From:
Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies
Eds. Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018
NB: For page numbers, please refer to the book
Introduction
“How does this hotel called Italy feel?” asks the poet and writer Guido Ceronetti in his book
Albergo Italia (1985). He answers: “I’ve got a nice room . . . with curtains through which one
can see and not see; little by little, the view from my window has lost grace indeed; it moves—
time and again being touched by the inexplicable: a hill disappears, and smoke and steel take its
place . . . the good fragrances of food and garden I used to smell are taken over by fumes that
burn your throat” (ix).1
How does this place called Italy feel? Not so good, lately. As we write, one of the
country’s biggest oil refineries, near Pavia, is burning. Meanwhile, in Sicily, hundreds of
migrants from Syria, Libya, and other Mediterranean lands are mooring in the docks, waiting to
be transferred to temporary reception centers or scattered across the country. It is a sunny
December morning; but still, it is a cold day for the thousands of people who lost their homes in
the earthquakes that continue to shake central Italy, destroying inestimable pieces of the
country’s artistic and historical heritage. Somewhere, in illegal dumps, hidden from indiscreet
eyes, criminal organizations are burying toxic waste that will one day return in new cellular
formations and epidemiological reports.
This perhaps graceless image is what one sees, looking through the curtains of our room
with a view. But if for a moment you direct your gaze away from this worrisome panorama, you
also see something else. You see that Italy resists. This resistance is visible in the movements of
citizens who defend the commons and ecological health, in the work of public intellectuals
against the ruin of environment and landscape, in the reevaluation of food culture as ecoanthropological presidium, and even in the creation of new words, such as “ecomafia,” which
inspired a long-awaited legislation against environmental crimes. It is a cultural resistance that,
although inconclusive and certainly still incomplete, is a sign that something is changing vis-àvis the dominance of what Ceronetti calls “the inexplicable,” namely, the strange mechanism that
transforms cultural richness into misery, and public good into a private supply for short-term
speculations. Strongly rejecting the separation of “the natural” from “the cultural,” this
resistance—slowly but irresistibly—is changing the scene of Italian studies, too.
Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies is part of this
culture of resistance. The idea for the book came to us in the spring of 2014 in Zurich, at the
conference of the American Association for Italian Studies. An interesting phenomenon unfolded
at that Swiss-Italian-American meeting of Italianists: for the first time, a number of panels and
presentations explicitly dedicated to ecocriticism and environmental humanities were being held
and copiously attended, indicating a meaningful turn of the dial in the critical canon of Italian
studies. What most inspired us, however, was Rosi Braidotti’s keynote lecture, “Posthumanist
Paradoxes.” On that memorable afternoon, we heard ideas that, filtered through our notes, read
like this: We need new figurations for the humanities. We need to explore intellectual pathways
in which critique goes together with creativity. We need critical practices that, defamiliarizing
consolidated patterns of thinking, escort us out of the safety zones in which anthropocentrism,
Eurocentrism, sexism, speciesism, ableism, constitute the normal discourse of our cultural
paradigms.
For convinced eco-scholars like us, this subversive call marked the joyful advent of a
long-awaited revolution. Intervening in a debate in which traditional humanistic approaches have
always played a major role, and in a context that has historically privileged single specializations
and critical methodologies, Braidotti courageously urged the audience to think beyond the usual
disciplinary categories and to embrace the more hybrid, inclusive, and participatory mode of the
environmental humanities.
Braidotti’s call could hardly have been more timely or more sensible. We undeniably face
critical times: critical for our planet and its collapsing life-support systems; critical for our
societies, ravaged by biopolitical tragedies and global uncertainties; and critical for cultural
imagination, now more than ever challenged by one-sided discourses that fail to address the
intertwined matters of our lives. The truth is that the “safety zones” of self-referential paradigms
dissolve every day in the faces of displaced people, in the decay of biomes and landscapes, in the
visible and invisible contamination of cells and places, and in all the multilayered turbulence of
the Anthropocene. As these emergences prove, the environment is not just “out there.” It is
everywhere, outside and inside our bodies and discourses; it is at once a background, an issue,
and an actor in our social and biological life. If subjects, agents, and dynamics are collective and
elementally intermingled, the traditionally conceived humanities can no longer critically deal
with the world alone but must engage in conversation with scientific fields of study. From this
need—the need to see how human stories emerge from and converge with the stories of the
more-than-human beings around and within us—come the environmental humanities.
