Abstract

The essay aims to provide a reinterpretation of the opening segment of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Racconto italiano, based on the connection between places and experiences, in other words, on his ways to organize narratively the relationship between individual and space. The author, tied up on his novel project, offers a representation of perpetual human condition in the particular situation of Italy: «Species aeternitatis in specie Italiae». Starting with its laboratory phase, this study demonstrates how places could be figures of knowledge, highlighting the connection between the forms of natural and anthropogenic environments and the cognitive and moral process (the ‘work’). This connection undermines deeply Gadda’s poetic and his prose, of which the night scenery is a specimen (brought to fulfilment in Notte di luna) here reinterpreted thanks to the stratified avant-texte of the Racconto italiano 5, kept in Quaderno di Buenos Aires.