'The Allegorical Eclogues': 10th anniversary of publication.

The Allegorical Eclogues (Le ecloghe allegoriche in Italian) is a collection of ten short stories published in 2014 by publisher Albatros il Filo for its Nuove Voci, New Voices, series. Picking it up again exactly ten years later, I do not deny that I feel a mixture of haphazard emotions.

'At that time I was a charioteer. The horses of my chariot were mighty, one white and one black. They ran wildly, always straight ahead of me. The gentle wind whipped my hair'. - From the Eclogue I - Eulogy of the false charioteer.

Many things have happened during this decade that have, inevitably, distanced me from the boy I was and who wrote those pages, mostly between my 16 and 17 years. Although the Eclogue VIII also contains a poem, Mio futuro, My future, which I consider to be my first completed poem, dating back to when I was perhaps 12 years old, which is followed by prose fragments dating back to my first year of high school, when I was 14.

In hindsight, it is perhaps natural to consider some of that writing, if not the whole book, an adolescent experiment, a youthful piece of writing. The prose is still very immature, in many respects, and each sentence holds many possibilities for improvement. Ten years later, in all likelihood, I would never write a book of that kind: but perhaps that is the point of picking it up again after all this time. A return to the origins.

'Amor had a torment that had never left him since he was born, and over the years had only been increased by the complications of the world'. - From Eclogue II - On the syntropy of love.

Because, even if I wanted to, I could no longer write it today as it was written and conceived at that time, so determined and contaminated by an adolescent worldview, perhaps more limited, yet also aware, to a certain extent, of its own limitations. Opening the book, in the Author's Note that precedes the eclogues, the first sentence one reads is precisely, 'This book was not easy to write, especially because of the sense of dissatisfaction that re-reading some of its pages often generates'. In the years immediately following that publication, dissatisfaction with it has been growing, yet today, that more time has passed, this is not the case. I have perhaps matured in my ability to interpret things for the value they had, or used to have, at that precise moment in my life.

I have the privilege of picking up those pages with the knowledge that I am no longer the boy nor the teenager who wrote them, but that I have managed to imprison on printed paper a testimony of what I used to be. Something that, even if I wanted to reconstruct it now, I couldn't do so, as it was authentically done at the time, with all the errors, conjectures, frustrations and even coarse aspects that go with it. The Allegorical Eclogues are, more than ever, tales that are derived from adolescence and its big questions, of the young boy who discovers himself no longer a child and not yet an adult, excluded from both worlds, without the reassuring protections of the former nor the decision-making freedoms of the latter.

'I rested in the shade of a wide beech tree, studying on a slender flute a sylvan song; the others left the homeland and the sweet fields, fled the homeland: but I, placid in the shadows, was making the woods resound with the name of the beautiful Amaryllis'. - From Ecloga III - Journey to the essential synol.

An eclogue was a composition of the bucolic poetry of classical Greco-Roman antiquity, normally developed in dialogic form, and although I had made the attribute 'allegorical' explicit, it was originally intrinsic that eclogues were made of allegories, with a strong celebratory intent of rural life. From Theocritus' Idylls to Virgil's ten Bucolics, this literary genre was a fundamental pillar of the ancient world. In my case, the term eclogue is not always used in its original meaning, although most eclogues are steeped in classical philosophy and mythology. In some cases, I have actually used it as a synonym or alternative of short story.

The setting is deeply linked to the years of writing these stories, the high school, in my case the Liceo Classico Statale G. Carducci in Milan, which I attended for five years, as is customary in Italy, from 2009 to 2014. Italian high schools have different orientations of study and I attended the one with a classical orientation, liceo classico, which focuses on literature, history, philosophy but above all includes numerous hours of Latin and Ancient Greek, with translation of the original classical texts. I wasn't particularly good at translations per se, although I did a little better in Greek than in Latin: grammar bored me, with its rigid schemes and rules, what I was passionate about was literature, the emotions that the poems of Archilocus and Anacreon conveyed to me (of the latter's, not surprisingly, the fragment I chose as the opening quotation of the book).

'With this prayer I adore and invoke Gaea, who was the first prophetess, so that she may assist me, accompanied by her Titanid daughters, in recalling the memory of Dikaiosýne and the time when she governed the constitution of human society'. - From Ecloga IV - The conspiracy of the tyrants.

Each eclogue is then accompanied by a drawing made by me, first in pencil, then coloured with watercolours, and finally going over some details with a fountain pen. The visual presence of the drawings was emblematic not only of how I, as a child, approached that type of artistic expression earlier than any other, but also of how I wanted to refuse to categorise myself too much within a single field of art: almost as if I feared that writing, in which I was only a beginner, might then be too narrow for me. After all, in those same years I had also dedicated myself to theatre acting thanks to the high school drama group. With them, I had also participated in the Connections Festival at Milan's Teatro Litta, and in May 2014 we had also performed on stage at the Elfo-Puccini Theatre.

