideas that “do not always follow a regular direction, but rather change as the place itself changes” ([1802] 1993, 143). Celati’s wanderings don’t much resemble the Baudelairian flânerie: in Celati’s writing there’s no uninvolved detachment, no distain, no defense strategy against the masses. If anything, from Baudelaire, through Poe, come the modern signs of the solitary walker, outside the common rites of society, outside even oneself, laconic to the point of being mute, with many examples (often studied by Celati) in American literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Celati is closer to another poet-walker: the Hölderlin-Scardanelli of the tower poems, translated by Celati, who not by chance in an epigraph that opens Verso la foce cites the first verse from “Aussicht” (View): “The open day shines on the man with images.” This poem, even more than Walser’s The Walk, contains the genetic code of Celati’s poetic propensity to embrace the world in all its infinite variety as an unending source of enchantment: The open day shines on the man with images When over the distant plain, green appears, Before the light bends to twilight And faint glimmerings gently soften the light of day. Often the heart of the world seems closed and dark, And human sense uncertain and shaken: Bright nature cheers our days And distant seems doubt’s dark question. 3

We know, thanks to the testimony of various visitors to his tower in Tübingen, that Hölderlin passed much of his time playing delightful songs on the spinet. When not playing music, he took long walks. Only in these two activities did he find peace. In walking, anxiety lessened, and the furies of thought no longer reared their heads. The world of appearances, nature, the “external space” of which Celati writes, suddenly becomes deserving of being observed, recorded, imagined: memorable. And “man,” from an “uncertain and shaken sense” opens, as Hölderlin affirms “to the open day” now shining with images. More often, even after a long walk, “the heart of the world” appears to him “closed,” indecipherable. The closure of the world doesn’t depend on the world, on nature, which in its infinite and “bright” variety of colors and transitory lights “appears” to cheer his days. It is the human heart that isn’t able to embrace its gifts, its “images”—and very often is incapable of breaking free of “doubt’s dark question.” Instead of questioning nature, he questions the self, sinks into thought and begins to worry that the images might be false, and thus falls into gloom. To pull himself out of the anguished bind of excessive awareness can be none other than a renewed state of calmness, reached only by walking, com-

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ing into contact with nature, opening the self to the “open day.” Only in this way will he be able to embrace the enchantment in which it appears, to think across the “images” that he observes: Denken ist Danken, to think is to say thanks to what there is. This gratitude of thought—in as much as it is a fabulous recognition (through “images”) of the infinite, unpredictable, and sacred variety of things—represents what I would like to call the Scardanelli poetic function, which the narrator-walker Celati draws from as a wellspring every time he feels fall upon himself “doubt’s dark question,” every time tedium or mental gloom with its company of anxieties and worries cause him to fall into doubt over the duplicity of life: who exists? I and my images? Or the world with its images? The response of Hölderlin-Scardianelli—and of Celati—is that once peace has been won, what Bachelard would have called “primitive,” characteristic of a state of rêverie, close to the sense of being temporarily lost, such as when you lose your way in an unknown city, of which Benjamin writes, the poet must assimilate and continue the images of nature. In other words, he imagines the phantasms that he sees. For him there doesn’t exist a true separation between the imagined world and the real world. II In the diaries of Verso la foce, there becomes apparent an opposition between a rational consciousness that is always driven to explain and categorize reality, and an “exact science” of perceiving (seeing, listening), incapable of drawing distinctions within the infinite variety of the world, which often reveals itself with characteristics “of everyday normal life,” immersed in the “overheard.” What is “the overheard” for Celati? Is it something of worth? Does it correspond with the notion of “the obvious” or not? In a 2005 interview, recalling the period in which he wandered the Po Valley on foot, Celati writes: Something I did at the time was to plant myself in country bars for entire afternoons and listen to everything that was being said. There were allusions to possible stories in every phrase, and from there I seemed to understand how stories are born. Listening to bar conversations, the other thing that came to mind is the idea that we live within the collective “overheard,” or, in other words, that the entire world for us seems enveloped by the “overheard.” For example, what is America? What was the First World War? What was life like in the concentration camps? Of these things we know very little, but we talk of them as “known,” because we imagine them in one way or another by way of something “overheard.”

