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Book Review
| Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh. By John Elder. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006. xv + 282 pp. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism series. Notes and index. Cloth $29.95.
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| I am not an expert in ecocriticism, but the fact that part of John Elder's pilgrimage—as well as George Perkins Marsh's—was in Italy has tied me in this story; and I am very grateful for this. |
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The idea of Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa is both simple and extremely complicated: John Elder tries to locate Marsh's famous book Man and Nature within the landscapes he visited and lived in. What he is trying to do, however, is more than a philological reconstruction of the relationships between the words and the worlds of Marsh. Certainly, the deforestation of his Vermont, the voyages along the Mediterranean seashores, and the destruction of the Italian woods had a powerful impact on his work. But the pilgrimage that John Elder proposes to us is also a passage through the sense of history, place, memory, and identity. It is not by chance that this pilgrimage is everything but a solitary one. First of all, there is Rita, Elder's wife, who is not just following him. Her presence transforms a literary pilgrimage into a search for identity and memory, obviously because Rita is making this journey to meet her Italian relatives, but also because this pilgrimage makes them—John and Rita—understand how much their stewardship of the Vermont forests has been related to the sense of family and memory. As Elder writes "doing so in the company of Rita ... helped me see the landscape of history as also being a field of relationships and inheritance" (p. 27). |
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As an environmental historian, and as an Italian one, I am particularly interested in this mix of landscape, history, and sensibility. I think that Italy is the ideal place for a pilgrimage of this kind: This old country seems too little, crowded, and full of arts and memory to have a "nature" without history. Probably one could say that this explains the weakness of Italian environmental history (as a field of study); rather, I think that—as John Elder's pilgrimage suggests—it might imply a diverse way of approaching nature and history together. In the past decade, a new kind of park has been "invented" in Italy: it has been called the "literary park" and its aim is to connect the works of some poets and writers with the environments where these works were conceived (see www.parchiletterari.com and also Maurizio Panunzio, "I luoghi della Memoria. L'Esperienza dei Parchi Letterari", I frutti di Demetra. Bollettino di storia e ambiente 2[2004]). Unfortunately, there is no such park dedicated to Marsh, perhaps because he seemed to be too much American or his inspiration too little Italian. But the problem is that John Elder's pilgrimage shows the inconsistence of a culture and practice of conservation which are based on a rigid divide between nature and history. Putting one along the other literary parks, natural parks, and historical exhibitions simply does not work. We need to mix them all together. Or, saying it with Elder's words, we need "to negotiate a vocabulary where 'wilderness' and 'stewardship' can enter into non- antagonistic dialogue with one another" (p. 223). Because speaking about words, interconnecting natural landscapes and sensitive landscapes, John Elder reminds us that our task is "to protect the land, and the human and non- human communities it supports" rather than to defend a particular vocabulary (p. 221). |
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Marco Armiero, currently visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, works at the Italian National Research Council and teaches environmental history at the University of Naples L'Orientale. He is the author of several articles and a book on Abruzzo's woods in the nineteenth century, the coauthor of a textbook on environmental history, and the editor of a collective book on the Mediterranean. He is currently co-editing a book on Italy's environmental history. |
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