Abstract

Starting with a text of the Fifties, 1944: FAIER, the theme, or rather the situation, of the writing on the walls recurs in both Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry and prose. Mostly anonymous, wall inscriptions almost always signify the passage of time and history, and their traumatic ‘tattoo’ on the subject’s psyche as well as on the territory’s «flesh-earth». The origin of this obsessive theme is to be found in the funeral inscriptions engraved in monumental Fascist memorials, or in humble country stones, in memory of those fallen in the First World War: monumental presences, in a broad sense, that marked the poet’s childhood and youth