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Those who are consumed with the restless urge of walking out in the open do not worry about having a destination. They’re happy to leave behind mournfulness, dark thoughts, and gloominess in front of a blank page. They face “the open day” full of “images” and possible encounters. They listen, inclined to enjoying themselves, and open to embracing external images. Now, this attitude, as Walser would have said, is “self-surrender and selfeffacement among objects” ([1957] 2012, 62), but these objects are covered, “encased,” as Celati puts it, by the “overheard” that reproduces them, imagining them “in one way or in another,” as if they were “known,” yet often nothing of them is recognizable. For Celati the behavior of those who go out to encounter the “open day” is not that of those who refuse the “overheard” of the world, of those who think that humanity is divided between people who are forced to struggle through the muck of common places and people who instead are able to escape from these places thanks to their “culture.” He holds no desire to disguise, no skepticism, no panicked terror of ceremonial, day-to-day aspects of life. He gathers the evidence of the collective “overheard” as a basis for a communal exchange of voices, news, suggestions, thoughts from which, as he argues, stories may be born. The seed of every story, at its very origin, isn’t born from the blank slate of ruminative gloom. On the contrary: every story is a sort of festive rite of the “overheard,” a celebration of words that pass from mouth to mouth, of experiences already said or lived that often, due to the long chain of transmission, bring forth beyond their historical veracity repertoires of wonder. Those who walk, venturing forth into the flux of all that which surrounds them—to the point that every encounter becomes for them something that can be retold—soon come to understand that the enchantment of everything that they observe, embrace, and gather isn’t a matter of veracity, or of the paralyzing and naked power of an event transpired once and only once, but rather of its infinite repetition: an event, of the “overheard” within the “overheard,” full of all the innumerable imaginative spaces which it has, “in one way or another,” crossed in order to reach us. We are immersed in the “overheard” and walk in an open space of “images” based on the “overheard.” That which renders our stories original and memorable is thus not their novelty, but rather their openness to the tradition of things already said, their repetition. The originality of those who narrate depends on the variation of execution and on the ability to allow an additional circulation, an additional occasion of enchantment. Now, for those who walk out in the open enchanted by the infinite and unstable variety of the world, does there exist a boundary between the overheard and the obvious? And if yes, in what does it consist? In our way of understanding the everyday, which is often quite blurry, the two notions tend to be confused with one another. For Celati this isn’t the case. Only recently

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did I perhaps first realize this, thanks to his introductory essay to L. F. Céline’s Castle to Castle. In a section of this essay entitled “The grey zone and the borders of the obvious,” Celati argues that in the hellish journey through Nazi Germany that Céline undertakes in the three texts of the work, “experience is no longer something of which someone can be proud” (2008, xi). It can only take on a grotesque, caricatured form. Céline makes of French collaboration an “operalike pantomime” and himself “the caricature of the accomplice ever more on the defensive,” who then becomes a “mask” of someone who has understood that in society there is always the need to say yes, “always the need to adhere to that which is given as obvious, to common chatter, to the tyranny of current ideas, even if they are deranged” (xii). The obvious is the reign of “current idealizations” which, as Celati later explains, are produced by the use of mass means of communication, which conceives of the daily life of people as a “machine, entirely for expected actions and deductions” (xiii). Celati cites a passage from Céline: “What is essential is to do everything as if it ‘is obvious’ . . . never disappoint! . . . never any surprises . . . always ‘it’s obvious’ . . . natural! . . . oh, but pay close attention! . . . you’ve said one word too much! exit from the great enchantment ‘it’s obvious!’” (xiii). It’s clear how the “enchantment” of the obvious has nothing to do with the enchantment that comes from the “overheard.” They are two forms of bewilderment with conceptions of experience that are completely different. The first is a condition of surrender to the rules and to modes of behavior imposed by the promotional and propagandistic machine, which, as in the extreme case of Céline’s work, can become terroristic. At that point the obvious comes to an end, Celati claims, turning into that “grey zone” described by Levi in which people, out of desperation, inability, or exhaustion, can no longer defend the fragile boundaries of their own humanity. In a world in which “experience is no longer something of which someone can be proud,” in a world in other words in which no one is able anymore to translate the obvious of everyday life into the raw material of their own story, what remains is the obedient adherence to something external to our own experience. Authority, usurping the story of our daily experience, interpolates itself into the “story” which the promotional and propagandistic machine imposes upon us. The second form of bewilderment is based on an old notion of experience, incompatible with the rules of calculating knowledge, and related to the common sense present in every person. This notion of experience, in a world enchanted by a disenchantment both rationalistic and propagandistic, appears only in caricature or pantomime; it reaffirms its authority not in relationship to calculating knowledge, but in rapport with the collective “overheard”—an uncertain system of voices, news, suggestions, and thoughts from which arise stories, which then become—drawing from Celati’s lexicon—“rituals” of

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narration, or modes of understanding each other beyond any rationalistic or scientific dichotomy: true or false, real or imaginary. At the end of his introductory “Note” to Verso la foce, Celati writes: Every observation needs to liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost. As a natural tendency that absorbs us, every intense observation of the external world carries us closer to our death—and perhaps also lessens our separation from ourselves. (2)

