(Re)membering Kinship

Abstract

The Wind Blows Round (E l’aura fai son vir, 2005, dir. Giorgio Diritti) opens with a visual introduction to its setting, curving along an Alpine road through tunnels in a series of bumpy handheld shots. Although urban eyes might be accustomed to thinking of rocky mountain slopes as wild, uncultivated places, the Italian Alps, like all Italy, bear deep material traces of the complex relationships linking humans, nonhumans, environment, and technē.¹ As early as the 1500s, the Dominican historian Leandro Alberti remarked, “Since men have multiplied so notably in Italy, and there are not enough flat places, and customary for cultivation to produce the things necessary to live, it has been necessary to cultivate the high and wild mountains” (qtd. in Pratesi 104). Alberti’s tall, wild sixteenth-century mountains, however, had themselves already been traversed, deforested, and inhabited by humans for centuries, as Fulco Pratesi’s Storia della natura d’Italia demonstrates.2 Landscape, as Serenella Iovino argues, is never mere scenery but rather “a balance of nature and culture stratified through centuries of mutual adaptation. It is a ‘warehouse’ of common memories to humanity and nature, in which human and natural life are dialectically interlaced in the form of a co-presence” (“Ecocriticism” 31, original emphasis).