La terra del morso. L’Italia ctonia di Ingeborg Bachmann

This study brings together the elements of a latent “south” in I. Bachmann’s "Italian verses". Poet, writer, translator, philosopher and acute literature and culture critic, of her short life (1926-1973) in Italy she spends nearly a half of it (1953-1973) in Ischia, Naples, Rome. Her poetic writing is streaked by the signs of an chthonic Italy : not at all evident in the themes, the impression (especially the acoustics) of this land undergrounds. The poems are places of (individual and cultural) memory and geographic locations themselves are also ‘texts’ with their own readability. Nevertheless, Bachmann's imagination is but never somewhere else than in the history and in her world. Her way to "escape southwards" is a form of search for the “Human” after the disaster, after the II world- war devastation, and it is for her a simboli descent into hell. The place Bachmann was thinking of was a place of origin for the energies from deep, dark, elemental, where a meeting and "true" encounter between words and music, dance and rhythm may come true. Bachmann leads the reader throgh a sismica land , populated by dangerous and biting animals - snakes, tarantulas - or by amphibians, able to live in many realms (birds, salamanders, ants, lizards). A land of explosions, paradoxally “rocked” by earthquakes and volcanoes, and also homeland of disturbing human creatures, fragile and oltreumane, sublime yet always exposed to the mockery of others such as Maria Callas, Gaspara Stampa, and all the heroines of the Opera. Who walks to the south, is exposed to the "bite", to the shock, to a sharp pain, which marks otherwis a start to a new vision and consciousness. In this sense, the search for Bachmann - in staging voices, dances, rituals situations depicted in southern collective popular events - joins the anthropological studies of Ernesto de Martino, while her attention to "chthonic" figures as Maria Callas , reveals her as a traveling companion and forerunner of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Callas was an unforgettable Medea in Pasolinis film shot in1969).