The experience that arises from common sense has an additional characteristic, which Celati defines in this passage as a “natural tendency.” The “I” of this experience doesn’t possess the traits of the psychological or thinking “I,” and doesn’t resemble the “subject” of modern knowledge with its inventory of abstractions. He longs to forget who he is, to forget every “subjective” experience, because for him, as for the ancients (and among the “moderns” only Vico) there exists a “collective intellect” that acts upon lone individuals. Thanks to their fabulous visual imagination, they are able to enter this collective intellect by fastening themselves one to the other. He thus must become lost if he wants to gather the “images” that surround him, if he wants to communicate imaginatively with others, if he wants at the same time to liberate himself from “familiar codes” and to lessen the separateness of the world which he inhabits. The “I” of experience, for as much as it may be lone and separate, is tied to others, always. The art of walking, as that of narrating, doesn’t consist of blazing a new trail, but rather of reechoing a state of enchantment and wonder in which the intonings of the overheard pursue one another, forming a collective path, a tradition. The know-how of the walker-narrator doesn’t rest in the marking of a path, in the inventing of a plot, or the sketching of an outline in which to recognize and identify oneself, but in following a “natural tendency”: observing very intensely the infinite and unstable variety of the world in order to come as close as possible to the ultimate, untraversable edge of experience, or in other words, the unknowable, death. In every “ritual” storytelling of those who walk out in the open enchanted by the overheard there resounds lighthearted and grave, like an echo in the wind, the maxim: “Accustom yourself to death.” Translated by Patrick Barron NOTES 1. The original Italian version of this text, “Camminare nell’aperto incanto del sentito dire: Due riflessioni su Verso la foce,” appears in Riga 28: Gianni Celati. Eds. Marco Belpoliti and Marco Sironi. Milano: Marcos y Marcos, 2008. 304–9. It also appears in Rizzante, Massimo. Il

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geografo e il viaggiatore. Lettere, dialoghi, saggi e una nota azzurra sulla prosa di Italo Calvino e Gianni Celati. Pavia: Effigie, 2017. 2. For Celati’s coined term “casa geometrile” (geometric house) see note on page (75) of Towards the River’s Mouth. 3. For the original German-language version of this poem (circa 1842) which Hölderlin attributed to the pseudonym of Scardanelli and gave the fictitious date of March 24, 1671, see https://kalliope.org/en/text/hoelderlin200208015. For Celati’s translation of this poem, see Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1993. 115. Poesie della torre. Trans. Gianni Celati. Milan: Feltrinelli.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 1968. “The Storyteller: Reflections on Nikolai Leskóv.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn, 83–109. New York: Harcourt. Celati, Gianni. 2003. “La linea leopardiana della prosa.” (Feb. 28). Zibaldone e altre meraviglie. http://www.zibaldoni.it/2003/02/28/la-linea-leopardiana-della-prosa/ ———. 2005. “Dialogo sulla fantasia” (Interview with Massimo Rizzante.) (Sept. 19). Zibaldone e altre meraviglie. http://www.zibaldoni.it/2005/09/19/dialogo-sulla-fantasia/ ———. 2008. “L’isola-Céline.” In Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Da un castello all'altro. Trans. Giuseppe Guglielmi, v–xvii. Turin: Einaudi. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1993. Poesie della torre. Trans. Gianni Celati. Milan: Feltrinelli. Schelle, Karl Gottlob. (1802) 1993. L’arte di andare a passeggio. Trans. Armando Maggi. Palermo: Sellerio Editore Palermo. Thoreau, Henry David. (1862) 2002. “Walking.” In The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by John Elder and Robert Finch, 180–205. New York: Norton. Walser, Robert. (1957) 2012. The Walk. Trans. Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions.

Chapter Ten

Introduction to Paesology Franco Arminio

There are paesi but few books that describe them. 1 There are experts on weapons and coral reefs, worms and stars. I am an expert on paesi, in the region of Irpinia to be exact. 2 Being an expert on paesi allows me to spot at first glance what is happening in a bar or on a bench, just as an expert hunter is able to second-guess certain movements of wild animals. There are many disciplines and subdisciplines, often centuries old, but also of dubious usefulness, focused for example on sociology or pedagogy. I have the impression that I am following a new discipline: paesology. The paesologist isn’t the local erudite who knows the names of all the petty lords who have dominated a paese or who knows all the proverbs. It’s someone who studies the inner-workings of the peculiar organisms that paesi are. The work of the paesologist takes place in situ. There are very few books about paesi, because most writers live in cities, and those who live in paesi continue to think that life remains in cities. Paesologists dedicate themselves to a reality in extinction, but this process of extinction is multifaceted, and thus they focus on the diverse forms that paesi take: similar to snowflakes, no two are the same. Do as I do, travel to paesi, but not on a Sunday drive. Go there to study them as they are now, not only to see a rock or taste some local food or hear the way people talk. Paesology doesn’t have any particular areas of interest. The entire paese is the object of its interest: a tree in front of a church, a fountain, a parked car, a little girl crossing the street—all this can be at once both useless and precious material. Paesology is a discipline that is not very rigorous, and one that cannot be taught, because it doesn’t heed principles or norms. The paesologist resembles less a historian or psychologist than a hunter of mushrooms or wild asparagus. 197

