ࡱ> ]_\ yWbjbj"" 0h@o_@o_@M'| | 8-$Q$&uu"rrrA&C&C&C&C&C&C&$)j,g&rrrrrg&|& rzA& rA&   !hƇ( -&&0&!,l,!,! rrrg&g& rrr&rrrr,rrrrrrrrr| :  From Verso la foce (Towards the Rivers Mouth), by Gianni Celati Translated by Patrick Barron [Introductory note] The open day shines on the man with images. Hlderlin, Aussicht, circa 1842 Note These four travel accounts were born while working with a group of photographers dedicated to describing the new Italian landscape, including my friend Luigi Ghirri. I would call them as they now appear, after having been rewritten and made legible, stories of observation. It is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside. More than the polluted Po River, the sickened trees, the industrial stenches, the abandoned state of everything not connected to making a profit, and a method of construction devised for interchangeable residents with neither origin nor destinationmore than all this, what is surprising is a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude. The four journeys here presented thus recount the crossing of a type of desert of solitude, which is however also everyday normal life. If they have some meaning, at least for the writer, depends on the fact that an intense observation of the external world makes us less apathetic (dafter or saner, more cheerful or more desperate). The first recounts a walk across the countryside surrounding Cremona in the days immediately following the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The second is a careful exploration of the banks of the Po River, with encounters that may seem improbable. The third is a visit to the immense area of reclaimed land near Ferrara, which ends fairly well, it seems to me. The fourth is a journey full of uncertainties to the mouth of the Po, in search of the limit of the land, a group of German ethologists, and perhaps of other things (at the moment of the journey not clear). Which things? Every observation needs to liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost. As a natural tendency that absorbs us, every intense observation of the external world carries us closer to our deathand perhaps also lessens our separation from ourselves. (pp. 9-10) [From Landscape with Nuclear Power Plant] At Ledas house I found copies of the newspaper La Libert, full of headlines about the disaster. Todays news is that the Chernobyl reactor has stopped burning, bringing to an end the danger of catastrophe. The dread entrusted to the experts and journalists becomes a trifle that once employed suddenly becomes useless: it cant become memory, and at most reappears as minor calls for calm and caution. I met someone who explained matters to me. He said that the Caorso reactor needed to be closed immediately, as radioactivity had increased by 20 percent. It seemed a war bulletin. He told me that there was going to be a demonstration, with a tone of someone who assumes that you are aware of the tacit political undertone (the world must change). After this he had nothing left to say, having already recited his rosary of propaganda. No dismay over what had happened, only a war bulletin with the uncompromising mirage of a safe solution: it was all so false that he avoided looking me in the face, he too perhaps tired of having to fake so much seriousness over an event that had nothing to say to his imagination. In Ledas car en route to Caorso to see how a nuclear power plant works. Outside of town a long, wide, seemingly military road, perfectly straight with gates and military-like signs, as if it led to a secret base. At the end on the left a building where visitors are met, with birds in cages and a little duck pond by the entrance. Inside a large room with a square well in the center. All around are diagrams and little models meant to explain how a nuclear power plant is made. On a table are piles of explanatory documents, and a woman gives me a stack of them: Do I need to read all of them? If you want to be informed. In the documents everything is well explained, but it would take perhaps a month to study them, and I am not even sure that I would be able without the help of someone. Definitions and graphic diagrams, an entire system of knowledge that would answer any question. As I step outside I lose the desire to understand how a nuclear power plant works. Besides, I dont even know where the plant might be. With my stack of explanatory documents I linger to look at the birds in cages, a small planted area to show that flowers still grow, the pool with ducks to show that the plants wastewater doesnt kill. There were other visitors, but they seemed as disappointed as me, because the muteness of objectivity makes you feel separate from the things of the world. And so, many like me looked at the birds, the flowers, and the ducks, and then left with their stacks of explanatory documents. (pp. 18-19) [From Days in the Territories of Reclaimed Land] 9 May 1984 Traveling by bus I revisited the countryside near Ferrara and passed by one of the beautiful masonry spillways from the Estensi period, built to drain marshes with a method of regulated outflow. Construction perhaps sixteenth-century, with a boxy little tower above a small bridge of short segmental arches. The four little pointy turrets on the roof are, I think, a prototype still adopted by draftsmen who design houses in this part of the countryside. Before falling asleep, I heard the rolling shutters tremble from a faraway vibration, and thought that here at night the earth gives way as far as the Po delta. At dawn I seemed to hear a radio advertisement for a furniture store echoing through the streets of this forlorn little town, Finale di Rero, in the territories of reclaimed land. It gave me the idea that car with a loudspeaker was driving along the deserted streets. The owner of the bar-hotel asked me if I had slept well, with a smile that I interpreted as grimace of solitude. After serving me coffee she made the same smile, which made me feel like shaking her hand as I was leaving; she cleaned her hand on her apron and awkwardly shook mine, saying: Excuse me. Her son offered to give me a lift in his little van to Tresigallo, and wanted to know what I was doing in the area. It must have seemed comic to him that I was there to write, because he said teasing me a bit: But what are you writing, a book for the consortium? It seems that here many