The Dangerous Belpaese: Literature and Ecology in Modern Italy

Abstract

This chapter discusses the intertwining between literature and ecology in Italian modernity. After providing an overview of recent developments in the environmental humanities applied to Italian studies, the chapter takes into account the peculiar relationship between Italian culture and the often antagonistic landscape of the country, a relationship resulting in a persistently ecophobic attitude toward the environment. The chapter then moves to discussing Italian ecophobia in relation to apocalyptic imagery, most notably in Giacomo Leopardi’s La ginestra (The Wild Broom), which is discussed for its representation of the effects of a volcanic eruption, and in a variety of post-apocalyptic novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finally, the chapter considers the ambivalent relationship of Italians with the landscape as something that has, and yet refuses, to be tamed, by discussing two short stories: “Malaria” by Giovanni Verga and “Eppure battono alla porta” (“Yet They Knock”) by Dino Buzzati. In the latter, a ghost story, the element of water is especially relevant, in an uncanny rendition of what Piero Bevilacqua has called the Italian “war on water.”