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SUNDAY PAESI Bisaccia: distance. This was the name of a RAI television program in which I took part a few years ago. 3 An hour-long program with the intent of showing how a paese had changed in forty years. It began with a beautiful 1958 documentary—a little less than half an hour of great television. An example of when things were done carefully, without hurry, and without worrying about the audience. My impression, after the program had been recorded and a brief visit to the studios where television shows are edited, was that of an enormous distance of my paese from the plaster and papier-mâché of the television studios. If the initial premise of the directors was that of showing the distance of Bisaccia from the rest of reality, the result was to reveal, once again, the distance of television from reality. Something similar also happens on local television stations. Located in the regional capital, they almost never cover the smaller paesi. Sending a film crew is expensive, so often a story makes do with archival images. The same can be said of local newspapers: in the province of Irpinia we now have six daily newspapers, which have become the territory of small politics. Town council offices are deserted—what the various officers have to say they say it to the newspapers. Some of them wake up in the morning in order to read the proclamations in which their own statements appear. It’s even the case that at times these statements speak of the people with whom the officers were walking the evening before. Most of the readers are local government employees, followed by teachers and others with fixed incomes who need to pass the time at work. These newspapers are also a wealth of information for those with the desire to analyze commonly held local beliefs, as well as the widely held prejudices about paesi. Who said that we must be well informed and exhaust ourselves in the bothersome upkeep of our intelligence? The paesologist can seek clarification from the distinguished scholar of southern Italian culture and history, but also from the distracted twenty-year-old writing about Montefalcione with her head in Montecarlo. Guido Dorso, Giustino Fortunato, Carlo Levi, and Rocco Scotellaro must be read in the libraries in which they repose, but also in the places where their spirits would be horrified to reappear: pubs, videogame arcades, fashion boutiques, teaching colleges, hospital lobbies, town council offices. These are places in which television cameras, in search of the picturesque and local cuisine, never appear. As if paesi were by now only Sunday paesi.

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EXERCISES IN PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY It’s striking to me that many people no longer know how to tell from which direction the wind is blowing. It’s striking to see how people fall in love with or become bored by their own chatter, but don’t find the time to glance at the cat who slips into a hole of a door or at the old man who watches you with an indecipherable emotion. These are moments fundamental to our being here in the world, in the light and in the silence of eastern Irpinia: beyond lies Naples in the haze, described by Freud, “where during the day it is impossible to remain because the city is as loud as kennel or a cage of monkeys.” I am drawn to paesi because, when the earthquake struck and I went to Teora and people spoke to me about the piazza, I felt an intense sadness at never having been in that piazza. 4 I wanted to have had a memory of people strolling there, I wanted to have touched, to have felt the atmosphere of that place. And instead in front of me there were only ruins. At the time I was twenty years old and, like many twenty-year-olds today, my own paese felt restricting—it would have been hard to imagine that I would have had the drive to torment and shrink myself in the search of other tiny settlements. I was born and live in Bisaccia, in the far eastern reaches of Campania. A desolate byzantine upland and a clump of houses clinging to a ridge of clay and cyanide. There are many images more or less toxic with which I have described in verse and prose a place where, like repeating students, we are forced to transcribe the beautiful facsimile of not living. I’ve written poems from the time I was fifteen. Apart from those published in books and magazines, the others rest in thirty black bags, for trash. I’ve felt and feel that through words I could attempt to understand the very form of my life. The form exists, and there are two black bags. Poems are made with the body, and when you have a body that makes you live as if a doctor had given you an hour to live, nothing else exists except poetry. It’s difficult to imagine someone on their deathbed asking to read a novel or to fill in the boxes of a crossword puzzle. Everyone has his or her motivations. My own are to keep a bit to myself and a bit outside of my body, and if this is a good arrangement for writing, it isn’t for living. Another arrangement rather productive for writing I believe corresponds with my paese, with remaining here after the earthquake and after the emigration. And it was in order to recount the events of my paese and those of my neighbors that at a certain point I felt the need for prose. Instead of leaving as many advised me to do, I set off on a series of journeys to paesi in Irpinia. I knew little about them, but the sight of them even now still stirs me, perhaps out of things with no use, things that don’t force you to look at or listen to them. When someone tries to expand them, lift them up, raise them

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even higher, these paesi dig their heels in like a mule who balks and refuses to listen. It’s not easy to narrate Irpinia while living in Irpinia. In general writers tend to narrate their places of origin from afar, sheltered somewhere. Tolstoy wrote that life without intoxication was a fraud, a stupid fraud. I write what I write only because it causes a certain kind of intoxication. Here I live intoxicated with pathological anatomy. More than a description, at times I recognize that I am conducting an autopsy of the landscape. I go out every day to draft new medical reports. Here the buried dead are only a very small part of the deceased I stumbled across. There are people who from the air breathe only carbon dioxide. There are people who decompose while seated at bars. To me literature is above all a form of consciousness. Everything will come to pass, but what matters is the attempt to bring to fruition my dismay and the dismay of the paese in which I live. To set down a few small remembrances in flux. Not pretending that my words are exhaustive or definitive. Mine is an extremely incomplete account. The life of a paese is a film that lasts thousands of years, and my understanding comes from watching for a few hours. I follow the whims of mood. When I enter a paese every so often it happens that the paese enters me. And then the game is on. Every time I leave a paese I return home to write a few pages about what I’ve seen and what passed through my mind. To see a paese is to hang a sheet between your temples and let it move without pulling it taut, without dragging it to one side or the other. It isn’t always the case that when we talk about a place we render it visible. Or that when we talk about ourselves we render ourselves visible. Because of this, an unbalancing is necessary, an error, a grave risk. If an analyst uses a method of fluctuating attention with patients, I employ with paesi a delirious observation. There’s no need to ask these difficult places anything. Only watching and walking are possible. These are the things that keep the mind open, that let you breathe. These are the things that bring us out of ourselves, not in the sense of madness, but of entering for a while a larger house, the house of life, the house of dogs and roses, of trees and stones. We can’t count too much on ourselves and on what happens inside of ourselves. Feelings, our presumed interiority, our reserves of enthusiasm, the drive to apply ourselves, are things that can suddenly abandon us, because they reside in an imponderable reservoir. An example is this last adjective—just moments before I had the right one in mind, then it flew away and I had to drop in this surrogate. Paesology is a defective science, which allows for a bit of time to be lost without the feeling that you’ve dropped impossibly behind. There’s no need to beat someone else to a discovery. And thus the paesologist can wander, in the pursuit of other obsessions. I would like if this book were read with

