«Non so qual cosa grave». Gozzano nella provincia del desiderio

In Gozzano’s poetic collections, a dialectical relationship between the city and the non-urban environment is readily discernible. This may be a town, an open space in the countryside, or an Alpine landscape. By assuming the concept of province in its broadest sense, to include places that are distinct from the city yet remain in relation to it, the investigation will focus on the relationship between the poetic exercise and the marginal nature of such spaces. The physical place will appear as an epiphenomenon of an eccentricity, of an intentional decentralisation from what the literature and society of Gozzano’s era represent in the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. The province will not should understood exclusively as a set of places distant from the city, or as a collection of nostalgic tastes and visions of the world that are not aligned with the rhythms of progress. Rather, it should be regarded as a metaphor for the gaze from the margin, from the threshold between authenticity and artifice, between the search for health and illness, between the dimensions of the possible and the necessary, between disillusionment and illusion ; pacification and struggle. The province will reveal itself to be the space of a wisdom that has its roots in nature and listens to its rhythms to guess its destination, in contrast to the city vision of the world by which the author is partly attracted, but whose traps he knows : gold and laurel. It will be one of the elsewheres in which, from the contemplation of the visible, a network of possibilities opens up.