The Poetic Geography of Italy: Coastal Geometaphors

This article pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of literary ecocriticism to suggest a new rhetorical figure: the “geometaphor.” The geometaphor is a metaphor that is not only geographically marked, but also rooted in a specific territory. In short, it is a poetic metaphor with a specific address. This article defines this concept through references spanning from the medieval Francis of Assisi to the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, and through a sample of geometaphors in three Northern coastal areas: Liguria, the Veneto, and Friuli. They are the enclosed gardens of the Cinque Terre in Eugenio Montale’s collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones); the harbor and hills of Trieste in Umberto Saba’s Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman); and the amphibious streets of Venice in Anna Toscano’s Doso la polvere. The technological component of this research is indispensable, and it grew out of a pedagogical need to present Italian poetry to an audience of students on the other side of the ocean with the help of Google Earth. In this essay, the omino facilitates a visualization of poetical terms. It is “dropped” in specific places on the Italian map to trace the contours of its poetic geography.