Ingeborg Bachmann e l'Italia

In the exhaustive search for a language able to express the most profound reality, one may be likened to a ‘nomad’ in search of a home. Bachmann shares with other 20 th c. Austrian writers the plight of an emigrant in search of a country, for the Glorious Austria had long since passed, and that which remained suffered from a constant identity crisis. My study focuses on the significance and influence that Italy had on the writer’s work. Specifically, I’ll examine her Was ich in Rom sah und hörte, an essay that describes Rome shorn of its conventional associations, and then reconstructed in the light of new associations that conform to Bachmann’s personal outlook. This poet’s Italy ranges far beyond the cliché traditionally used to describe it. Instead, the complexity of her characterization is revealed in two ways: spirituality in poetry and utopia in her Roman essays. Bachmann uses these forms to express herself. On the one hand, she believed that an author was limited in their ability to speak and, thus, write about a foreign country. Yet, as a foreigner bound sentimentally to her host country, she formed part of a dynamic that eluded precise definition.