Since the eighteenth century, the Phlegraean Fields have been depicted as fundamental legs along the grand tour experienced by great painters and poets. The tour allowed them to admire the wonders of the landscape: temples, terraces, thermal sites, promontories and islands that still conquer the travellers’ hearts. Cappella, a fraction of Bacoli and Monte di Procida, abounds in finds, and it smells like salt. Under its main square, there is a roman funerary complex that extends along the ancient road that connected Miseno to Cuma. This stretch, covered with the cement of houses, ferments with spirits. Here is what the poet wrote[1] about the relationship with his territory: "Since I was a child, about five or six years old, I have had a strong attraction in the territory where I was growing up, the Phlegraean fields, so dense in nature, archeology, history. Being in contact every day with the backdrops and wings of tuff, whose brightness and porosity are the very quintessence of these places, and in contact with lakes, sea, remains of ancient roman temples, was for me, as a child, an authentic adventure. I still bring with me the joy that I felt, not only with my eyes but also with my hands, my nose and even my ears, increased and intensified throughout the years. I precisely mean joy, as I felt a great pleasure in everything that I would see, listen, smell, thus establishing a perfect equation between the physical and the psychic, between the body and the space, between the showing off of nature and the theatre of the mind. I recorded infinitesimal sensations as in a film, I was literally captured, possessed by sounds, voices, water sounds, plant voices, sounds and voices of insects that wedged between the cracks of the stones. Sometimes I really had the sensation of walking in a no man’s land, so much and so far, was the spell cast on me by the hypnotic mass of liquid and the intricate plant forms around me. I began to perceive the vital importance of landscape. The landscape appeared to me in all its precariousness and restlessness, with the passing of the seasons: the more the color of the sky, of the houses, of clothes changed, the more I perceived, in an imperceptible way, a sense of bewilderment, of instability. It was as if my belonging to a well-defined territory, resolved in an unstoppable process of dissolving and dissolution. And yet, the landscape, that is to say that set of signs, shapes, figures, remained there, alive and true, liquid and petrified, identical and in continuous metamorphosis, surprising and familiar. I mirrored on it, and my moods, my roots sank there, yet I obscurely perceived a swarm of forces, presences, suggestions. I then realized, in retrospect, that a sense of possibility, of probability of the world, of nature, of the country, of the landscape makes itself manifest.”

Reading the writings of Sovente, we can feel his deep relationship with nature and the bradyseism. He loved to rely on the past, he entered into the sanctuary of the Acropolis of Cumae and confided in the Sibyl.

 

The myth tells that the Cumaean Sibyl was a young woman Apollo was in love with, to the point of offering her whatever she desired, on the condition that she became his priestess. She asked immortality, forgetting to ask for eternal youth. And so, as she grew older, her body became smaller and smaller, and was placed in a cage in the temple of Apollo, until she disappeared completely and only her voice remained. As a background to his works, there is the mythological landscape of the Phlegraean Fields, a place which is expressed by sounds, screams, noises. So, on the one hand, there is the reality shaken by bradyseism, which could shatter at any moment, and on the other there are the sounds that come from a mythical past.

“The Mediterranean landscape of the Phlegraean Fields is a chronotope”, writes Liberti[2], in which bradyseism and volcanism bring to light traces of the Greek-Roman past, mythical characters such as Odysseus, Proserpina and the Sibyl, gods like Demeter and Venus, fantastic cities like Naples and Cumae, along with a violent and corrupt present.

In an interview, Mario Franco[3] asks the poet: "Is it difficult to be poets in Naples?" – And the poet replies: "We all know that here there is no cultural industry, that life for an intellectual is more difficult. I do not have to do the pundit at Costanzo show or hold a section on an illustrated weekly, so this condition does not weigh on me; I have published with major national publishers and I couldn’t live elsewhere. I am bound to Naples by my studies, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, the small village where I live, Cappella, which is not on maps, but for me it is as important as Cumae, Baia, Pozzuoli, with their charm of tuff, baths, Roman statues, spectres that rise from the numerous columbariums of sulfur, of lakes, which exalt and move me. Naples and the Phlegraean world are united by the same condition: to preserve, despite modernity, an irreducible archaic soul and being continually the object of looting, degradation, barbarism. But living here means being in contact with strong creative incentives. For me it’s like listening to sudden echoes, to be carried by the hand of the spell".

We read a reflection of the poet[4] in the magazine Poesia: "The feeling that follows me every time is of wonder and pain together. It seems to breathe an enchanted air and move in a maze. Everything seems to stand still in a time, never existed but at the same time alive and full of fears, smells and recalls. (...) As Naples fascinates me and involves me with its extraordinary forms, so Cumae, Fusaro, Cappella, Bacoli, Baia, Monte di Procida, Pozzuoli, with their charm full of tuff, ancient stones, baths, Roman statues, rise from the numerous tuff columbarium, lakes, they exalt me, they make me reflect but they freak me out and they move me."

It is likely that the poet is indebted to a great of his land, the nolan Giordano Bruno, for his philosophical conception of the elements of the universe: a "naturalistic" conception, capable of imagine the world as a unitary body, based on continuity between vegetable, animal and human components. Men, with their fears, their hopes, their emotions, are part of nature. And that is why a border between feelings and memories, between the present’s objects and the ruins of the past, between the fragments of the landscape and the fragile movements soul does not exist.

In his verses Sovente often succeeded in giving rise to a certain sense of the place. Not a small thing, because it does not simply imply a visible landscape or particular geographical references, but, more deeply, a substance, roots. As Roberto Galaverni[5] makes us notice, it is precisely the paradox of this very concrete hidden country that triggers his poetry, which in fact is full of fractures and telluric cavities, of dark caverns, of “erosions and deflagrations”, of archaeological or mythical finds, of “monsters and chimeras” that emerge here and now, in the time of history.

 

[1] Michele Sovente, L'arte come enigma e come ricerca, from Poesia, international monthly magazine of poetic culture n. 188, Crocetti.

[2] Michele Sovente- Cumae, critical and annotated edition by Giuseppe Andrea Liberti, Quodlibet, 2019.

[3] Mario Franco, Michele Sovente. Poeti contro paroliberi la nostalgia è il verso, da I volti di Napoli, La Repubblica.it, 21st November 2004.

[4] Michele Sovente, Malessere e sortilegio tra Napoli e i Campi Flegrei, from Poesia, Mensile internazionale di cultura n. 57, December 1992, Crocetti editore.

[5] Roberto Galaverni, Una lingua sola non basta per scavare a Cuma, La Lettura – Corriere della Sera, 19/01/2020.

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