Italian Ecopoetry, or the Art of Reading through Negativity

Italian Ecopoetry, or the Art of Reading through Negativity
   Danila Cannamela

   MLN, Volume 135, Number 1, January 2020 (Italian Issue), pp. 302-326 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2020.0003

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754952

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Italian Ecopoetry, or the Art of
       Reading through Negativity                                       1

                                       ❦

                         Danila Cannamela

  Ecopoetry—a new literary genre inspired by the current environmental
  emergency—aims to “give voice” to living beings who have none, and to
  attest to their rights. Within the vast universe of poetry, Ecopoetry does not
  claim a position of supremacy over other traditional poetic expressions, it
  simply chooses to be different.2

Maria Ivana Trevisani Bach’s “Manifesto of Italian Ecopoetry” (2005),
which circulated over the internet and through international confer-
ence presentations in the early 2000s and cited above, marks the
birth of a different genre: an empathetic and accessible poetry that
allows readers to identify with “animals, trees, [and] forests,” to see
“the beauty of a pristine landscape as a model to be protected,” and
to reconceive of human existence as a symbiotic relationship with
other living beings.
   However, more than ten years have passed since this declaration
and, while Trevisani Bach’s manifesto has generated neither a cohesive
movement nor an easily-traceable new genre, this text still prompts
key questions which call for an exploration of contemporary Italian
literature: What is ecopoetry? How does it diverge from traditional
nature poetry? And, if the environmental emergency is a global issue,
is it possible to distinguish a distinctively Italian ecopoetics? Moving

  1
   I would like to thank Franco Arminio, Antonella Bukovaz, Mimmo Cangiano, Mat-
teo Gilebbi, Serenella Iovino, Rossella Romeo, Niccolò Scaffai, and MLN anonymous
reviewers for their help with this article.
  2
   The English translation of this manifesto is available on Massimo D’Arcangelo’s
website: http://www.massimodarcangelo.altervista.org/index.html.

       MLN 135 (2020): 302–326 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press

M LN                               303

from these queries, in this article, I offer an overview of ecopoetry
in the broader context of literary studies and identify in the locus
amoenus—a beautiful, yet perturbing, site where presence and loss
coexist—the origin of an idiosyncratic Italian ecopoetic discourse.
   A useful starting point for this investigation is to clarify the differ-
ence between “ecopoetics” and “ecopoetry.” Both derive from the
Ancient Greek ποιεῖν (poieîn), to make or to create, designating an
act of creativity, or ποίησις (poiesis). Yet, as Aaron Moe highlights,
“this making” is not exclusively human but appears “through [ . . . ]
innumerable nuances of bodily movement, symbolic gesture, [ . . . ]
symbolic vocalization,” and forms of “innovative imitation” across
animal and vegetal life (7). Embracing a similar non-anthropocentric
perspective, I adopt “ecopoetics” as an umbrella term for all lan-
guages, media, and practices—whether they are human, nonhuman,
or interspecies—that make the experience of dwelling on earth an
act of creative interaction. On the other hand, my use of the term
“ecopoetry” has a much narrower focus, referring exclusively to poetry
as a medium of ecopoetics, which is to say, as a creative language that
can mediate people’s construct of nature.
   The issue, though, is that defining ecopoetry is still a matter of
debate. If, following Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne’s proposal,
we approach this area of inquiry as a “coextension of post-1945 poetry
and poetics” (3) rather than as a genre, we are still confronted with a
series of issues. First, it is not clear whether the prefix “eco-” should
designate only poetry that seeks to raise awareness of the human-
provoked environmental crisis. One limitation of this definition,
as Niccolò Scaffai warns us, is that it runs the risk of falling into a
Manichean interpretation of reality by setting the positivity of nature
in opposition to the negativity of human influence (37). This type
of binary approach tends to oversimplify the intricateness of the
material and symbolic relations of our ecosystem in order to affirm
“comforting spiritualized conceptions of nature as a warm and inviting
place outside culture” (Bryant 291). Moving to metaliterary aspects,
we may wonder whether ecopoetry depends on authorial intention,
reader response, or textual strategy, or on an elusive combination of
all of these. Finally, if the troubled epoch of the Anthropocene has
dramatically shown that nature and culture are interwoven, can we
assert, drawing on Timothy Morton’s perspective, that every work of
poetry is intrinsically environmental?3

 3
  On this point, see Shoptaw and his critique of Morton’s view (397).

304                         DANILA CANNAMELA

   In order to pinpoint the peculiarity of the Italian case, it is impor-
tant to recall that in the last few decades, the poetics of nature has
gained new visibility in Italian literature. In the twentieth century,
Mario Luzi’s late works, which grasp the “contingency of a biological
life that embraces the human, the animal, and the divine” (Gilebbi
99), and the exploration of language and nature that characterizes
Andrea Zanzotto’s writings, delineate areas of creative inquiry that
Italian poets have continued to examine.4 If, in a 1997 interview,
poet Claudio Damiani still hoped for “un secolo meno separato dal
tempo, dalla memoria, dalla natura” (“a [twenty-first] century less
separated from time, memory, nature,” his wishful thinking is now a
well-established trend (La difficile facilità 143–44). A revised twenty-
first-century poetics of nature, in which humans and nonhumans are
revealed to be intermingled co-agents, is constructed by a number
of authors, including Tiziano Fratus’ “dendrosophy” (a “philosophy”
of trees in verses), Laura Pugno’s experimental representation of
nature, and the zoopoetics of Ivano Ferrari and Fabio Pusterla. The
same applies to anthologies such as Poesia e natura (2007) and the
recent bilingual volume Intatto. Intact (2017), which gathers works by
Massimo D’Arcangelo, Anne Helvey, and Helen Moore.5
   It is not surprising that interest in nature is being rekindled in an
epoch that Lynn Keller has dubbed the “self-conscious Anthropocene,”
a time of “changed recognition when the responsibility humans bear for
the condition of the planet [ . . . ] is widely understood” (Recomposing
Ecopoetics 2). What might be odd, then, is for Italian poets to retrieve
the idyllic imagery of the locus amoenus in a troubled time, in which
discourses of nature are overwhelmingly infused with negativity—mass
extinction, toxicity, and sense of inadequacy are all concerns resonat-
ing with the Anthropocene.
   In examining how a seemingly obsolete pastoral beauty is both
indicative of an Italian philology of nature but also surprisingly
reflective of our environmental present, my investigation engages the
notion of negativity in its many iterations: lack, loss, desire, frustra-
tion, concealment, criticism. This study uses negativity as a method
of inquiry, as a criterion for selecting an archive of poetry that is still
at the margins of the ecocritical canon, and as the negative affects
underlying these works. The overarching goal is to introduce a
twenty-first century selection of neo-pastoral poetry that illuminates
two “ecological” aspects of the Italian humanistic tradition: its reuse
  4
   On Zanzotto, see Benvegnù’s essay “Birds who Speak my Dialect” and Scaffai’s chapter
“Ecologia e modernità nel Novecento letterario italiano.”
  5
   For a comparative dossier of ecopoetry see the journal Semicerchio.