people write books for farming consortiums, why Im not sure. The main piazza in Tresigallo is a uniform opening between four streets, delimited on one side by a fascist-era construction with epic bas-reliefs, and on the other by a parking lot packed with little cars in front of the town hall, a modern building in the shape of a graduated cube. A boulevard leading out of town is lined with short recently pruned trees and squat old houses, then passes next to the cemetery from which I see exiting many women, their heads wrapped with scarves. In the piazza, people saunter about slowly with the slow movements of vacationers, and here too I hear a radio advertisement echoing in the air. The young men in shorts and flip-flops also give the impression of being on vacation, clustered together to talk about sports under the shelter of a tree. At the end of the piazza is a narrow street of brightly painted little geometric houses, and I head in its direction. Sensation of being amid people who populate the inner reaches of a continent, in some far-removed province, where everything arrives a little muffled. Perhaps this is what I was in search of, yesterday on the bus. The road that leads from Tresigallo to Jolanda di Savoia is a narrow and straight, bordered by plane trees. The yellow wheatfields, the still-green cornfields, the furrows with other plantings, all have straight lines that seem to converge in perspective towards the same point on the horizon, and that point moves with me as I walk. Houses and trees and bell towers stand out, very low in the background, distant and scattered in space. Cars pass by a high speed and I have to walk along the outside shoulder. Up high a crow slowly turns, then I watch it land on the asphalt to take something that seems to me a piece of plastic. White cumulous clouds along the edge of the earth loom over faraway isolated clusters of houses and barriers of poplars. I pass in front of an old abandoned farming complex, with its walls all covered with grey mold, its windows broken, and crows sauntering about in front of the stables awaiting something. On the other side of the road is a little pink villa with weeping willows in the yard. No one to be seen for a moment, and then a truck drove by pulling a trailer loaded with tractors. The bus appeared and I had to run to catch it. Jolanda di Savoia is a wide road with two cross streets, around which you see clusters of geometric houses everywhere. An agricultural settlement established during the fascist era under the auspices of Italo Balbo, I think. When my mother was a child it didnt yet exist, and here there was marshland. Along the wide road a row of shops with all the modern sacraments, and women off to do their shopping pedaling along as if time for them was weightless. A little gothic-styled church from the fascist era, flowerings of TV antennas on the roofs, and here too that tone of life of far-removed places. Just outside of town, in the fields and along the road, many little brightly painted houses, well kept, modest. They all have sharply pitched roofs, aluminum frame windows and doors, yards enclosed with simple metal fences, glassed entryways that protect the front doors. They dont seem prefabricated prototypes, but old houses remodeled in keeping with common trends. From the bus they appeared awaiting out there, like everything else. Everywhere an air of waiting, of time flowing, days passing, one season turning into another, that you dont feel in cities. I thought that the bus was going to Codigoro, but instead at the end of a farm it turned back. Looks from passengers as I asked the driver to let me off, with overly hurried gestures. At times I feel the difference between the city and country in the way that people stare at my gestures as if they were incomprehensible. A woman in the bus had a relatively fixed gaze, but she gazed at me without gazing at me, looking rather at something around me. The bus turned back leaving a cloud of dust behind it. Here the dirt road leads into the fields, after a little bridge over a canal. In front of me empty countryside with ample sky above, an extremely wide sky over an expanse of rectangular plots, cut through by ditches and highways. Ive been walking for an hour through the fields, following a canal that on my military map is called Canale Leone. I havent seen anyone, and I dont really know where I am going. With my compass I see that Im traveling approximately eastward. Theres a kind of happiness out there, in the lines of earth that go off everywhere without undulations. Theyre so flat that I seem to be in an elevated spot, simply due to the fact that the little path is a foot higher than the fields. In the far distance are indistinct visions of brightly painted houses, emerald, pink, egg yellow, grass green. I hadnt realized that these sheets of phosphorescent green, the large grasslands across which my path leads, are rice paddies. Stems of rice plants rise up just above the surface of the water, surrounding me like a submerged prairie. The sky is dark again, low clouds with a flat base that darken towards their tops. Surprised to be in rice paddies, and rice paddies everywhere here, as far as I can see. 3pm. I pop out on an asphalt road, in front of heap of crumbling masonry on which a beautiful ailanthus tree has sprouted. On the other side of the road is another abandoned farm complex. Stables, storehouses, farmhouse, all closed with big padlocks, and the scent of manure still in the air. Here the base of the road is about ten feet higher than the surrounding land, and I finally have a good view of the rice paddies. A sea of green rectangles that seem meadows, if it werent for the glimmer of the strips of water separating them. Im very drawn to them, and am happy to be here. A man in a three-wheeled Vespa truck gave me a ride to a little town called Le Contane. Passing through rice paddies, we saw many herons. The man talked about the weather forecast, but I think that he took me for a foreigner, because at some point he asked me: But can you understand what Im saying? Walking towards the line of the horizon always gives you the sense that youre adrift in some far-flung point in the sweep of the earth, like objects visible in the distance. One must search for another point for orientation, and imagine that it will come sooner or later. There arises the need to