A burgeoning area of transdisciplinary inquiry, the environmental humanities is an
umbrella term that “brings the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences together
in diverse ways to address the current ecological crises from closely knit ethical, cultural,
philosophical, political, social, and biological perspectives” (Oppermann and Iovino 2017, 2).
The distinctive trait of the environmental humanities is that they are practiced in the form of
research collectives, where highly specialized results achieved in single disciplines are
complemented by other concurring areas, explicitly integrating scientific and humanistic
methodologies. Rejecting the reductionism of eco-technocracy and of a “managerial approach to
human-environment interaction” (Castree 2014, 249), this cooperative discourse infers that
environmental research can have a meaningful impact on society only if climatologists and
economists team up with historians and political scientists, biologists join forces with
philosophers and geographers, and hard-science researchers work together with humanities
scholars and educators, supplementing efforts in public policy with more sustainable cultural
models. The point here is that no single discipline can provide satisfactory answers when the
problems to be tackled are embedded in complex systems. To really know what “environment”
means and what “ecological crisis” implies, we must, in other words, move beyond unilateral
approaches and engage in cooperative conversations that boost our imagination of reality.
Rejecting the divide between the “two cultures,” as well as autarchic ontologies of the human,
the environmental humanities invite us to rethink the humanities themselves as critical
posthumanities, in an attempt to move beyond human-centered individualism and universality.
This intellectual shift does not intend to reject the methods and insights of the humanistic
tradition but rather “spells the end of the idea of a de-naturalized social order disconnected from
its environmental and organic foundations, and calls for more complex schemes of understanding
the multilayered form of inter-dependence we all live in” (Braidotti 2013, 159–60). The
educational impact of this vision is momentous, for it has the potential to reaffirm the crucial role
of the humanities “at a time when a neoliberal agenda of economic utilitarianism, along with
empirical-quantitative models of science, threatens to dominate universities” (Zapf 2016, 1).
Faced with the potentialities of this approach, we therefore understand Braidotti’s call as
something more than an invitation to explore new disciplinary territories. We read it as the urge
to move toward a radical sea change in our worldviews, overcoming the anthropocentrism and
dualisms that characterize the humanities. This does not mean that, as we focus our attention
beyond the sphere of the human, we wish to radically remove the human subject from the picture
and devaluate or reject human life and concerns. As Christopher Breu (2014) argues, “there are
too many forces in contemporary life that degrade human life, such as neoliberalism,
neoimperialism, global warfare, and various discourses of social exclusion and exploitation, for
it to be acceptable that theory even unconsciously participates in the denigration of the human”
(194). However, when humans are vulnerable, but also largely responsible for our “messy era of
ruinous hyper-industrial civilization” (Cohen 2016, 24), we believe that the focus of academic
inquiry should shift from being exclusively (and hubristically) centered on human life and
subjectivity. To better understand (and possibly disentangle) the troubling predicaments of our
era, the humanities are called to encompass and make sense of the role and agency of more-thanhuman reality as a whole, in the hope that this “discursive change . . . will create and implement
more sustainable economic practices, social behaviors, and moral paradigms” (Oppermann and
Iovino 2017, 5). We respond to Braidotti’s call by imagining that the human must acknowledge,
collaborate with, and curate the stories of the nonhuman others that traverse, compose, and
surround us. The environmental humanities, in this way, embody a discourse of liberation, a
renewed humanism that is at once critical and nonanthropocentric.
In a nutshell, this discourse means that we need to be able to read the texts of the world
from many angles, whether informed by arts or sciences, and whether these angles are human or
not. And we need to be able to articulate what we read in critical narratives that can provide the
ground for wider pedagogies in which the human world is an element rather than an end in itself.
We need more creativity in our critical ventures, and we need to work together, across the
abstract margins of our fields. In other words, we need new figurations for the humanities.