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of the past as an interpretative lens for the present, and its denial of
any hierarchical division between (immaterial) reason and (material)
life. As philosopher Roberto Esposito maintains, “all Italian thought,
from Bruno to Leopardi, seeks in the wisdom of the ancients the keys
to interpret what is closest at hand” (23) and stands out for being a
“living thought,” namely, a reasoning inseparable from the field of
living praxis (11). This peculiar thought, steeped in life, is indeed
distinctive of an Italian ecopoetics that revisits the hidden negativ-
ity of the pastoral locus amoenus to meditate on the natural-cultural
complexity of the current epoch.
   My analysis begins with an overview of ecopoetry via negativa; I then
move to discuss how Italian ecocriticism has unmasked the stereotypical
poetic image of Italy, the “Bel paese,” and mainly explored ecopoetry
as a space where traditional beauty is demystified. The second section
reclaims the idyllic landscape as a productive scholarly discourse and
retraces the origin of the Italian poetics of nature in the mythologeme
of the locus amoenus. The “beautiful place,” as Ernst Robert Curtius
points out, is a “principal motif of all nature description” that has
evolved from Greek and Roman literature to the Romance tradition
(195). “Its minimum ingredients,” Curtius continues, “comprise a tree
(or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook” (195); yet, this
motif often spans, combines, and even embeds bucolic landscapes, wild
woods, Edenic gardens, and a rich variety of eternal spring delights—
“spices, balsam, honey, wine, cedars, and bees” (198).6 These settings,
which are typical of pastoral literature, are generally identified with
an escape into a benevolent nature; yet, a closer look reveals that the
locus amoenus is a much more obscure space where poets have typi-
cally elaborated on loss and desire from frustrated feelings of love to
sociohistorical “conflicts of innocence and experience, simplicity and
complexity, nature and civilization” (Winsor Leach 24). This inner
ambiguity also resides in the etymology of the adjective “amoenus.” In
addition to designating a “pleasant” locus (from the Greek comparative
“améinon”), the adjective could also be used to describe an “unfruit-
ful” place (from “a-munus,” without gifts), namely, a place dedicated
to the creative unproductiveness of otium. Finally, the term could also
mean “open space” (from “a-moenia,” without walls) (Pasqualini 3).
   The locus amoenus, understood as a classic archetype of natural-
cultural interconnectedness and concealed negativity, is the thread
weaving together an overlooked archive of twenty-first-century Italian
poetry. With this premise, the last part of the essay focuses on how five

 6
  On the locus amoenus see also Pennacini and Poggioli.

306                          DANILA CANNAMELA

poets—Antonella Bukovaz, Mariangela Gualtieri, Umberto Piersanti,
Gabriella Sica, and the aforementioned Damiani—have redeployed
pastoral beauty to represent pressing socio-environmental issues, such
as confronting the binding power of death and illness, repositioning
the human in relation to the nonhuman, and finding a local sense
of place. Their critical “retreat” into a centuries-old locus amoenus,
where nature and culture are revealed to share the same “creative
urgency,” ultimately questions the widespread idea that, in light of
the ecological emergency, traditional humanistic approaches must
be substantially revised.7
   Italian ecocritical analyses have generally investigated ecopoetics
through novels and cinema, yet this article shifts the focus to fairly
recent Italian poetry. In doing so, it uses the discourse of negativity
as the through line to explore how seemingly conventional nature
poetry can still “connote openings, indeterminate possibilities, and
practices of resistance” (Skinner 111).

What Ecopoetry is Not
Discussing what ecopoetry is not is, perhaps, the most effective way to
illustrate this multifaceted field, which has generated a lively debate in
North American literary studies and recently spurred interest within
Italian Studies. Ecopoetry is not a genre. The difficulty in defining this
amphibious genre/non-genre, which is about nature as much as it is
not, has inspired Jonathan Skinner’s article “Small Fish Big Pond,” one
of the most cited pieces on ecopoetry. This seminal work opens with
a vague, and purposefully misleading, statement: “Ecopoetics is some
poetics. Ecopoetics is not an author, a genre or a method. Ecopoetics
includes all poetics and poems and can be an aspect of any poetic
work” (111). Skinner’s “non-definition” is important, as it suggests
we think of ecopoetry as a “modest work-in-progress, a rough draft”
(113) rather than as a delineated area.
   Ecopoetry is not (solely) nature poetry. Despite his friendly warning,
a number of scholars have attempted to define ecopoetry. Ann Fisher-
Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, in The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013), identify
three subcategories of ecopoetry: nature poetry (traditional lyric poetry
that, in using “nature as subject matter and inspiration,” focuses on
the human observer), environmental poetry (works “propelled by

   7
    On the bursting creativity that joins everything, see Damiani: “la poesia [ . . . ] è
fatta come il mondo, e [ . . . ] la sua urgenza creativa è la stessa con cui si crea ogni
giorno, o diciamo ogni istante, il mondo” (La difficile facilità 234).

