{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021121802393804272, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004459047172025346, 'mean_word_length': 5.295420974889217, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Landscapes in Between. Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film

Monica Seger’s insightful reading of “landscape in between” in modern Italian literature and film is centered on the concept of interstices. Interstices are overlooked spaces, often perceived as gaps to be filled, like an unwanted crack in a street pavement where weeds keep growing, despite the pesticides that we may spray or the cement that we pour on to create smooth, aesthetically pleasing surfaces. Interstices will continue to exist despite our effort to eliminate them, because they are the “in between” spaces that make possible the communication between the natural world and the artificial one that we have constructed for ourselves. Intersticial writers and filmmakers are not afraid of confronting embarrassing moments of silence in their works, because they know that pauses and gaps in texts and speeches often count more than spoken and written words. They tend to walk away from traditional settings: monumental urban landscapes do not interest them, and the celebrated natural sceneries of the famous bel paese leave them indifferent. In Landscapes in Between Seger outlines what may be defined as a genealogy of intersticial literature and film. She begins by analyzing two of Italo Calvino’s early novellas, La speculazione edilizia and La nuvola di smog, both written in the 1950s, when Italian politicians and intellectuals, fascinated with the ongoing economic boom, usually paid little attention to the consequences that development may have on the natural environment. Calvino’s first text, set in an unidentified town that closely resembles his native Sanremo on the Italian Riviera, constitutes a precise analysis of the mechanisms that may have driven progressive intellectuals like Quinto, the novel’s protagonist, to take a “real estate plunge” that would have disastrous effects on his own life and the traditional landscape. Pier Palo Pasolini’s films, novels and critical essays also show a keen awareness of environmental issues, although his apocalyptic vision of modern Italian society greatly differs from that of Calvino, who is much more ambivalent and ironic. Pasolini’s famous essay on the disappearance of fireflies due to air and water contamination, published in 1975, is among the texts discussed in chapter 2. However most of the chapter focuses on Pasolini’s films, whose protagonists often are marginal figures who inhabit edgeland spaces, as in the movie Accattone. The Roman borgate, the slums that proliferated at the periphery of modern industrial cities in the postwar period, lend themselves quite nicely to the type of analysis proposed by Seger, who points out that many of Pasolini’s works filmed in the 1960s acknowledge the damage being done to the environment and “celebrate what they posit as a ‘pure’ spirit of nature” (54). From a theoretical perspective, Seger’s book is itself in between; that is, situated on the edge between landscape studies and eco-criticism. Her attempt to combine these two different and often contrasting critical approaches makes the book especially intriguing. Whereas in the case of Calvino and Gianni Celati an eco-critical reading may appear questionable because of the profound irony that characterizes their narrative, her approach works extremely well with the novels authored by Simona Vinci, a contemporary Italian author who usually writes about the region of Emilia Romagna. There is a clear intertextual continuity between Celati’s Verso la foce, written immediately after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster and Vinci’s Strada provinciale tre (2007). In both cases the protagonists walk through the polluted landscape of the Po Valley. In Celati’s text, however, the pilgrim is the author himself, who frequently wandered through the region with his friend mafia confinando le donne al ruolo di capro espiatorio. Attraverso la lente dei Gender Studies, Renga è riuscita nel difficile compito di analizzare non solo la caratterizzazione dei principali interpreti dei film di mafia, ma anche la psicologia di un intero paese alle prese con la traumatica esperienza di convivere con le organizzazioni criminali, un paese, insomma, che ancora ha molto unfinished business con la mafia.