Innovatively blending critique with creative prose, the twenty-two essays of Italy and the
Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies seek to distinctively situate Italian
studies on this horizon. To couple Italy and the environmental humanities is not a demanding
task: Italy’s history, its significant literary and artistic heritage, its importance in shaping the
Western construction, appreciation, and aesthetics of nature and landscape offer excellent starting
points. Our collection, however, is motivated less by a parochial eco-renaissance than by the
aspiration to show how this particular country, with its problems, ambivalences, and resources, is
at once unique and exemplary in the panorama of the environmental humanities. Italy is indeed a
nation systematically affected by political corruption and infrastructural deficiencies—and yet
the Italian government periodically earmarks substantial amounts of public money to build a
“mythical” bridge over the highly seismic area of the Strait of Messina, which is supposed to link
the mainland to Sicily.2 Unregulated building development results in severe hydrogeological risk,
flirting dangerously with intricate webs of fault lines, rugged terrain, and tens of thousands of
kilometers of increasingly eroding coast. Almost daily, the country faces ethical, geographic, and
sociopolitical challenges with thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to reach its
shores. The magnificent capital city, itself always on the verge of collapse, is surrounded by “a
belt of favelas, made of decrepit huge building blocks, aborted streets, and fake squares invaded
by rubbish” (Settis 2012, 8). Environmental business—for example, waste disposal, building
development, and even farming—is often in the hands of the ecomafia, with tragic consequences
for living beings and territories. Meanwhile, tiny alien parasites are destroying countless acres of
iconic olive trees, thus bringing the agricultural economies of entire regions to their knees.
The interlaced landscapes of matter and stories that we see from our hypothetical window
require us to transform Braidotti’s incitement into a number of questions. For instance, how
urgent is it to reconsider the limits of both the humanities and the environment? What does this
reconsideration mean for a country steeped in the tradition of humanism and the Renaissance,
with their emphasis on human potential and accomplishments, and later shaped by the neoidealistic philosophy of figures such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile and their
privileging of a dematerialized mind over the tangible claims of the physical world? And how
might the novel, postdualistic humanities merge with a culture that has contributed to a radical
critique and rethinking of the contemporary social and political world? Italy, in fact, is also to be
found in the work of intellectuals such as Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito,
Maurizio Ferraris, and the so-called New Italian Theory; it is present in a strong tradition of
feminist scholarship, which includes seminal figures like Adriana Cavarero, Luisa Muraro, and
the nomadic Braidotti herself; it is the reassessment of modernity from the southern,
Mediterranean perspectives of Franco Cassano and Franco La Cecla; more recently, it is the
reconsideration of the nonhuman—this “ontological South”—in the posthumanist philosophies
of Roberto Marchesini and Francesca Ferrando. It is advocacy for including places and their
artistic heritage on our horizon of political values, initiated by Antonio Cederna and Eugenio
Turri, and powerfully epitomized today by Salvatore Settis and Tomaso Montanari’s struggles
for a joint safeguard of Italy’s cultural landscape and constitutional principles. And so, how can
this rich tradition of Italian culture and Italy itself, in its multiple, historical, imagined, and
material-discursive forms, contribute to these challenges? Where does this country, with both its
texts and contexts, locate itself within the expanding critical debate of the environmental
humanities?
In order to answer these questions, we believe it is necessary to defamiliarize the
imagination of Italy—too often frozen in essentialist anthropological categories, romanticized in
the aesthetic cliché of the “beautiful land,” and fixed in the human-centered discourse of
classical humanist thinking—and to engage with the voices emerging from the Italian cultural
horizon. In the past several years, indeed, Italian scholars and Italianists have been increasingly
rethinking how they tell their stories, and what they want to tell stories about. These voices and
narratives are so numerous that a complete list is impossible, and yet some of the major steps
toward the making of the Italian environmental humanities must be noted in this introduction.
They are here to prove that, as we considered how our volume might enrich this debate, we
mused in good company.
A map of the Italian environmental humanities avant la lettre might begin with the
trailblazing contributions of Eugenio Turri, a prolific geoanthropologist who has literally
changed the way we look at landscapes, especially those of the Po Valley and of the Italian
Nord-Est, and whose legacy lives in the important works of scholars such as Francesco
Vallerani, Marcello Zunica, and Nadia Breda. Italy’s landscapes have also spoken to and through
a number of eminent environmental historians. A few major examples: Piero Bevilacqua’s
pioneering wide-ranging works delve into the history of land reclamation, agriculture, and
landscape photography; Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall’s Nature and History in Modern Italy
(2010) brings a broad view of Italian environmental history to English language readers;
Armiero’s monographic A Rugged Nation: Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011,
translated into Italian as Le montagne della patria, 2013) compellingly shows how the Italian
mountains contributed to the making of the nation and how the nation shaped and modified the
rocky landscape; Stefania Barca’s Enclosing Water: Nature and Political Economy in a
Mediterranean Valley, 1796–1916 (2010) sheds light on the power of water to shape protoindustrial landscapes and stir up early forms of ecological awareness, citing the Liri valley as an
exemplary case; and Giacomo Parrinello’s Fault Lines: Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern
Italy (2015) uncovers the powerful geological force and historical agency of two of the major
seismic disasters in the history of modern Italy (Messina and the Belice valley). Populated by
vital nonhuman protagonists—earthquakes, landslides, and mobile waterways—this original
scholarship has shifted the terrain of Italian studies, showing that, long before a political entity
called “Italy” had been officially imagined, a compelling geo-cultural mesh of stories was
emerging from the peninsula and its inhabitants. Antonella Tarpino’s recent Il paesaggio fragile
(The fragile landscape, 2016), as well as her previous works Geografie della memoria
(Geographies of memory, 2008) and Spaesati (Dis-placed, 2012), can also be situated in this
lineage; with considerable interdisciplinary skillfulness, she retraces the stories and imagination
of Italy’s often ignored marginal areas (abandoned mountains, ancient roads, critical borders),
explicitly calling into question the country’s official “political cartography.” The work of
environmental sociologists such as Aurelio Angelini and Mario Salomone are also crucial
references, not the least because they complement their studies with important projects of ecopedagogy and landscape valorization. Donatella Della Porta, Mario Diani, and Pietro Saitta
research environmental movements, activism, and models of political ecology in Italy, and give
voice to both environmental struggles and vibrant strategies of resistance.