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lightheartedness and without judgment. It isn’t a matter of catching a writer offside, but of simply abandoning oneself in a trifle that is connected to the innumerable other trifles that make up our existence. Translated by Patrick Barron NOTES 1. The original Italian version of this text first appeared in Arminio, Franco. Viaggio nel cratere. Milan: Sironi: 2003. Arminio’s coined terms paesology (paesologia) and paesologist (paesologo), which he here discusses in detail, derive from paese (pl., paesi), which can mean both a small settlement (such as a village or hamlet) and the surrounding landscape, as well as a country. As there is no English equivalent that conveys these overlapping meanings—the closest two being “land” and “village”—I have here chosen to retain the Italian the term paese and to adopt the slightly anglicized derivatives, paesology and paesologist. 2. Irpinia is a mountainous area roughly centered around the town of Avellino in southern Italy, about 30 miles inland from Naples. 3. RAI: Radiotelevisione Italiana (known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane) is Italy’s national public broadcasting company. 4. The earthquake of November 23, 1980.

Index

Abram, David, xxiii, 131, 139n7, 140 Agamben, Giorgio, 162n15, 165, 182n2, 183n11 Albergo del Bersagliere, 21 Alice disambientata: materiali collettivi su Alice per un manuale di sopravvivenza, xxi, 144, 151n1 allegria, xvii, xxi anthropocentrism, 107, 118, 120, 122, 125, 148, 149 appearances, xv, xvi, xxii, xxiii, 5, 14, 27, 38, 49, 66, 93, 102, 105, 106, 168–181, 188, 189, 190 Appearances. See Quattro novelle sulle apparenze Ariano Polesine, 37, 62, 63 Ariosto, Ludovico, 8, 209 Le avventure di Guizzardi, xii, 144, 167 Bachelard, Gaston, xxiii, 131, 139n6, 191 La banda dei sospiri, xiii, 79, 144 Bartleby the Scrivener, xii, 111–113, 183n11 Bateson, Gregory, xxiii, 130, 131, 137, 139n8 “Il bazar archeologico”, xiii, 110, 182n7 Belpoliti, Marco, xi, 77, 79, 81, 84, 97, 119, 144–145 Benjamin, Walter, 81, 83, 85, 134, 167, 170, 182n7, 182n9, 189, 191

Berger, John, xxi, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98, 107, 114n3, 120, 122, 125 bewilderment, 135, 193 bioregion, xxiii, 127–128, 133, 138, 139n13 bioregionalism, 130, 134, 137, 139n11 Bisaccia, 198, 199 Bologna, xi, 3, 25, 106, 144 Boretto, 21, 23 Borgoforte, 26, 27, 28 Ca’ Zullian, 72 Calvino, Italo, xi, xii, 79, 80–81, 102, 144, 167, 181, 182n3 Caorso nuclear power plant, 6, 10 Capelli, Luciano, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 82, 92, 93, 175 Casalmaggiore, 12, 15, 17, 18, 21, 36 Case sparse—Visioni di case che crollano, xii, 90, 95–96, 98 Cé line, Louis-Ferdinand, xxiv, 193 The Charterhouse of Parma, xii, 17 Chernobyl, xviii, 1, 3, 5, 18, 24, 91, 94–95, 134, 148, 156 chiavica. See spillway Chioggia, 62, 65–66, 162n14 Codigoro, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 108 Colorno, 18, 19 Comacchio, xv, xvi, 56, 58, 59, 108, 120 Comiche, xii, xiii, 144, 167 203