M LN                                         307

and directly engaged with active and politicized environmentalism”),
and ecological poetry (experimental poetry that engages with “the
relationship between nature and culture, language and perception”)
(xxviii–xxix). This tripartition, while offering general guidelines,
leaves room for conflicting interpretations, particularly concerning
the divide between lyric and experimental poetry, or human-centered
versus non-anthropocentric poetry.8
   Poet John Shoptaw, in an essay polemically titled “Why Ecopoetry?,”
reaches a possible compromise, affirming that while we can view
ecopoetry as a type of nature poetry “that has designs on us, that
imagines changing the ways we think, feel about, and live and act in
the world,” we must also concede that even more traditional nature
poetry can lead readers to rework their anthropocentric worldviews
(408). “Nature poetry, even without broaching ruination or restora-
tion, can also be environmentalist,” he concludes (408).
   Ecopoetry is not about harmony. Disharmony is a concept that
resonates with ecopoetry on many levels. As a discourse that crosses
a wide range of poetics—e.g. pastoral, Romantic, experimental—eco-
poetry cannot help but generate stylistic inhomogeneity and internal
dissonances. Moreover, for twenty-first century poetry, dissonance, or
“scalar dissonance” in Keller’s coinage (“Twenty-First-Century Ecopo-
etry” 49), has become a central theme in the representation of the
Anthropocene. In this multitemporal timeframe of tragic irony, the
anthropos is simultaneously an individual actor and aggregate agent,
perpetrator and victim of the environmental crisis, prominent change-
maker and bit player of its own center-stage action in the biosphere.
   Within Italian ecocriticism, the notion of disharmony has long been
a central topic of discussion, which has also offered a lens to examine
ecopoetry. A number of scholars, including Serenella Iovino, Elena
Past, and Monica Seger, have problematized the notion of beauty typi-
cally associated with the Italian landscape.9 Their works have unveiled
how toxic discourses—environmental emergencies, criminal activities
surrounding waste disposal, and industrial pollution—undermine such
a perfect façade. The investigation of the concealed dissonances that
shape the myth of Italy’s beauty has also prompted a few analyses of
poetic works. Iovino, in her preface to Intatto. Intact, affirms that “[e]
copoetry is consciousness of a dual expropriation: human—abused,
exploited, dominated—and non-human” (8, 10). This awareness is not

  For another possible categorization, see Garrard and Lidström’s article.
  8

  See, in particular, the introduction to Italy and the Environmental Humanities, edited by
  9

Cesaretti, Iovino, and Past; Past’s article “Trash is Gold,” and Seger’s “Narrating Dioxin.”

308                      DANILA CANNAMELA

limited to a call for ecojustice; additionally, it is a way for literature to
voice that “the reality of the more-than-human dimension [is] [ . . . ]
bearer of sign and meaning” (10). Thus, ecopoetry unveils a crucial
aspect: ecology, conceived of as a shifting reality, as a “meaning” that
is mobile and continually transforming, has never been in harmony
with people’s fixed construct of nature, whether nature is seen as a
resource to control or an “intact” space, separate from human activity.
   Likewise, Scaffai, in his introduction to an issue of Semicerchio
dedicated to “ecopoetry,” touched on the theme of disharmony. His
introduction makes a few key points that are worth summarizing.
Poetry—its lines, sounds, figures—exerts an estranging effect on lan-
guage; however, when environmental degradation enters the poetic
space, once it uses or forces its codes, this uncomfortable topic can,
in turn, create further estrangement and ultimately demystify long-
lasting cultural models, for example, the motif of the garden used
as a metaphor for the Italian landscape (4–5). Additionally, Scaffai
remarks that the journal favored one particular aspect of the term
“ecology,” “quello più legato a un’idea ibrida di natura” (“the one
more linked to a hybrid idea of nature,”; 5), or to a nature that is
always interwoven with sociohistorical and political discourses. As he
concludes, ecopoetry cannot reside in the fixed idealization of the
idyll, but rather in the representation of “ambienti che accolgono,
e più spesso subiscono attraversamenti di soglia, come quelli tra
l’umano e l’animale [ . . . ], tra il rurale e l’urbano, tra il naturale e
l’artificiale” (“environments welcoming, and more often undergoing
threshold crossings, like those between human and animal [ . . . ],
rural and urban, natural and artificial”; 5).
   Iovino’s and Scaffai’s reflections highlight from complementary
perspectives how “negativity”—critique, estrangement, degradation—is
the main trait of a contemporary ecopoetry that destabilizes constructs
of natural harmony and beauty. Paradoxical though it may seem, also
the locus amoenus is an overlooked site of productive negativity. Far
from being a perfect oasis of “natural balance,” this beautiful locus
has inspired a poetic tradition in which personal, social, political,
and environmental thresholds are trespassed. This may explain why,
in the twenty-first century, poets have redeployed the pastoral locus
amoenus as a place where anthropocentric exceptionalism “dies” and
Italian humanism continues to feature a lively copresence of past and
present, living thought and living matter.

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An Ecopoetic Archetype: The Beautiful Land of Loss and Desire
Unlike Anglophone poets—we could mention Gary Snyder, Helen
Moore, and Juliana Spahr—who have used their verses to voice their
strong commitment to environmentalism, their Italian counterparts
have engaged in more nuanced ecopoetics in which the discourse of
nature is less dominant and always blended with other discourses—the
aesthetic, the social, the political.
   The distinctive obliqueness of the Italian poetics of nature origi-
nates in the pastoral tradition, whose “deliberate simplification of life
[through an escape into luxuriant vegetation] is far from simple.”
Charles Segal remarks, pastoral poetry “expresses the paradox inherent
in all art, that an imaginative and imaginary distancing from reality is
simultaneously a means of intensifying and clarifying reality” (6). The
complexity that surfaces in simple bucolic beauty is exemplified in
a classic model such as Virgil’s Eclogues, which open with Meliboeus’
longing for his homeland—a reference to the traumatic episode of
the confiscation of lands that occurred after the battle of Philippi (42
BC). Likewise, in the Georgics, the celebration of a peaceful rural world,
under the divine guardianship of Augustus, comes in the aftermath
of decades of civil war that deeply destabilized Roman society. What
pastoral beauty shows through its artifice of simplicity is that its idyl-
lic setting—trees, a lovely breeze, a creek, and singing shepherds—is
a heterotopia, disturbingly close to the unreachable utopia of the
Edenic garden. This hidden negativity, along with the blending of
natural-cultural discourses, are the main traits of a poetics of nature
that has evolved from the classic pastoral tradition to contemporary
adaptations.
   In Italian culture, the natural-cultural imagery of the locus amoenus
is comparable to the North American myth of wilderness. As Scaffai
clarifies, while North American nature writing is traditionally based
on the imagery of an untouched wild land, in Italy, the idea of nature
has been mediated by culture through centuries-old aesthetic para-
digms and an ancient history of anthropomorphization dating back to
Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans (167). This filtering, Pasquale Verdic-
chio notices, is also visible in the verbiage of the Italian Constitution,
which regards the territory of the peninsula as a landscape, inseparable
from the nation’s cultural heritage, therefore creating a “relationship
grounded in aesthetic and not conservationist considerations” (viii).
The motif of the beautiful place, since Theocritus’ idylls, has in fact
shaped a literary landscape in which the beauty of nature and that
of poetry assimilate, as the shepherds are also poets. Consequently,