'I remember the vague colour of her eyes, glassy and pierced with hints of irrationality. One sensed an uncanny absolute depth in that gaze, so algid and impenetrable, so in need of love, and at the same time ready to provide a reflection of it'. - From Eclogue V - Apology of a maenad.

The Allegorical Eclogues are, for me, also the first memory of family enthusiasm and support for my writing. Both my mother and father were selling copies of the book among their work colleagues and acquaintances, with an initial commitment for which I will always be grateful. Above all, however, I remember with deep affection the sales made by my grandmother Caterina, who would stop friends and acquaintances in front of the neighbourhood church, before or after mass, and convince everyone with a certain fervour to buy her grandson's books.

'It was our Thalia the first to deign to sing in the verse of Syracuse, and she was not ashamed to dwell in the woods, at the time when I sang kings and battles, and Apollo tugging at my ear admonished me, "It is necessary for the herdsman to shepherd the fat sheep and sing a humble song"'. - From Eclogue VI - The good daimon. 

The limited attempts to promote The Allegorical Eclogues were also the occasion of my first radio interview, on a local Radio Milan-Inter programme. I was invited by the young programme host, who had been particularly struck by my book, and who was keen to offer me that opportunity. I went to Cologno Monzese, on the outskirts of Milan, where the television studios of Mediaset, one of the biggest broadcasters in Italy, are located. My best friend, Sabrina, accompanied me: she had been with me since well before I published my first book, and I am always grateful for her constant friendship and support. As a recently turned 18 year old boy, speaking on the radio for the first time was quite experience for me: time slipped through my fingers and everything ended before I realised I had really been there. What remained with me, beyond the interview per se, is the feeling of gratitude and gratification for being able to share my work with other people, potentially interested, especially if they were only strangers to me. I realised that it was good to reach out to family and friends, but it was even better to forge magical relationships, bound by the written word alone, with strangers.

Most of the eclogues have, as already mentioned, a classical characterisation, inspired by the Greco-Roman world that had so deeply marked the years of my adolescence. However, there are exceptions: I am thinking, in particular, of the aforementioned Eclogue VIII, which contains a summary of earlier writings, the most 'ancient' pieces in this book of modern antiquities, in which I wanted to search for the thread of friendship. Then there is the last one, the Eclogue X, in which one can easily find a narrative voice of the calibre of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, which I had come across for the first time in those very years, and whose philosophical mysteriousness, almost imbued with a religious aura, seemed to converse with so many of the existential questions of growing up.

'A malleable mask covered my face for years, an entire existence, before you came along, with your beautiful voice'. - From Ecloga VII - Calliope.

One eclogue has a particular history, the seventh, because it was changed at the last moment, shortly before the book went to press. It was originally entitled The Springtime of Life, purely bucolic in setting, also including a part of poetic song, but it was very intimate: less mythological and more experiential, empirical. The person to whom that story was originally dedicated asked me not to publish it in the book, to keep it private. I remember my pain at hearing that request as if it were today: it was my first experience of censorship of my work, of my writing, into which I had for better or worse poured myself, my emotions, my being. Of censorships or requests for censorship I would see more, later on, but nothing hurts as much as a censorship imposed by a loved one.

'A sense of futility pervades my soul,/hatred and pride prevent me from loving,/they stifle my capacity to rejoice'. - From Eclogue VIII - The ethical hypostasis or friendship.

This book was for me, in retrospect, a learning experience. Learning not only in the practice of writing in the strict sense of the word, but in all that surrounds it, in the world that precedes, attains and follows the publication of a book that, once taken out of our drawer, is there, in the outside world, with an autonomous life and existence. Independent and free from the author's life. The first experience, inauguration of a journey all uphill and all yet to begin. Never a finishing line, always a starting point, as my father would say. At that moment, for me, it must have been important to write exactly those things, to create those images, to give voice to my artistic stream of consciousness through those characters, halfway between a dreamlike journey and a tribute to classical literature. A book that I can now take in my hands and leaf through with a different gaze, less critical for the sole purpose of criticism, and more open to seeking a dialogue with my past self.

'The wind of my Lesbos caresses my cheeks, but it is not enough, it is no longer enough!' - From Eclogue IX - The cliff of Lefkada.

In conclusion, the last two eclogues are almost antithetical, and yet so connected to each other, both sides of the same coin: love. Eclogue IX is desperate, the last lament of a soul damned by love and its unattainability, a tribute to the great poetess Sappho. Eclogue X, as mentioned, is inspired by Gibran, and it concludes with an appeal to the highest, most sublime love as the ultimate meaning of the quest in life's journey, as the ultimate enrichment, learning to love and to be loved. The desperate, strong, experiential and shattering love that is so typical of the teenage years, when it is first discovered and experienced, is balanced and perhaps even cured by a new, more mature, stable, cognitive (gnoseological) love, presented in the last story as a journey still in the making: the image of the boy becoming a man.

'Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, as one day towards his sunset, had landed on his native island, after a voyage in which the sea, which calls all things to itself, had made him sail into his dreams, and waking now from his deepest dream, he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul'. - From the Eclogue X - Noumenal gnoseology.