Italian poetry and the Italian landscape (the specific relationship between the great Italian poets and the specific places they describe, the relationship that makes reading Italian poetry before visiting Italy not an academic exercise but a practical enhancement of the visitor's perception): the Italian poetic tradition (from the Dolce Stil Novo of the 13th-century Florentine poets through the Petrarchan sonnet tradition (the lyric form that shaped European poetry from the 14th century to the present), the specific Leopardian pessimism (the specific Leopardi intellectual stance that the Recanati hill landscape generates), and the Montale "correlativo oggettivo" (the specific Montale technique of using the Ligurian coastal objects (the cuttlebone (l'osso di seppia), the lemon tree (il limone), the wall (il muro scrauso)) as the correlatives of the emotional states)) is simultaneously the most linguistically precise and the most landscape-specific of any European national poetry tradition.
The practical reason to read Italian poetry before visiting Italy: Dante's Commedia (the specific Florence geography in the Inferno, the San Giovanni Battista baptistery, the Arno river, the specific Florentine political factions whose representatives populate the Hell), Petrarch's Canzoniere (the specific Laura-landscape connection, the Provençal Vaucluse spring and the Italian Monti Euganei near Padova where Petrarch retired), Leopardi's "L'infinito" (the specific Recanati hill and hedge (la siepe) on the Via delle Grazie that the poem describes, still identifiable today in the Recanati landscape), and Montale's "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (the specific Ligurian midday coastal landscape that any visitor to the Cinque Terre or the Monterosso coast can stand in and read the poem against): each of these specific poem-landscape connections transforms the visit from the aesthetic experience to the specific literary-archaeological experience that no guidebook can substitute for.
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Italian Poetry: Poet by Poet Guide
Dante Alighieri. Florence, 1265-1321
Dante Alighieri (the specific Florence geography of the Divina Commedia): the specific pre-visit Dante reading (the Inferno, particularly the Florence-connected cantos (the Canto X with the Farinata degli Uberti (the Ghibelline leader who "arose with chest and countenance erect, as though he held all Hell in great contempt"), the Canto XV with Brunetto Latini (the Florentine scholar and Dante's mentor), and the Canto XXV with the specific Florentine thieves)): the Dante landscapes in Florence (the Casa di Dante (Via Santa Margherita 1, the museum in the building near Dante's birth house). The Piazza della Signoria (the political arena of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict that shapes the Inferno). And the Ponte Vecchio/Lungarno (the specific Florentine river geography that Dante uses in the Purgatorio canto (the Arno as the river that runs through the "sad valley" of Tuscany))): the Florence visit after reading the Inferno produces the specific experience of recognizing the characters and the geography of the poem in the city, the experience that Henry James described as the specific "haunted air" of the Florentine streets.
Giacomo Leopardi. Recanati, 1798-1837
Giacomo Leopardi (the Recanati hilltop and "L'infinito"): the specific "L'infinito" (the 15-line poem of 1819 that begins "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle", "Always dear to me was this solitary hill") whose specific hedgerow (la siepe) that prevents Leopardi from seeing the horizon from the Monte Tabor hill above Recanati, generating the specific infinity meditation that is the most compact single metaphysical poem in the Italian tradition: the Recanati visit (the Marche hill town 25km from Ancona) to the Casa Leopardi (the Leopardi family palazzo where the poet was born and lived until 1825, the specific library (the 25,000-volume library that the father Monaldo Leopardi assembled and that the young Giacomo consumed in the specific "sette anni di studio matto e disperatissimo" (seven years of mad and desperate study) that damaged his eyesight and his spine but produced the specific intellectual formation of the "L'infinito" poet) and the Monte Tabor hill with the specific hedge): the most intimate single Italian poet-landscape connection available to any visitor.
Q&A: Italian Poetry
Do I need to read Italian to benefit from Italian poetry before visiting Italy?
No, the quality English translations of the primary Italian poems are sufficient for the pre-visit reading purpose: the Robert Hollander Dante (the Princeton bilingual edition, the most accurate single English Dante translation), the Anthony Esolen Inferno (the Modern Library), the Reginald Gibbons Leopardi (Northwestern University Press, the most poetically faithful Leopardi in English), and the Jonathan Galassi Montale (Farrar Straus Giroux, the definitive English Montale). The specific bilingual recommendation: reading the Italian alongside the English, even without Italian fluency, allows the specific sound of the Italian language (the specific Italian phonological character that the Italian verse is inseparable from) to be present in the reading: the "Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle" read aloud in Italian by someone without Italian isn't meaningless, the sounds of the Italian vowels and the specific rhythm of the hendecasyllable are the poem's first material.