310                       DANILA CANNAMELA

Italian culture has inherited an idiosyncratic awareness that could be
considered proto-ecological: the realization that nature, as a separate
and delimited hortus conclusus, seat of pristine authenticity, is lost for
good.
   The bucolic and georgic imagery, as a foundational mythologeme
of the Italian construct of nature, is operative even in less obvious
contexts. For instance, we can detect its latent presence in the com-
munication strategy of Slow Food. This organization devoted to
sustainable agriculture has recovered the pastoral idyll through its
concept “good, clean, fair;” it has also politicized the dimension of
otium, characteristic of the locus amoenus. Slow Food’s approach to
sustainable food is, in fact, a “reaction to the accelerated tempo [of
negotium] imposed by global capitalism in one of our basic living
functions—eating—and on the interlaced systems of exploitation on
which this function depends when it is industrially controlled” (Iovino,
Ecocriticism and Italy 146). However, the pastoral beauty evoked by Slow
Food is not predicated on the idea of retreating into nature’s “righ-
teousness;” rather, it is an attempt to rethink the natural environment
as an ecosystem tied to socio-economic apparatuses of production,
distribution, and consumption.
   Moving to a literary example, the locus amoenus is the underlying
text of the “Manifesto breve del realismo terminale” (2014), a warning
about the extinction of humanism under the dominance of objects. In
mourning the loss of reality caused by a pervasive late-capitalist artifi-
ciality, the authors of the manifesto—poets Guido Oldani, Giuseppe
Lagella, and Elena Salibra—state: “La natura è stata messa ai margini
[ . . . ]. Nessuna azione ne prevede più l’esistenza. Non sappiamo più
accendere un fuoco, zappare l’orto, mungere una mucca. I cibi sono
in scatola, il latte in polvere, i contatti virtuali, il mondo racchiuso
in un piccolo schermo. È il trionfo della vita artificiale” (“Nature has
been marginalized. [ . . . ] None of our actions involves its existence.
We no longer know how to light a fire, hoe the orchard, milk a cow.
Food is packaged, milk is powered, relationships are virtual, the world
enclosed in a small screen. It’s the triumph of artificial life”).10 Here,
even more than in the rhetoric of the Slow Food movement, the real
genuineness of nature is filtered through a nostalgic pastoralism.
Interestingly, the manifesto does not actually lament the loss of an
idealized (and separate) nature, but of a material relational space.
The pastoral setting, although reminiscent of arcadian ideals, stands

 10
   (http://giuseppelangellaopere.weebly.com/il-realismo-terminale.html).

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as the vanishing locus of a more direct—yet potentially frustrating and
problematic—relationship of co-belonging with nonhuman agents.11
   If the locus amoenus has never been the seat of natural authenticity,
it has been even less a place of pure bliss. Despite being a locus where
beauty is on display, this place rarely offers comfort or solace. It is
not a coincidence that, in classic mythology, the story of the cyclical
arrival of spring is built on a narrative of loss and desire. As Ovid’s
Metamorphoses recounts (5.341–461), after Dis, the god of the under-
world, kidnapped Proserpine in a meadow blooming with flowers,
her mother Ceres, goddess of agriculture and the harvest, wanders
in longing for her daughter’s return to earth. Ovid’s archetypical nar-
rative is a further example of how, in classic poetry, the presence of
“violence, cruelty, and arbitrary suffering in pleasant natural settings
[is] [ . . . ] almost a theme” (Garrison 100).
   The clash between the beauty of nature and social trauma has
evolved in Italian literature. In the overarching story of Boccaccio’s
Decameron, the young “brigata” finds shelter in the countryside while
a deadly plague is decimating Florence. In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,
Angelica is the victim of aggression in a locus amoenus that, along the
lines of the Metamorphoses, suddenly turns into a locus horridus, symbol-
izing a veiled critique of power that the Este family materially displayed
in their magnificent gardens (Pasqualini 11). Poliziano’s Favola di Orfeo
ends with Orpheus, the enchanter of animals, being violently killed by
the Bacchantes after he fails to rescue his beloved Euridice from the
underworld. Moving to twentieth-century poetic adaptations, Pascoli’s
endangered family nest, Pasolini’s nostalgia for the peasant lifestyle,
and Zanzotto’s critique of a biocide industrial progress all share a
poetics of nature that is filtered through the pastoral mythologeme
of the locus amoenus and redeploys its foundational motif of loss and
desire. In a broader sense, this literary topos suits the imagery of Italy.
The fabled “Bel Paese,” with the highest number of World Heritage
Sites, the land renowned for its tranquil Mediterranean lifestyle and
top-notch produce and cuisine, is also a place undermined by “the
contiguity of décor and slander, [ . . . ] antiquity’s glory and uncivilized
modernity” (Arminio, “On Places and Looking” 113).
   The ambiguity intrinsic to the locus amoenus has shaped Franco
Arminio’s paesologia, which is undoubtedly one of the most original
expressions of contemporary Italian ecopoetics. Paesologia is an art of
flânerie based on the observation of a landscape where the copresence

   On this, see also Iovino’s chapter “Slow,” in Ecocriticism and Italy.
  11

312                       DANILA CANNAMELA

of strong traditions and modern industrialization clashes. Through
this itinerant art of contemplation, Arminio has criticized the capital-
ist notion of growth, and brought forward, in contrast, a celebration
of degrowth, loss, and death. However, the negativity of paesologia is
neither a form of pessimistic nihilism nor a self-indulgent carpe diem.
Rather, it is an open invitation to acknowledge and embrace human
mortality as a path to civic engagement dislodged from the myth of
hyper-productive futurity. As Arminio writes in the poem-manifesto
that opens his 2017 collection, Cedi la strada agli alberi:
   Pensa che si muore
   e che prima di morire tutti hanno diritto
   a un attimo di bene.
   Ascolta con clemenza.
   Guarda con ammirazione le volpi,
   le poiane, il vento, il grano
   Think that we all die, everything dies
   and before dying everyone, everything, has the right
   to a moment of goodness.
   Listen with mercy.
   Look with admiration at the foxes,
   the buzzards, the wind, the wheat. (“Pensa che si muore”).