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commodification, 110–111, 154, 168 “Conditions of Light on the Via Emilia.”. See “Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia” “Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia”, 93, 98, 102, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 182 consumerism, xxiii, 143, 145–146, 147, 148, 149, 150 contamination, 8, 92, 148, 182n8 Contarina, xvii, 63, 67, 109 Coppi, Fausto, 4, 5, 22, 23, 75n2 Cortellessa, Andrea, 79, 81, 84 Costantino, Mr., 55, 56, 58, 63, 73 Cremona, 1, 8, 9, 10, 20 Deleuze, Gilles, 93, 98 Delfini, Antonio, 60, 63, 68, 74 Dellit, Reinhard, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 82–83, 156 description, xix, xxi, 19, 66, 71, 78, 80–81, 83, 91, 92, 95, 102, 105, 132, 135, 145–146, 156, 200 Diol Kadd, 120–121, 122–123, 124–125 disorientation, xxiii, 108, 135, 136, 153, 155–157, 160–161 documentary, xiv, 55, 76n9, 82–86, 89, 99n5, 103–106, 113, 117, 123, 126n1, 137, 144, 155, 183n11, 198 ecology, xxiii, 77, 127, 128, 131, 134, 137, 153, 154, 155 ecology of mind, xxiii, 131, 132, 137, 139n5, 139n8 estrangement, 128, 135, 153, 155–157, 161, 179 ethics, 129, 169, 180 ethology, 2, 61, 63, 68, 73, 75, 158 everyday, xii, xiv, xvi, xix, xxi, 1, 10, 85, 90, 93, 98, 103, 129, 145, 166, 167, 172, 176, 180, 181, 182n10, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193 exterior, xiv, xvii, xxi, 78, 80–83, 86, 110, 119, 156, 193 external, xiv, 50, 56, 60, 61, 80, 102, 120, 158, 188; appearances, xxii, 38, 66; images, 192; movements, xxi; phenomena, 47, 137; space, 5, 25, 42, 102, 190; world, xii, xiv, xv, xvii, xx,

xxiii, 1, 2, 16, 43, 54, 63, 89, 90–93, 94, 95, 96–97, 104–106, 113, 122–123, 124, 146–147, 148, 149, 150, 187–188, 194 Ferrara, xi, xxi, 1, 22, 26, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 52, 55, 108, 127 Finzioni occidentali, xiv, 110, 167 Garibaldi, 57, 60 geography, xviii, 77, 134, 147, 153, 155, 157, 159–160, 169 Ghirri, Luigi, ix–xiv, xv–xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, 1, 77–78, 79–85, 93, 95, 102, 104–106, 108, 110, 114n3, 117–118, 119, 124–125, 126n2, 145, 146, 148 Goro, 60, 61, 62, 75, 108 Gruppo 63, 166, 167 Guerra, Tonino, 4, 5 Gussola, 15, 16 Handke, Peter, 78, 79, 85, 86n1 Heidegger, Martin, 78, 81, 82, 85, 168, 170, 171, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181 hermeneutics, 172, 181 Hö lderlin, Friedrich, xxiv, 1, 190, 191, 195n3 imagination, collective. See immaginario immaginario, xxi, 80, 146 Irpinia, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201n2 Isola Ca’ Venier, 67, 68, 72 Kafka, Franz, 173, 174 landscape, xii, xviii, xxi, xxiii, 3, 9, 20, 31, 40, 43, 47, 48, 52, 59, 62, 67, 68, 93, 95, 96, 102–104, 106, 108, 110, 119, 121, 130, 133, 135, 145, 155, 170, 201n1; cultural, xi, 77, 125, 127, 131, 136, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162n3; degradation of, 42, 127, 128, 129, 143, 156, 200; and imagination, 53, 80, 137, 138, 189; industrial, xviii, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 19, 21, 22, 34, 36, 41, 51, 55, 79, 83, 91, 128, 134, 135, 146, 148; language of, 91; “new Italian”, xviii, 1, 77, 79, 146; photography of, xiv, xv, xvii, 26, 41, 42, 80–82, 85, 92, 96, 98,

Index 123, 124, 125, 146; urban, xviii, 1, 34, 98, 127, 128, 129 language, xiii, xix, 105–106, 123, 143–144, 145, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 179, 180, 181; abstract, xii, 49, 61; of the news, 4–5, 17, 24; and vision, xxi–xxii, 83, 89–99, 107, 125 Leopardi, Giacomo, 26, 109, 189 Lukács, Georg, 166, 168 Lunario del paradiso, xiii, 144, 167 mapping. See maps maps, xv, xvi, 33, 46, 49, 58, 73, 82, 102–103, 105 Melville, Herman, xii, 111, 113, 183n11 Menini, Emanuele, 98, 102, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 182 metacinema, 120, 121 metaphysics, 82, 168, 173, 174, 179, 183n13 Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, xii, 95, 117–118, 124–125 Movement of 1977, 8, 75n3 narration, 93–94, 95–96, 97, 98, 105, 132, 135, 143, 177, 194 narrative reinhabitation, xxiii, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138 Narratori delle pianure, xii, 78, 82, 85, 102, 106, 155, 167 Narratori delle riserve, xiii, 147, 149 nature, 23, 39, 91, 117–118, 124–125, 127, 131, 137, 148, 154, 158, 168, 180, 190, 191 necroregion, 128, 135, 138, 154 neo-avant-garde, xi, 166 nonhuman, xviii, xxii, xxiii, 91, 92, 94, 133, 138, 145, 156, 158, 160, 162n10 Northern League, 127, 128, 129, 139n13, 153 observation, xiv, xviii, xxi, xxiv, 1, 2, 78, 79–80, 84–85, 89–90, 91, 92, 95, 105, 121, 124, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 156–157, 187–188, 189, 194, 200 Occhiobello, xxi, 38–39 ontology, object-oriented, 118, 122 ordinary, xii, xvi, xix, 32, 77, 85, 107, 119, 146, 149, 177

