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The article aims at offering a new interpretation of some photographs of Luigi Ghirri’s Il profilo delle nuvole. Once separated from the linear sequence in which they are arranged in the book and recomposed in a panel inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, these images reveal a hidden genealogy that, taking into account both Luigi Ghirri’s suggestions and readings of his work by Marco Belpoliti and Gianni Celati, traces the figure of the columns back to 15th- and 16th-century motifs, in particular to the columns of Hercules in the Age of Discovery. It is then possible to create a connection between Il profilo delle nuvole and a text which is apparently distant from it, namely Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a poem that just like Ghirri’s photo-text feature two crucial elements of landscape in the Po Valley such as the columns and the embankment. By establishing what Carlo Ginzburg would call an intentionally anachronistic and asymmetric dialogue between these texts, a new hypothesis is made about Luigi Ghirri’s understanding of the relationship between the columns and the embankments, a relationship that is entrusted with the task of showing that it is possible to take care of reality by taking care of its representation.

The introduction to the thematic section of volume 22 issue 1 (Il semplice. Vite e voci di una rivista) explains the origin, methods, aims and news of the most recent research dedicated to the journal «Il semplice. Almanacco delle prose» (1995-1997), one of the most interesting workshops of the Italian panorama at the end of the millennium. This introduction introduces some fundamental questions, addressed in the individual essays, which concern the ideas and suggestions that Gianni Celati has transmitted to the magazine. «Semplice» was an inexhaustible forge of short narratives of which the archive of the papers, kept in the Library of the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo di Modena and presented in this issue for the first time, will offer the scientific community new opportunities for study and research.

The essay investigates Gianni Celati’s relationship with two different authors such as William Blake and Henri Michaux. Starting from the reproposal of soome excerpts of their works on «Il semplice», it is exposed how Celati’s interest in these writers is linked to themes such as vision and liberation from social constraints - two topics variously treated by Celati in his works.

This essay focuses on the fantasy ethnographic short stories published in the second issue of the literary review «Il semplice» and written by Gianni Celati, Ginevra Bompiani, Ugo Cornia, Jean Talon, Stefano Benni and Henri Michaux. After a brief discussion of the role of ethnography and fantasy ethnography in the publication, I considered their relationship with travel writing. I then focused on the key role of Gulliver’s Travels, pointing out the possible Swiftian origin of the different kinds of estrangement adopted in the short stories collected in the review. In the last section, I compared and contrasted Michaux’s Gli Hiviniziki with the other short stories, and I stressed the similarities in the representation of the relationship between imaginary populations and the natural environment.

The following paper aims to identify a genealogy of the ‘almanac of prose’ «Il semplice», a six volumes journal by Feltrinelli publishing house (1995-1997). The idea first took shape in a series of public readings (known under the name «Viva Voce») held in Modena in 1992, and the journal was conceived as a permanent literary workshop since the very beginning. The first part of the article is mainly focused on an unpublished journal called «Astolfo dei narratori»: an in-depth study of some related archival documents has shown its strong connection with both «Il semplice» and Narratori delle riserve, a literary column run by Gianni Celati from 1988 to 1989. Forms and themes of the almanac «Il semplice» have been instead investigated in the second part of this study, using the homonymous archive: the purpose of this section is therefore to highlight the elements of continuity with the previous projects and to define its innovative nature.

My essay examines the connection between translation and tradition in Daniele Benati and Gianni Celati’s work (with a special attention to Celati’s figure). The starting point is a selection of translations originally published in the magazine «Il Semplice» (1995-1997) then collected in their four-handed anthology Storie di solitari americani (2006).