  This invitation to indulge in an attentive, compassionate gaze rein-
vents the bucolic contemplative attitude and georgic industriousness
into a “revolutionary” local project. Inland small villages, whose names
turn into poetry lines—“Craco, Romagnano, Roscigno / Aquilonia,
Conza, Apice”12—become the locus amoenus of a counter-culture where
a more-than-human community can flourish:
   Abbiamo bisogno di contadini,
   di poeti, gente che sa fare il pane,
   che ama gli alberi e riconosce il vento.
   Più che l’anno della crescita,
   ci vorrebbe l’anno dell’attenzione.
   Attenzione a chi cade, al sole che nasce
   e che muore, ai ragazzi che crescono,
   attenzione anche a un semplice lampione,
   a un muro scrostato.
   Oggi essere rivoluzionari significa togliere
   più che aggiungere, rallentare più che accelerare,
   significa dare valore al silenzio, alla luce,
   alla fragilità, alla dolcezza.

   12
     The poem “Craco, Romagnano, Roscigno” “estranges” the materiality of remote
villages into poetic musicality.

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  We need farmers,
  poets, people who can make bread,
  who love trees and can read the wind.
  More than the year of growth,
  we would need the year of attention.
  Attention to those who fall, to the sun that rises
  and dies, to the children who grow up,
  even attention to a simple lamppost,
  to a scraped wall.
  Today to be revolutionary means removing,
  more than adding, slowing down more than accelerating,
  it means to value silence, light,
  fragility, sweetness. (“Abbiamo bisogno di contadini”).

   In this view, the revolutionary potential of negativity enables a form
of cultural ecology. The thought of death, Arminio explains, is the
most ecological of all, as it is the only thought radically free from the
production-consumption cycle and therefore able to generate a process
of liberation (Geografia commossa 37). In relation to the ecological value
of death, poetry serves as a form of ethics-aesthetics that, in grasping
our fleeting existence, also catches its beguiling beauty, absurdity,
and redeeming potential—the possibility of giving way to the trees,
or “prova(re) a sentire il mondo / con gli occhi di una mosca, /
con le zampe di un cane” (“to try to feel the world / with the eyes
of a fly / or the paws of a dog”; “Prendi un angolo del tuo paese”).
   Arminio’s paesologia is not an isolated attempt to reinvent the pastoral
tradition into a distinctive Italian ecopoetry where idyll and negativity
coexist. In the twenty-first century, other poets have also repurposed
the convergence of mourning and desire, beauty and trauma, and
simplicity and complexity into a poetics of sustainability.

The Locus Amoenus in Twenty-First-Century Italian Ecopoetry
By redeploying a locus amoenus of pastoral, georgic, and Edenic
nuances, twenty-first-century Italian poets have similarly represented
“Le cose intorno a noi [ . . . ] non emblematiche o allusive [ . . . ]
ma compagne della nostra vita, intere e vere come la nostra vita”
(“the things surrounding us [ . . . ] not emblematic or allusive [ . . . ]
but companions of our lives, whole and true like our lives”; Dami-
ani, La difficile facilità 151).The complexity of this companionship is
particularly visible in “Il giardino del mio amore,” a poem in which
Damiani describes his beloved’s “heavenly” garden as a microcosmos,

314                      DANILA CANNAMELA

carved out in a frightening “outside” of sick trees, weeds, and strong
wind. By contrast, the garden seems to be ruled by a “sacred order:”
  Lo guarda: qui c’è una piantina grassa
  azzurra, là c’è un vilucchio, qui un sasso,
  qua una gramigna che al mio amore è cara
  anche, qui giace una viola che prese
  ieri in un campo, e in ultimo gli stecchi
  dei fiori morti che il mio amore tiene
  lo stesso, e le lumache [ . . . ]
  Questo è il giardino; se lo guardi è forte
  il lume tanto che ti fere gli occhi
  e ti rivolti, ma subito apprendi
  che tutto è vero, ogni cosa che vedi
  è vera, e svolge la vita nel tempo
  e è intera
  She looks at it: here is a little cactus
  baby blue, there a bindweed, here a pebble,
  here a weed that my love loves
  too, here lays a violet that she picked
  yesterday in a field, and finally the stems
  of dead flowers that my beloved keeps
  anyways, and the snails [ . . . ]
  This is the garden; if you look at it so strong
  the light that wounds your eyes
  and you turn away, but soon you learn
  that everything is real, everything you see
  is real, and carries on life throughout time
  and is whole (Poesie).

   In the age of climate change, Damiani’s familiar garden, threatened
by external agents and suddenly able to turn itself into a threat, recalls
the time-space of the Anthropocene—its slippery borders between
inside and outside, and its overwhelming wholeness that cannot help
but to blind our eyes. The allure of Damiani’s garden mostly resides
in its puzzling reality, infested with death, and yet still releasing a
captivating beauty.
   One of the main challenges of facing the “negativity in the garden”
is indeed to craft a sustainable humanism, what Iovino comprehen-
sively defines as “non-anthropocentric humanism,” that can reframe
the relationship between people and the soil “tattooed under their
feet” into an emancipatory “culture of co-presence” (“Ecocriticism

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and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism” 32).13 In the twenty-first
century, theoretical approaches such as vital materialism and mate-
rial ecocriticism have targeted the hierarchical system of binaries (i.e.
human-animal, mind-body, rational-irrational, culture-nature) that has
traditionally enabled an enlightened dominance over an allegedly inert
nature and naturalized others.14 In contrast, these frameworks posit
matter as agentic and recast the conventional divide between human
and nonhuman into a site of meshing and porous trans-corporeality.15
   Italian ecopoetry undoubtedly echoes current critiques of anthro-
pocentric worldviews; however, the contemporary poetics of the locus
amoenus is not directly dependent on the fairly recent debate on non-
human agency. Rather, it draws on a “culture of co-presence” rooted
in Italy’s cultural heritage and geo-political history, testifying to the
extreme adaptability of a long-standing humanistic tradition of “living
thought” that “is irreducible to the distinction between res cogitans and
res extensa, reason and [matter], or proper and common” (Esposito
25). This thought has developed an intriguing form of ecopoetry that
suggests “una strategia etica di avvicinamento tra nature ed esseri
diversi,” (“ an ethical strategy of closeness between different natures
and beings”; Iovino, “Storie dell’altro mondo” 119), while performing
a twofold practice of cultural ecology—an act of conservation and a
process of creative interaction with the past. Damiani, Sica, Gualtieri,
Piersanti, and Bukovaz, by revisiting ancient motives, recreate a poetics
of nature that is inextricable from the poetics of the human. And in
the epoch of the conscious Anthropocene, living entails (re)think-
ing of beauty as a space of co-suffering, resilient vitality, and critical
acknowledgement of the past in the present.
   The neo-pastoral settings of Damiani and Sica share a common
origin as, in the 1980s, both authors were members of a Roman
group of young poets and artists. The group, despite their agreement
with the mindset of the neo-avant-garde, sought to unveil capitalist
ideology through a return to poetic “simplicity,” in the form of an
intelligible and referential language. Imitation of nature became the
pillar of a poetics that reclaims “[la] lingua e [l]’eredità dei morti”
(“the language and the heritage of the dead”; Sica, “Corpo umano di
Vetralia rovente e verticale” 104). This reconnection implies drawing

