A garden of words, the landscape in literature. Unlike painting which tends towards mimicry and, to imitate reality, resorts to visual effects produced by brushstrokes and colours, literature must use words to evoke and depict plants, flowers, landscapes, naturalistic environments. Brushstrokes and colors are therefore replaced by linguistic skills and tricks that flow into the rhetorical repertoire. This is a particularity of the representation that has led scholars to question the peculiarity and autonomy of the concept of landscape. By no means taken for granted, the meaning of the landscape has taken on a rich versatility of nuances over time, starting from the geographical investigation of the nineteenth century to reach, through the multidisciplinary reflection of recent years, the documents stimulated by the Council of Europe and published in the European Landscape Convention, signed in Florence in 2000.
The investigation of the specific character of the landscape in literary culture comes from afar, from ancient literature and especially the Latin one, as highlighted by the prestigious research on this theme in Latin literature, launched by the University of Padua, starting in 2008 and presented in 2011 at the Conference held at the same University. Regionis forma pulcherrima. Perceptions, lexicon, landscape categories in Latin literature is the title of the valuable volume published by the publisher Olschki, edited by Gianluigi Baldo and Elena Cazzuffi, which collects the proceedings of the Conference and provides a decisive contribution to the development of literary research and to that line of investigation on the theme of the landscape which ended up gain a leading role.
At the heart of the study is the overcoming of traditional rhetorical boundaries who in the past had limited the study of the literary landscape as an exclusively rhetorical fact, under the species of locus amoenus or its opposite, the locus horridus. One of the main innovative aspects of the research lies in the problematization of the thesis of the geographer and orientalist Augustine Berque which seemed to exclude the autonomy of the landscape in ancient literature.
The Padua-based research group, driven by the need to find, in a non-rhetorical but strictly diachronic perspective, all the "traces that prefigured the modern conception of the landscape or, conversely, signal extraneousness and discontinuity” in the journey from ancient Rome to today, it has given life to an absolutely unprecedented multidisciplinary itinerary that paves the way for possible research developments that branch off in different directions. On the one hand, the need to carry out a census as complete as possible of Latin texts, literary and otherwise, with a landscape theme is expected. On the other hand, the need appears to create a Latin lexicon of the passage through critical lemmas, also as a tool that helps to illuminate the Latin linguistic history and to focus a retrospective look on the formation of the European intellectual lexicon.
Like so many paths that wind and venture into the penetration of an unexplored territory, the fourteen studies contained in the volume investigate the conceptual forms, the textual realizations and the constitution of a landscape lexicon in Latin literature. The contributions, signed by classical philologists, geographers, philosophers and ecologists, are very diverse in the variety of objects and methods. Some investigate Latin authors such as the valuable essay by Gianluigi Baldo which explores the meaning and dimension ofangle in Horace's poetic production as a privileged perspective from which to detach oneself from the congested worldliness of Rome, isolating oneself in Tivoli or in Licenza. Other scholars deal with specific lexical fields such as Martina Elice who identifies different terms (solitaire, solitudes, steriles harenae) to indicate the desert according to the sense it assumes, geographical or metaphorical. Still others approach the theme from an ecologist's point of view, such as Gianumberto Caravello who proposes the evolution of the landscape from an ecological point of view or Almo Farina who examines it as a semiotic interface between organisms and their resources. Finally, there are also those who carry out theoretical and methodological remodulations of the concept of landscape, with the gaze of the philosopher or geographer.
In conclusion, a large plurality of points of view makes the study an absolute novelty in the field, offering numerous original ideas for interpreting the theme of the landscape in Latin literature. The editorial look is enhanced by the ivory paper, whose consistent and smooth weight makes reading particularly pleasant to the touch and sight.
Regionis forma pulcherrima. Perceptions, lexicon, landscape categories in Latin literature curated by Gianluigi Baldo and Elena Cazzuffi, Olschki, 2013, € 34,00
