One cannot be a writer without a symbiotic relationship with space and landscape. Writing requires specific modes of observation, akin to those of architects and designers. “Environment, surroundings, territory: in a few lines, three concepts on which it would be good to seek clarity. A writing that seeks as much as possible to be understood, or misunderstood, should not leave the meaning of words so heavy and [...] so recurring, and so often in vain, vague,” wrote Vitaliano Trevisan in his book Works.

So, if in 1957 Italo Calvino published the long story A Plunge into Real Estate; today, Professor Ida Duretto, lecturer in Italian Literature at the University of Kyoto and a former student of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, has found among the documents kept in the archive of the Manuscript Center of the University of Pavia a poem that Eugenio Montale wrote in 1975—the same year he received the Nobel Prize—taking a stand against the Hotel Fuenti, the first Italian project to earn the title of “ecomonster”.

Built in Vietri sul Mare, in the Fuenti area, in 1971, on the Amalfi Coast near Salerno, the hotel was later demolished in 1999 after a thirty-year struggle by environmentalists. It seems that Elena Croce, daughter of the Italian philosopher Benedetto, convinced the Ligurian poet to take a position against that ecological misstep, to put it in the words of the  Italian journalist Antonio Cederna, along with other intellectuals of the time—including Calvino himself, Natalia Ginzburg, Mario Soldati, and Franco Zeffirelli.

Here is the poem: “It seems that sooner or later / indeed before later / on the Alyscamps that shine / between Amalfi and Vietri, enormous / skyscrapers will be seen, and already from the waist up / the intelligentsia rises, with its high platters. / But they will be wasted; scraping the sky / is what remains for those who no longer believe / that a sky exists”.

Today, the area, characterized by terraced slopes along the tufa promontory, hosts the Giardini del Fuenti, with gardens, vineyards, citrus groves, panoramic terraces, a beach, a bar, and two excellent restaurants featuring a modernist aesthetic, inaugurated in 2019 and 2022.

The cover image is from Wikipedia.