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Ostellato, 55, 56 “Ottima è l’acqua”, 158, 161 overheard, xxi, xxiv, 187, 191–192, 193, 194 Padania, 128–129, 133, 136–137 paesology, xxiv, 197, 198, 200, 201n1 Palmieri, Nunzia, xi, xviii, 84 pensiero debole, xxiii, 166–167 perception, xviii, xxi, 78, 81, 83, 85–86, 90, 93, 94, 95, 99, 104, 107, 122, 173 perspective, 8, 18, 22, 31, 32, 38, 45, 49, 50, 101, 105 phenomenology, 105, 131, 134, 167, 169 place, xii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxi–xxiii, xxiv, 81, 89, 95, 98, 99n3, 103, 110, 122, 154, 162n4, 188, 192, 198, 199; commercialization of, 42, 43, 49, 70, 78, 148, 161, 170; imagination of, 79, 83–84, 86, 127–138, 147, 156, 161, 190; photography of, 29, 31, 41, 82, 85; representation of, 8, 9, 19, 77, 80, 125, 145, 146, 200; sense of, 9, 18, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 33, 40, 42, 45, 49, 54, 66, 77, 114n3, 155 Po Delta, xv, xvi, xviii, xxi, 26, 29, 33, 37, 44, 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 106, 107, 111, 118–119, 136, 155 Po di Gnocca, 73, 74 Po di Venezia, 67, 69, 72–73 pollution, xviii, 1, 36, 91, 95, 127, 128, 129, 145, 146, 148, 149, 153–154, 156, 159–160, 161, 162n7 Pomponesco, 22–23 Pontelagoscuro, xxi, 41 Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, xxiii, 79, 90, 92, 102, 105, 106, 165, 167–181 Rea, Ermanno, xxiii, 127, 133, 137, 139n14 reclamation, land, xvi, xviii, 1, 20, 44, 48, 49, 51, 59, 136 reinhabitation. See narrative reinhabitation riflusso, xxiii, 166, 167 San Benedetto, 31, 32, 34 Scardovari, 74, 75 Schelle, Karl Gottlob, 189–190

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Schneider, Marianne, 95, 99n2 Se questo è un uomo, 155, 158 Sironi, Alberto, 4, 5, 21, 22, 23, 96 sound, xviii, 5, 20, 27, 33, 43, 60, 70, 71, 75, 97, 105, 106, 107, 109, 114n5, 117, 120, 140n22, 162n3, 176, 181, 182, 194 space, xv, xxi, 22, 40, 45, 48, 64, 78, 103; of affection, 18, 137; built, 18, 34, 38, 52, 64; collective sense of, xv, xvi, 32, 137; commodified, 49, 128–129, 154; empty, 17, 111, 119; external, 5, 42, 81, 102, 190; marginalized, xiv, 110; movement through, xviii, 11, 32, 68, 75, 102, 105, 107–108, 110, 192; as multiplicity, xviii, 22, 26; open, 13, 22, 25, 31, 43, 47; outer, 74, 108; phrased, 22, 30; and time, 39, 49, 96, 132, 165 spillway, 20, 41, 42, 44, 76n8 sprawl, urban, xviii, 63, 128 Stendhal, xii, 17, 18 storytelling, 27, 84, 106, 125, 147, 149, 150, 179, 194 Strada provinciale delle anime, xii, xxii, 95, 101–113, 118, 120, 124–125, 150 Swift, Jonathan, xii, xviii, 86 temporality, xiv, 78, 85, 91, 92, 93–94, 95, 98, 102, 179 terrain, 23, 33, 58, 64, 139n13 testimony, 95, 155, 158, 161, 162n8 Thoreau, Henry David, xxiv, 187 Togliatti, Palmiro, 33

tourism, 9, 30, 36, 49, 60, 61, 64, 70, 85, 106, 108, 110, 111, 177, 178, 187, 189 translation, ix, xii, xxi, 67, 86, 89, 99n2, 107, 111, 123, 125, 176, 190 trauma, cultural and environmental, 147, 154, 155–156, 158, 161 Turri, Eugenio, xviii, 153–154, 162n2–162n3 unheimlich, 155, 161 Vattimo, Gianni, xxiii, 165–172, 174–175, 177, 179, 180 Venetian. See Venice Venice, xv, 47, 49, 66, 67 Viaggio in Italia, xiv, 77, 78, 80, 85, 102, 146 vivaciousness. See allegria Voices from the Plains. See Narratori delle pianure walking, xxiv, 3, 5, 7, 18, 19, 35, 46, 48, 51, 57, 73, 134, 171, 173, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 198, 200 Walser, Robert, xxiv, 173, 180, 187, 188, 190, 192 Walt Disney, 13, 16, 21, 23, 91 wandering, xiv, xviii, xxi, 14, 18, 27, 30, 42, 48, 55, 72, 75, 82, 91, 92, 107–110, 129, 160, 178, 182n10, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 200

