This book brings together the critical reflections of around fifteen Italian and foreign experts on the poet’s work. The focus is especially on the role of the landscape – from the Dolomites to the Venice lagoon – and the writer’s long-standing intimate relations with the city of Venice, which appears in his poetry as a kind of archetype, associated and contrasted with the more familiar places of his native Soligo or other parts of the Veneto. Some of the papers dwell on an analysis of the relations between Zanzotto and Federico Fellini, which clearly emerge in the poem Filò (1976). In fact the scene with the giant female head emerging from the Grand Canal at the beginning of Fellini’s film
Casanova (Zanzotto wrote some of the texts for the film in Venetian), became a thoroughgoing allegory for the re-emergence almost from the poet’s unconsciousness of dialect and its mysterious links with the deepest roots of language and the mother (or
“stepmother”) land. At the same time the experts naturally also consider the connection between these themes and Andrea Zanzotto’s overall literary and theoretical work.

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