IMAGES OF EXILE: DISTANCE AND MEMORY IN THE POETRY OF CINO DA PISTOIA

Abstract

‘Exile literature’ is a category that finds a place in the critical history of Italian literature from the Middle Ages onwards. Its significance in the realm of politics is obvious. One of the peculiar aspects of the development of ideas of political identity in Italy is that they are so frequently tied to the experience of exile or exclusion. From Dante to Foscolo, and through the turbulent events of the twentieth century, writers about Italy have often occupied positions of geographical, legal, or psychological exclusion from or within the state. In the case of medieval authors, of course, the context for such writing is not that of the peninsula as a whole. Their Italy is subdivided into small-scale polities, often themselves in a condition of repeated constitutional and territorial flux. It is these fluctuations, especially in the city-republics of the north and centre, that make exile into an experience common enough to produce extensive comment in literature; and over the past decade in particular, medieval Italian exile has become a focus for research. In the case of ’exile literature‘, especially of lyric poetry, it is clear that, from political beginnings, the topic took on extended metaphorical dimensions, and was developed into a flexible rhetorical trope which could be deployed outside a discourse of pure politics, as well as alongside it. In Corrado Calenda's useful formulation, writers could refer to exile equally as a matter of autobiographical documentation, factual esilio, or as a figure of internal and psychological esclusione.

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