Capri, The Earth and the Sea

Preface to the first edition

It is a pleasure to write this presentation of the book by Elena Scarfagna Rossi, not only because I like her poems, but also because they take me back to the island of my soul, the territory of my body, that can be defined as the alter ego that all of us look for and find in a place where one would like to be born and to die too.
This is why many years ago I chose Capri, not to go on vacation but to pursue the "vacatio" from other lands which is the most noble and difficult of all kinds of elopements.
At the beginning it was a way of escaping from Rome and from my work as a journalist, then I could escape from New York and from my job as a writer and a cultural event organizer, it was a way of honouring Capri by organising an event that would bring some of the most important writers of our time to the island.
Thanks to the Capri Award, which I founded, poets like Czelaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate who has been defined by Joseph Brodsky as the greatest poet of the twentieth century, landed at Marina Grande as well as Brodsky, Derek Walcott (another Nobel prize winner), Rafael Alberti, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Thomas Venclova, Attilio Bertolucci, Irving Layton, Bohumil Hrabal, the U.S. Congress laureate poet Robert Pinsky, the Pulizer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove and Eugenij Evtishenko.
Novelists and intellectuals have also been awarded such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roger Peyrefitte, Hector Bianciotti, Banana Yoshimoto, Ralph Dahrendorf, Francis Fukuyama.
Promoting Capri as a symbol of culture and beauty is one of the aims of this event as well as to consecrate it as the ambassador of a poetic message to be conveyed all over the world.
This is also the author's goal that she set for herself, and I also appreciate this opera for its complete dedication to the charm of the island that emerges from its lyrics and the pictures, as beautiful as the poems to which they give a visual touch turning them into small imaginary islands in an archipelago revolving around enchantment. Capri seems to be part of another time and of another planetary system.
Whoever understand this encounters a mystery by which he or she is subjugated. Elena Scarfagna Rossi perceives it when she claims she stopped asking the reasons behind things. There is another reason that conquers her and it is the reason of poetry, with "The shadow of the seagulls over / the white rock / like a ghost ... ".
The poems in this collection, like all beautiful poems, have a beginning but do not seem to have an epilogue, because they continue to rotate around dreams and beauty. `So the only possible epilogue is the one by Daisy Utemorrah: "That land is what we are! We are that territory! Without that territory we are nobody, we are nothing. And it cannot be any land, you know? It must be that land."

Claudio Angelini