Abstract

In the current debate on climate change, several scholars and authors have underlined the importance of literature and fiction for a shift from knowing to believing what scientists agree is real in order to motivate action. Still, knowing and believing imply non-identical relations to reality, thus raising the question of what is «real» or «true» from two different standpoints. By focusing on the case of the floods of the Po River, the article deals with the representation of reality in literature (with examples taken from Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Riccardo Bacchelli, and Sonia Aggio among others) and its ambiguity between the two poles of knowing and believing. This ambiguity, it is claimed, reaffirms the importance of the role that literature can play for bridging the gap between knowledge and belief, but it also opens the possibility of giving voice simultaneously to contradictory meanings of what is «real».