  13
     The image of a “tattooed geography” is recurrent in Bukovaz.
  14
     For a detailed overview of the “nonhuman turn” in the humanities and social sci-
ences see Cannamela, The Quiet Avant-Garde (especially introduction and first chapter).
   15
     The “mesh” is a concept developed by Morton, see “Thinking Ecology,” 268–269;
“trans-corporeality” is a notion Stacy Alaimo has illustrated in Bodily Natures.

316                          DANILA CANNAMELA

on the classics—Virgil, Horace, and the elegiac poets—and retrieving
the “difficult ease” of an Italian lineage that ideally links Petrarch to
Pascoli, and then proceeds through the twentieth century, with Saba,
Penna, and Caproni.
   Damiani’s and Sica’s poetry revitalizes the “dead language” of tradi-
tion while using the very image of death as the basis of a beautiful com-
monality to come, “qualcosa che ci appartiene / e non ci è estranea /
qualcosa che ci accomuna, e ci riunisce” ( “something that belongs to
us / and is not extraneous to us / something that joins and reunites
us”; Damiani, “Se siamo così tanti,” Poesie). This shared “creatural
fragility”16 is the foundational element of the interspecies solidarity
attained by their parallel reinventions of the pastoral locus amoenus.
   In Damiani’s poetry, this material feeling of binding precarious-
ness is exemplified in the image of the fig tree planted on the top
of a fortress. This tree that “ha vita molto precaria / perché quando
faranno i restauri / sarà certamente tagliato” (“has a very precarious
life / because when they do restorations / it will certainly be cut”) is a
pastoral oasis of the present: “si lascia accarezzare / dalla luce e dalle
brezze tiepide / sente la nebbia, sente gli uccelli / che parlottano tra
i suoi rami” ( “it lets the light and the tepid breeze / caress him, /
feels the fog, / hears the birds / chit chatting on its branches”; “Il
fico sulla fortezza,” Poesie). Damiani’s tree brings to mind the humil-
ity of Pascoli’s myricae—a reference to Virgil’s “humilesque Myricae”
from Eclogue IV—as well as the resilience of Leopardi’s wild broom,
springing forth from the arid soil of a volcano. We should also recall
that, in the classic pastoral tradition, each author has established a
tree as symbolic to his approach to the genre—the pine in Theocritus’
Idylls, the beech tree in Virgil’s Eclogue I, the oak in Longus’ Daphnis
and Chloe (Wesolowski 211). Damiani’s precarious fig can be read as a
suitable metaphor for an environmental future that, albeit uncertain,
is definitely shared; as the tree declares, referring to its seeds: “Mori-
remo tutti insieme, come soldati intrappolati, / non morirò prima
io o prima loro / ma tutti insieme, capisci? / E questo mi rincuora”
(“We will die all together, like trapped soldiers, / I won’t die first, they
won’t die first / but all together, you know? / And this comforts me”;
“Quel fico sulla fortezza,” Poesie). Also in Damiani, as previously seen
in Arminio’s poetry, the negativity of death is recast into a comforting
binding element that reworks literary images from the past into an
open invitation to interspecies solidarity.

   “Fragilità creaturale” is an expression of Lagazzi (see Sica, Le lacrime delle cose 159).
  16

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   The unifying image of death returns in a poem of Sica, “Come
sono come saranno questi nostri anni . . . ,” which voices an even
stronger poetics of interconnection between nature, politics, and
culture. This text re-contextualizes the prophetic tone of Virgil’s IV
Eclogue, where “[f]ollowing the so-called Sibylline Books, [the Latin
poet] announced that mankind had just reached a turning point”
(Poggioli 18). In Sica’s rewrite, the turning point coincides with the
apocalyptic events of 9/11—“l’apocalisse nell’urto” (“the apocalypse
in the collision”; Le lacrime delle cose 150). The negativity of this histori-
cal cataclysm is read, though, as the possibility of generating a new
unforeseen society, which Sica, echoing Virgil, describes through a
series of natural adynata:
   Non hanno le Parche detto ai loro fusi di affrettare
   il secolo dell’oro quando non patirà la terra violenza
   né la vigna-casa la falce
   e il suolo produrrà per vivere il necessario
   senza la legge folle del mercato
   allora saremo liberi dalla paura perpetua
   gli armenti non temeranno i leoni furiosi
   scomparirà l’erba velenosa tra le bionde spighe
   e il serpente dalla lingua di fuoco
   Haven’t the Fates told their spindles to hurry up
   the golden age, when the land will bear no violence
   nor the vineyard-home the sickle
   and the soil will produce enough to live
   without the foolish market law
   then we will be free from perpetual fear
   the herds won’t fear the furious lions
   the poisonous grass amidst the blond spikes will disappear
   and the snake with the fiery tongue (150–51).