continually imagine whats out there in the distance, otherwise it becomes impossible to take even a single step. Its six miles from Le Contane to Ariano Ferrarese, and I walk through tomato fields and a few more rice paddies. On a strip of grassy land between the paddies, hundreds of thronging seagulls frantically squawked. It begins to rain, a woman comes out of a farmhouse to take down the laundry and some birds take shelter on the branches of a big oak tree under a dark sky. Now with my hood pulled up under the rain it seems that outside, in everything occurring, there appears the mirage of a stirring presence. The call of open space issues from everything that appears, grows or arises around me. The young driver of a Volvo gave me a lift to Mezzogoro, telling me that he was in college and about to graduate with a degree in economics. I got out on a bypass in front of a completely white little house, in a style that you might call postmodern. An excavator was almost done clearing away the remains of an old house, to make room for another little white house, in the same style, I imagine. Among the debris I saw an oleograph of Venice and an image of the Madonna. An old man on a motor scooter came up to me and said, You should have been here this morning, when they were tearing off the roof. As if I had missed an enthralling spectacle. Then he told me the whole story of the demolished house and its hapless owners, without once looking me in the face: when he had finished the story, he left without saying goodbye. I ran into the old man again in front of a bar, where young men in sandals with toothpicks in their mouths looked at my shoes. That is, they were looking at the shoes of everyone and the legs of the women, without once overly lifting their eyes, with gestures so idle that they seemed exaggerated. In the bar a heavyset barman was talking about fishing with a client. Coming out of the bar, I was accosted by the old man on the motor scooter, who whispered to me, pointing out a man sitting off to the side: Hes an Egyptian. Three more of them have already come, showing me the number three with his fingers. Then he left without saying goodbye. I write in the bus, driving along a canal that flows between two concrete embankments with water that comes up to the level of the road. This is the realm of canals. At the outskirts of Codigoro little houses everywhere. A ultramodern-looking supermarket with diagonal green stripes. Stores selling designer clothes with English names at what almost seems a rural crossroads. 9pm. Feeling the need to talk, I call G but dont find her. The intimacy that we carry inside ourselves is also part of the landscape, its tone transmitted by the space that opens outside at every glance; thoughts too are external phenomena in which we stumble upon ourselves, a strip of light on a wall, or the shadow of a cloud. In order to write, I always need to calm myself, sitting down or leaning somewhere, without fighting the passing time. I can even write while walking, but later discover in my journal only lists of things seen, without the opening of the space in which I saw them. (pp. 87-93) Gianni Celati Gianni Celati, born in 1937, is widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary Italian writers. From his first published collection of stories, Comiche (Slapstick silent films, 1971), to award-winning books such as Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi, 1973), Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains, 1985), and Costumi degli italiani (The Habits of Italians, 2008), Celatis reputation has consistently grown. He has won many honors, including the Cinque Scole, Grinzane-Cavour, Mondello, and Bagutta Awards. He has written sixteen books and numerous critical essays, produced four documentary films, and has translated a number of books from French and Englishfrom Stendhals The Charterhouse of Parma (1993) and Swifts Gullivers Travels (1997), to most recently, James Joyces Ulysses (2013). About Verso la foce (Towards the Rivers Mouth) Gianni Celatis 1989 four-part philosophical travelogue Verso la foce (Towards the Rivers Mouth) originated from his collaboration with a number of photographers, notably Luigi Ghirri, seeking to document the new Italian landscape where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms in his introductory note to the book as a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude. Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with Ghirri in search of sites to photograph, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into stories of observation. At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the Rivers Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities. Towards the Rivers Mouth is divided into four sections that are arranged geographically, as the title suggests, from west to east in the rough direction that the Po River flows. The first, Landscape with Nuclear Power Plant, recounts journeys in the days immediately following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, in areas of the Po River Valley near Parma, Cremona, and Piacenza. Explorations along the Levees, the second section, is set in 1983 and further downstream, north of Bologna in areas near Ferrara and Mantua. It is composed of various trips, many in the company of landscape photographers, in search of ordinary yet unexpectedly unsettling or surprising places. The third section, Three Days in the Territories of Reclaimed Land, steps forward one year to 1984, and continues the downstream journey to lower-lying lands, near the Po River Delta, of former marshlands now in large part reclaimed for agriculture. The final section, Towards the Rivers Mouth, returns to 1983 and carries us to the labyrinthine Po River Delta and the edge of land and sea.  The term Celati uses, chiavica, refers to a masonry building with gated arched spillways at its base designed to control the flow of water through a drainage channel. Found along the lower reaches of the Po River, many were first built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  The term Celati coins here, case geometrili, refers to houses designed by geometri (surveyors who also design small buildings), but also plays with the fact that many geometra-designed houses tend to be boxy with simple geometric features.     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