About the Contributors

Franco Arminio is a writer, poet, and filmmaker who Roberto Saviano has called “one of the most important poets in Italy.” He has directed four films and written over twenty books, winning a number of literary awards, including the Stephan Dedalus, Volponi, and Carlo Levi prizes. Patrick Barron is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he codirects the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and teaches courses in environmental literature, translation studies, and poetry. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published various essays, translations, and poems, as well as the books Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (2014), Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto (2012), The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (2007), and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (2003). Damiano Benvegnù is a lecturer in the French and Italian department at Dartmouth College. His current research focuses on representations of animals and animality in modern Italian literature, visual art, and philosophy. He is also interested in literatures produced in peripheral languages (particularly by multilingual and diglossic communities), and in the interactions between aesthetics, history, and nature. He is an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and an active member of several associations promoting interdisciplinary research between arts, science, and philosophy. He has published articles on the work of writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, José Lezama Lima, and Andrea Zanzotto, and in 2018, the book Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work (2018). 207

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About the Contributors

Matteo Gilebbi is a lecturer in the French and Italian Department at Dartmouth College. He holds a PhD in Italian from the University of WisconsinMadison and a Master in Narratology and New Media from the University of Urbino. His primary area of research is the interaction between literature, philosophy, and digital media in modern and contemporary culture. His recent publications take an ecocritical and posthumanist approach to Italian contemporary poetry and cinema, examining the work of Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mario Luzi, Paolo Volponi, Ivano Ferrari, Gianni Celati, and Paolo Sorrentino. Thomas Harrison is professor of Italian at UCLA and a specialist in modern European intellectual history, literature, and the comparative arts. He also researches contemporary Italian prose fiction, film, poetry, and critical theory. He is the author of L’arte dell’incompiuto (2017), 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (1996), and Essayism: Conrad, Musil and Pirandello (1992) and editor of Nietzsche in Italy (1986) and The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry (1984). He has authored articles on Leopardi, Magris, Michelstaeder, Montale, Morante, Ortese, Pirandello, Tabucchi, Ungaretti, and Zanzotto. Serenella Iovino is professor of Italian and Environmental Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her recent publications include Material Ecocriticism (2014), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (2017, both coedited with Serpil Oppermann), and Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (University of Virginia Press, 2018, coedited with Enrico Cesaretti and Elena Past). Her monograph Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (2016) was awarded the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize and of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. Massimo Rizzante is a poet, essayist, translator, and associate professor of Italian and comparative literature at the Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Philological Studies at Trento University in Italy. He has published three books of poetry, four collections of essays—the most recent being Il geografo e il viaggiatore. Sull’opera di Italo Calvino e Gianni Celati (The Geographer and the Traveler: On the Work of Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati, 2017)—and numerous translations, including three books by Milan Kundera. Michele Ronchi Stefanati is a doctoral candidate and Eduardo Saccone Scholar in Italian Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. He holds an MA in Italian Studies, European Literary Cultures, and Linguistics from the University of Bologna with a thesis on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. His re-

About the Contributors

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search currently focuses on contemporary Italian literature and political commitment with particular reference to the work of Gianni Celati. In 2016 he organized the conference “Gianni Celati. Tradition, Translation, Rewriting” in which Celati also participated. Monica Seger is associate professor of Italian Studies and the 2017–2020 Sallie Gertrude Smoot Spears Term Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at William & Mary. Her research and teaching address twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature, film, and media; the environmental humanities; and gender studies. She is the author of Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Toronto UP, 2015), as well as numerous articles. She is currently working on a new book examining the relationship between narrative and dioxin toxicity in contemporary Italy. Marina Spunta is associate professor of Italian at the School of Arts, University of Leicester. Her research focuses on contemporary Italian literature, photography, cinema, and their intersections, in particular on the representation of space, place, and landscape, and of orality and vocality. She has published a number of essays and articles on contemporary Italian fiction and photography, and is the author of two monographs: Voicing the Word: Writing Orality in Contemporary Italian Fiction (2004) and Claudio Piersanti (2009). She has coedited the following volumes: Proteus—The Language of Metamorphosis (2005), Oral and Written in Contemporary Italian Culture (2006), Letteratura come fantasticazione. In conversazione con Gianni Celati (2009), Luigi Ghirri and the Photography of Place. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2017), and Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy. Essays for Sharon Wood (2017). She was the primary investigator of the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust-funded research project Viewing and Writing Italian Landscape. Luigi Ghirri and His Legacy in Photography and Literature (2013–2015). Rebecca West is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where she taught for forty years, from 1973 to her retirement in 2013. She has focused her research and pedagogy on modern and contemporary Italian literature, with a concentration on poetry and prose fiction, and more recently, on cinema. She has maintained her long-standing interest in Dante, on whose Divina commedia she has published several articles. In addition to having published over one hundered articles and notes, she has edited or coedited six volumes on topics such as women’s literature, film adaptation, and modern Italian culture, and she has published two prize-winning books: Eugenio Montale: Poet

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About the Contributors

on the Edge (1981), which explored the concept of the liminal in his poetry, and Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (2000), which studied the ways in which his work is allied with oral storytelling and with the validation of past modes of verbal and visual communication. Professor West has been awarded an American Academy in Rome Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and residential Fellowships at the Centro Ligure in Bogliasco and the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio. She has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, Stanford, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Calabria, the University of Turin, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (the ETH).