   Contrary to this poetic prophecy, in the aftermath of 9/11, the
capitalist apparatus has gained new market venues (e.g. the market
of airport security), homeland borders are patrolled with fear, and
a global agreement on environmental norms has yet to be reached.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that Sica’s golden age is a future in which
culture, politics, and the natural environment can only regenerate
together; furthermore, in her view, overcoming the negativity of the
times entails embracing the route of a destabilizing (and very human-
ist) self-criticism. In the last two stanzas, Sica replaces the reassuring
paradigm of human stewardship with the unsettling collective figure
of the heir-refugee: “la terra dei padri è stata assegnata a noi profughi”

318                       DANILA CANNAMELA

(“the land of the fathers has been assigned to us, refugees,”; Le lacrime
delle cose 151) she writes. Even the traditional poetic “I” must die to
allow for a cross-national, interspecies chorus of refugees to thrive:
“L’io è le cose che succedono / le lacrime che implorano qui raccolte
nel catino / è il noi che si fa voi comunità e coro” ( “The I is the
things that happen / the tears imploring here gathered in a basin /
is the we that becomes you all, community and chorus”; Le lacrime delle
cose 151). Sica’s idyllic future “ricco di castagne tenere e di miele che
stilla dalle querce;” (“rich in soft chestnuts and honey dripping from
the oaks”; 151) is an apocalyptic time of revelation and regeneration.
   In Bestia di gioia (2010), Gualtieri has similarly drawn on a pastoral
and georgic imagery, yet also on a Franciscan-like simplicity, to shape
a communal locus amoenus of intense joy and regenerative pain. In
this place, humanism stretches far beyond the human, and “Tutto è
uno che cresce / che muore. Che felicità” (“All is one that grows /
that dies. What happiness”; “Un vento che esegue” 21).
   The book opens with a section, “Naturale sconosciuto,” that depicts
life in its multifaceted vitality: the buzzing honey bees, the must turn-
ing into wine, the overwhelming silence in the woods, the lament of
captured beasts, and “Il firmamento [ . . . ] capogiro di Dio” (“the
firmament [ . . . ] vertigo of God,”; “Il firmamento è il capogiro di
Dio” 36) all palpitate of the same mysterious energy. Gualtieri’s vital
materialism, while recalling Jane Bennett’s political ecology of vibrant
matter, is modulated after ancient conceptions that conceived of life
as a divine force pervading everything.17 The poem “Le api tessevano,”
which features an explicit homage to Virgil’s book IV of Georgics, is
illustrative of this vitalist poetics. Gualtieri writes:
   Le api tessevano
   di miele un’invisibile rete.
   Vibravano accese.
   [...]
   [...]a me parevano
   discese dalla mente prodigiosa
   d’un animale celeste
   Bees were weaving
   of honey, an invisible net.
   They vibrated full of light.
   [...]
   [...] To me bees seemed

  17
    I am referring to the notion of material agency that Bennett has theorized in
Vibrant Matter (2010).

M LN                                319

  descended from the prodigious mind
  of a celestial beast (“Le api tessevano” 29).

  Her description, which highlights the bees’ celestial energy rewrites
Virgil’s celebration of these prodigious insects. In Georgics 4.220–225,
we read:
  [ . . . ] bees own a share of the divine soul and drink in
  the ether of space; for, god invests everything—
  earth and the tracts of the sea and deepest heaven;
  from him, flocks, herds, men, all species of wild animals—
  each one gains for itself at birth its little life (67).

   In addition, the fabula Aristei, which closes book IV, is a retelling of
bugonia, namely, the myth of bees’ self-generation from the carcass of
a cow, of life springing out of death. In her poetry, Gualtieri retrieves
the notions of celestial animality and life’s intrinsic agency to create
an aesthetics of nature that is also an environmental ethics. This poet-
ics of living beauty challenges the conventional debasement of beasts
and conjoins humans and nonhumans in a shared joyful desire that
lies outside logics of techno-acceleration and economic exploitation.
Silence, meditation, and humility are values that Gualtieri finds in
her observation of nature:
  Nel silenzio dei fiori
  in quel silenzio al centro.
  Nell’umiltà
  del seme nel tacito afferrarsi
  di radici al terreno
  il brulichio delle menti umane
  appare tarlato di bene.
  In the silence of flowers
  in that silence in the middle.
  In the humility
  of the seed in the tacit mutual grabbing
  of the roots to the soil
  the swarming of human minds
  appears worm-eaten with good (“Nel silenzio dei fiori” 24).

  Gualtieri, in her criticism of an accelerated life, incompatible with
the rhythms of nature, develops another topical theme that shapes the
pastoral tradition. As Renato Poggioli explains, “the pastoral implies
a new ethos, which, however, is primarily negative [ . . . ]. Foremost
among the passions that the pastoral opposes and exposes are those
related to the misuse, or merely to the possession, of worldly goods”

320                    DANILA CANNAMELA

(4). In her poetry, capitalism is the fake idol that deprives humans
and nonhumans alike of their divine nature to tame them into docile
consumers. Gualtieri’s neo-pastoralism thus evolves into a political
chant of freedom from the “[ . . . ] le catene / d’una dittatura che
impera. // Noi non adoreremo le sue merci. / Non piegheremo la
schiena / alla sua greppia” (“[...] chains / of a ruling dictatorship.
We won’t adore its goods. / We won’t bend our back / to its manger”;
“Ciò che non muta” 32).
   Gualteri’s hymn to the humble persistence of life, which is set in
opposition to the opulence of fleeting idols, is an invitation to find
a renewed sense of accomplishment in a liberating “serena attesa di
niente” (“serene waiting for nothing”; “Ma l’amore” 42). This waiting
ends with death, which is only a reconnection with the impalpable
intricacy of matter; it is “l’entrare fuori misura. / Senza chili, senza
metri, senza / particelle. Alleluiare” (“entering a space beyond mea-
surements. / Without kilograms, without meters, without / particles.
To be the halleluiah”; “Un secolo di polveri pesa” 130).
   In Nel folto dei sentieri (2015), Umberto Piersanti also explores the
complex commonality that links us to nonhuman nature, but in doing
so, adopts a self-reflective lens. His locus amoenus is an intimate place
where the author confronts a negativity intrinsic to (his human)
nature: illness. The collection is a poetic wandering around the Marche
region, in an area between the woods of Cesane and the beaches on
the slopes of Mount Conero. The poet knows these places so well that
he can name a wide variety of plants with great precision—flowering
ashes, orchids, lesser celandine, hyacinths, stocks, anemones—and yet
he cannot avoid getting lost in this familiar landscape.
   These woods hold personal memories for Piersanti, including liter-
ary memories spanning Arcadian images—“[co]i pini profumati / e il
vento lieve” (“perfumed pines / and a light breeze”; “Era un giorno
perfetto” 194)—and metareferences (in particular, Dante, Leopardi,
Pascoli). These woods are also where the poet encounters the natural
mysteriousness of his own son, Jacopo, who is affected by autism. The
parallel between the familiar alterity of Cesane and the impenetrability
of Jacopo is strengthened by a mythological comparison to Proser-
pine’s kidnapping: “Jacopo anche tu / da una forza nera / scelto e
devastato, / solo che quella donna / risale ai prati, / sparge i fiori
tra l’erbe / nei campi il grano” (“Jacopo, you too / by a dark force /
chosen and devastated, / but that woman / goes back up to the
meadows, / spreads flowers in the grass / wheat in the fields”; “Se
t’inquieta primavera” 33). Piersanti’s journey through the “thickness