From our own vantage point as ecocritical scholars, we cannot fail to emphasize the role
played by literature on this horizon. Italian literature—from Dante to Machiavelli to Manzoni—
helped create the Italian polis and its language in ways that have been well documented. The
manifold ways in which Italian literature and cinema participate reciprocally in a more-thanhuman world, however, have just begun to emerge in academic work. With Italian
Environmental Literature: An Anthology (2003), Patrick Barron and Anna Re curated a valuable
reading list from which to begin this process. Serenella Iovino’s long engagement as a theorist
and literary scholar subsequently provided fertile ground for environmental cultural studies,
paving the way for a new generation of Italian scholars to reenvision their position in material
and scholarly worlds. Her seminal Ecologia letteraria (Literary ecology, 2006) traces the
relationship between environmental ethics and literary theories and methodologies, while her
transdisciplinary Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (2016) brings
material ecocriticism to bear on the Italian context and landscape, offering a roadmap to a
transverse narrative practice of liberation—a practice with deep ethical implications beyond
Italy.
Monica Seger’s monograph Landscapes In Between: Environmental Change in Italian
Literature and Film (2015) and Pasquale Verdicchio’s edited collection, Ecocritical Approaches
to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild (2016) continue the work of rereading
Italy and its many eco-cultural texts in ethically engaged, ontologically open ways, drawing
more cities, geological forces, and environmental pollution into the unfolding conversation.
Deborah Amberson and Elena Past’s edited volume Thinking Italian Animals: Human and
Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (2014) calls on the nonhuman animals,
biopolitical and posthumanist questions that animate and trouble Italian cultural productions.
From a more geographically defined standpoint, Silvia Ross’s Tuscan Spaces: Literary
Constructions of Place also provides an insightful contribution to the debate. Most recently,
Enrico Cesaretti organized a Mellon symposium on environmental posthumanities at the
University of Virginia. The day of collaborative, engaged meetings convened Italianists,
comparativists, and some of the most vibrant voices in the environmental humanities, performing
the kind of work this volume wishes to continue.
In the essays that follow, we aim to shape a critical approach to Italy that, in creative and
rigorous ways, heeds territories, bodies, animals, and more-than-human beings. Territories are
here taken as the basis of a new anthropology of nature, namely, as a way to reinforce the mutual
formative bond of humans and places, something which should constitute the premise for a
healthy life, both in physical and political terms. Implicitly resonating with the social
implications of Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, Salvatore Settis refers to a healthy territorial
life as a “sanità dello spazio”—a healthiness of space, to be intended both literally and culturally
(Settis 2012, 52). It is evident, in fact, that the decline of a landscape, and of a shared
environment in general, is a decline of citizenship, and of citizens’ basic rights. Far from being
active players in democratic decision making, individuals are often forcibly separated from both
their social and territorial identities. This, of course, is a political problem, but it is also an ethical
matter. The lack of a bond between cultural identity, social awareness, and environmental
protection is indeed at the core of the ecological crisis. Within these territories and landscapes,
bodies—human or not—are nodes of ecological dynamics, political actions, and worldviews.
