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Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini

Mario Luzi

Translated from the Italian by Luigi Bonaffini
With an Introduction by Barbara Carle

A Bilingual Edition

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Mario Luzi (1914–2005) was one of Italy’s great 20th-­century poets, and several times a candidate for the Nobel Prize. At 80, he wrote Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini (1994), imagining the last voyage of the medieval painter from Avignon to his native Siena. The pilgrimage is a journey of discovery and purification that leads to a new perception of reality. As the Luzi writes, “the poem is also a return to origins, an unconscious search for a light purer than the splendid one that had exalted his colors.”

Luzi published his first book of poetry, La barca in 1935. Pier Paolo Pasolini considered Onore del vero (1957) to be one of the best books of postwar Italy, Per il battesimo dei nostril frammenti (1985) was published in English as For the Baptism of Our Fragments, and Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (1990) as Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song.