Snaking Roads, Meandering Rivers: Uphill and Upstream in Italian Literature and Cinema

Abstract

1.Roads, whether in literature and or in photography music, the fine arts, is an infinite topic. Snaking rivers: uphill and upstream in Italian literature and cinema, represents an effort, to quote Shakespeare, to give local habitation and a name to a chaotic proliferation of ideas and images scattered across diverse landscapes in Italian literature and cinema. Realizing the vastness of the task, this essay will necessarily be very selective. The complexity of this topic is compounded by the natural tendency of art to imitate life and by the demands of roads and in their various configurations of crookedness, tortuosity, impetuosity and placidity, to rise to the status of metaphors and allegories for life's many journeys and the rainbow of creative processes. This is, therefore, an effort to share with the reader something seminal, inquisitive, unsettled, perhaps tentative. It was Leon Battista Alberti, that master of classical similes and metaphors, who laid across one of his most memorable pages! the contrastive significance of two types of one that cuts its path decisively, rushing from mquntain to sea, another that meanders through plains and valleys on its inevitable gravitational journey to a larger and terminal reality. Alberti saw in the first the impetuous and decisive lifestyle of action, in the second the considerate and meditative lifestyle of the contemplative, the speculative and the leisurely. It will be well to begin by considering the key terms used in the title. First, snaking roads, not unlike meandering rivers, rise or descend patientl y according to the will of the land. The snakingelement is in the unending