Considering them often, but not exclusively, within the theoretical framework of material
ecocriticism, the bodies examined in this volume are read both as litmus tests to evince
environmental criticalities and as fronts of resistance against the infiltrating violence hidden in
the corners of development. Finally, animals and nonhuman beings are here taken as full-fledged
material-semiotic subjects, and not as merely symbolic or metaphoric matter. They are holders
and agents of interlaced stories and not simply backgrounds for human enterprises.
The Italian landscapes discussed in this volume thus mark a shift from the idealized
Grand Tour representations to the living nightmares of ecomafia and the post-seismic rubble,
also traversing the linguistic territories, both cradles and enclaves, in which this country
expresses its mind. Italy’s natures embrace nonhuman creatures from eloquent birds to storied
trees, resident parasites, and stratifying geo-social layers; its ecologies entail the beauty of
Alpine regions as well as the cellular intricacies of pollution and maldevelopment that
contaminate Italian bodies and elements. In short, the stories we record are stories of life forms
and signs, justice and violence, food and places, uncertain borders and oil, dissident communities
and interspecies dialogues, poetry and slaughterhouses, industry and art, sea and roots.
The first section, “Natures and Voices,” features essays that, from various perspectives,
underline the complex interrelations and entanglements between living beings and their natural
and artificial surroundings. If the voices we hear in Patrick Barron’s study of Gianni Celati are
those of the ordinary, often overlooked ecologies in which we all live and move, those in Almo
Farina’s and Damiano Benvegnù’s essays are those of birds who sing, respectively, in the woods
of Lunigiana and in the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto. In Matteo Gilebbi’s essay the sounds, real
and metaphoric, muffled and violent, are instead the dreadful ones coming from the abattoirs
powerfully evoked in Ivano Ferrari’s poetry. This initial section ends with a short piece by
writer, philosopher, and zoo-anthropologist Roberto Marchesini, who engages in a dialogue
between his personal path and the Italian intellectual scenery. In this autobiographical account en
philosophe, Marchesini shows how posthumanist ontology has become a philosophy of
codependence, where animals, as forms of embodied “epiphany,” show us the impossibility of
understanding the human divided from its relation with the other.
The critical essays that compose part 2, “Places and Landscapes,” share an interest in
charting and deciphering the meanings inscribed in a number of physical, artistic, and literary
Italian landscapes. Starting from the industrial North, but with a look at larger dynamics,
Serenella Iovino uses Italo Calvino’s early urban works as tools for a “narrative stratigraphy.”
Calvino’s imaginative dealings with the material world, she argues, emerge and evolve along
with the landscapes of the Anthropocene that stratify over and within Italy’s bodies. And
stratifications—this time linguistic as well as ethno-anthropological—come from the region of
Calabria, which provides the background of Viktor Berberi’s essay on the literary works of
Carmine Abate. The interpenetration of landscape and folklife—an Italo-Albanian hybrid
compound—in some of Abate’s novels engenders, Berberi maintains, a sense of social
engagement and a possibility for resistance. Serena Ferrando’s contribution shifts our attention to
northern Italy again and the Alpine landscape of the Dolomites, a familiar playground of writer
and journalist Dino Buzzati. His works, Ferrando contends, outline a liminal, fantastic territory
made of rock, sand, mud, and Dolomitic peaks that is both human and elusively more-thanhuman. In the fourth essay we encounter the Italian landscape as an artwork to be looked at from
above. Here, Sophia Maxine Farmer, an art historian, argues that the Futurist sub-movement of
aeropainting portrayed the fantasy of a conquered Italian land and of a national identity
associated with the transformation of wilderness into a productive agricultural landscape.
Implicitly rejecting nationalistic epopees for the ancient silences of peripheral lands, the writer,
poet, and theorist of paesologia (placeology) Franco Arminio provides a creative conclusion to
this section with an alternative Grand Tour across Italy’s peripheral and abandoned sites and
villages. Lost and dispersed in a voracious history, Italy’s minor places are here populated by
stones and empty squares, by weeds and rusty tools—all things that glint with unexpected
narrative power. More than merely mapping this marginal geography, Arminio uses
paesologia—a poetic eco-phenomenology of places—as a way to preserve the material horizon
of domestic intimacy, a “form of intimate resistance,” and a therapeutic art of inhabiting place.