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of the woods” eventually brings his poetic persona closer to Jacopo,
to his obscure nature that is biologically connected to the poet’s own
DNA. This tortuous route that leads the poet to traverse time and
space is traced in the poem “Non avevo i tuoi anni”:
  sempre senza una sosta e senza meta,
  Sisifo del mio tempo
  e del mio sangue,
  [...]
  eri in un altro tempo,
  in altro spazio,
  elfo con la cuffia
  [...]
  ancora salgo solo alle cesane
  con una lunga canna
  batto i rami di mele rosa
  [...]
  ciacco le noci
  giù per gli stradini,
  godo del vento,
  bevo l’acqua chiara,
  [...]
  ma la corsa dei giorni
  non s’arresta
  e io debbo tornare
  alla mia casa
  e scendere alla tua
  così lontana.

  always restless and without destination
  Sisyphus of my time
  and my blood
  [...]
  You were in another time
  and in another space,
  elf with the hat
  [...]
  I am still going up the hills of the Cesane, alone,
  with a long stick
  I hit the branches pink of apples
  [...]
  I chew the walnuts
  down along the narrow streets,
  I enjoy the wind,
  I drink the limpid water
  [...]

322                      DANILA CANNAMELA

  But the running of days
  doesn’t stop
  and I must go back
  to my home
  and descend to yours
  so far away (“Non avevo i tuoi anni” 161–63).

   The poetic transformation of Jacopo into an elf whose tender and
distant voice is barely audible, like the voice of the nonhumans, casts
doubt on both the widespread narrative that pairs (masculine) nature
with ableism as well as the idea that a positive relationship with nature
must be a perfect symbiosis. For Piersanti, as much as we may try to
control nature, it is nature that still enjoys the privilege of escaping
us, remaining elusive to our actions and way of thinking. An imper-
fect symbiosis, a wandering through this unfamiliar familiarity, is our
closest closeness to nature. Piersanti’s take on classic nature poetry
and mythical figures inspires new reflections about our uncomfortable
closeness to nature. In particular, his ecopoetics of familiar negativity
resonates with the notion of the “strange stranger” that Morton uses
to describe the feeling of uncanny reconnection that we experience
in nature.18
   The experience of feeling a deep yet estranging symbiosis with
the environment we call home is what drives Bukovaz’s poetry. If, as
previously seen, bucolic poets connect their singing to specific trees,
Bukovaz’s breech tree is quite telling of the negativity rooted in her
locus amoenus. As she explains in her first book, Tatuaggi (2006), her
last name comes from the Slavic “bukev,” beech tree, and describes
somebody who lives near beech trees. She was raised near these trees
as the “figlia di una lingua che è arrivata dalle pianure tra la Visla e il
Dnjepr nel VI sec. d. C.” (“daughter of a language that arrived from the
plains between Visla and Dnjepr in the Seventh Century CE”; Tatuaggi
45) growing up with one language to feel and one language to work.
Bukovaz’s search for a sense of place is driven by self-estrangement
but is also nourished with the collective material history that bonds
the Slovenian people living in Italian territory.
   Her writing from the border, as Guido Oldani defined it, is strictly
connected to the land that we are, in her case the village of Topolò-
Topolove, in the valleys of the Natisone river, at the border between
Italy and Slovenia (Tatuaggi 7). These places, where “la parola / [ . . . ]
è stata terra ed è stata guerra” (“the word / [ . . . ] was land and was

 18
   See Morton, “Thinking Ecology,” 275–276.

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war”; “Storia di una donna che guarda al dissolversi di un paesaggio,”
Al limite 14) mark an area that is still somewhat “stunned” by centuries
of conflict and precariousness: this land used to divide the Republic
of Venice from the dominions of Austria, then the Italian kingdom
and the Hapsburg empire, and, until the independence of Slovenia,
the Italian Republic and the Republic of Yugoslavia (Miorelli 109).
  In her poetry, the pastoral locus amoenus is reinvented into a mar-
ginal place-nonplace that cannot be traced as it is always outside—“del
prato mi piace l’orlo / dove sfrangiano i cespugli / al limitare del
bosco” (“of the meadow I like the border / where the bushes fray /
at the border of the woods”; “Del prato mi piace l’orlo,” Tatuaggi
23). The title of her second book, Al limite (2011), is evocative of the
interiorized liminality of her poetic “I.” In Bukovaz’s verses, even the
contemplative act of admiring the landscape involves a continuous
“practice of de-territorializations,” to use a Deleuzian term:
  Così resto seduta e sono
  nel volo della poiana seguo
  il prato con gli occhi fino
  a sparire frusciando nel bosco
  e il bosco soffiando nel ruscello e ogni cosa
  insinuandosi nella cosa confinante
  e i confini tra le cose ingoiano se stessi
  so I remain seated
  and I am in the flight of the buzzard I follow
  the meadow with my eyes
  until I disappear rustling in the woods
  and the woods blowing on the creek and everything
  insinuating in the bordering thing
  and the borders between things swallow themselves (“Storia di una
  donna che guarda al dissolversi di un paesaggio,” Al limite 13).

   Bukovaz’s language is the linguistic trace of a negativity that she
has defined as an oscillation between an “identiqua” (identihere) and
“identilà” (identithere) (Al limite 108). Her poetics of nature is inextri-
cable from her own story of inclusive displacement and from a call
for ecojustice that could be phrased in these terms: Who has the
right to enjoy and care for a natural beauty that is enclosed within
human borders?
   Overall, these twenty-first century rewrites of the locus amoenus show
an Italian ecopoetics of nature-culture that can reframe our sense
of place beyond anthropocentric (and nationalistic) assumptions,
while strengthening our connection with the cultural heritage of the