The notion of resistance also informs much of the third section, “Ecologies and
Environments.” The four essays in this part, shifting focus between the regions of Piedmont and
Sardinia, also emphasize unavoidable ecological continuities between landscapes, bodies, and
ideas. In Marcus Hall’s opening essay on malaria in Sardinia, resistance, in the sense of
immunity, may paradoxically emerge from contamination, as he shows us how the microinhabitants living inside us alter our physiology as well as cognition, and promote sickness as
well as good health. In the second essay, Luca Bugnone compares the enthusiastic response to
the opening of the Fréjus rail tunnel in 1871 with the contemporary dissent against the
environmentally devastating construction of a transalpine high-speed railway linking Turin and
Lyon. Examining the transnational landscapes of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Elena Past identifies
the director’s relentless attention to the hydrocarbon cultures that drive people apart but that also
fuel the filmmaking industry. Sorrentino’s cinema, she argues, enacts a Mediterranean form of
resistance by “thinking on foot” about how to live in the Anthropocene. How to resist food’s farfrom-ecological transformation into a global commodity in a reality of land-grabbing and
environmental crisis is the crucial question Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan asks both herself and, in an
exclusive interview, Carlo Petrini, the globally renowned founder of the Slow Food movement.
The fourth section, “Bodies and Pollutions,” includes essays in which pressing issues of
environmental justice and politics dialogue with creative literary and cinematic texts that have
helped to aesthetically translate the Anthropocene. Within this framework, Marco Armiero’s
personal, scientific, and political reflections on his research experience and “guerrilla narrative
project” on the waste crisis in Campania are followed by Andrea Hajek’s discussion of how two
recent earthquakes in the region of Emilia-Romagna changed not only the natural environment
but also people’s living and working practices, forcing them to rebuild their body politic by
rejoining the material territory, the social environment, and the community at large. In the third
contribution, the highly polluted city of Taranto, in the southeastern region of Puglia, is at the
center of Monica Seger’s investigation on local forms of creative resistance. This section ends
with the story of the environmental eco-noir book series Verdenero. Marco Moro, the editor-inchief of Edizioni Ambiente, Italy’s only publishing house exclusively devoted to environmental
issues, shares his view of an initiative of cultural activism that coincided with the emergence of a
new Italian “social novel” and introduced issues long hidden by the collusion between politics
and organized crime.
In the final, fifth section, “Imagination and (Re)visions,” onto-epistemological and
ethical questions continue to resonate, as our attention is drawn to new material and intellectual
landscapes. It opens with Pasquale Verdicchio’s provocative reconsiderations of our common
perceptions of the Mediterranean. Against a backdrop of cultural beliefs that emphasize a natural
blending of human and sea life, he contends that the remains of drowned migrants decaying on
the sea bottom retain a sort of agency stemming from transformative processes that incorporate
the basic elements of human bodies into the body of the sea. Reconnecting with Farmer’s essay,
Enrico Cesaretti’s contribution provocatively suggests ways in which Italian Futurism may be
approached from an ecocritical perspective. Cesaretti draws attention to potential affinities,
parallelisms, and, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, “adjacencies” between the way Futurism
imagined the interrelated notions of nature, matter, and corporeality and some of the current
positions of postmodern, material ecocriticism. The final two essays of this section are by eco-art
gallery curator Andrea Lerda, who addresses the often prescient relevance of Italian
contemporary art in raising environmental awareness, from Arte Povera in the 1960s until today,
and by contemporary writer, poet, and “tree seeker” Tiziano Fratus, who takes us for a deep
natural-cultural immersion into some important Italian forests, elaborating an imaginative
anthropology of woods in which roots, landscape, sounds, and time converge in his notion of
“dendrosophy,” a theory of arboreal wisdom and an art of living. An ideal conclusion to the
volume, Rosi Braidotti’s afterword, “The Proper Study of the Humanities Is No Longer ‘Man,’”
reconnects the large scope of the environmental humanities with the theoretical principles of
feminist philosophy in a common front of cultural and material liberation.
“A general explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account the way our
house was situated,” writes Italo Calvino in his autobiographical piece The Road to San
Giovanni (1993, 3). Far from providing general explanations of history and the world, the
modest ambition of this book is to describe, in different ways and from different angles, the
terrain where this house of ours is situated and some of the inhabitants that animate it. Perhaps
you will not see an ideal beautiful land from this window view. But maybe Italy was never just a
beautiful land—and this might indeed be a source of its enduring creativity. Through its
dystopian, dissonant, disturbing, yet ever resistant and resilient stories, we have tried to show
that this old country, with its hybrid roots and evolving mind, can still provide new figurations
for the humanities.
Notes
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1
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this introduction are our own.
2 For
a critical history of the bridge, and for its definition as “mythical,” see Angelini (2011).