Psychopoetics in a Natural Environment: ‘Allora?’

In this paper we will examine a multilingual and multicultural situation of reading poetry in a natural environment. To this end, we will look at a fragment from the movie Il Postino (The Postman, 1994) where Mario, the main character, living on a small Italian island, is recited the poem Oda al Mar (Ode to the Sea) on a beach by its author, Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet in exile on the island. The poem evokes the sea, ever present in Mario’s life, but it does so in a foregrounded way: the endless movement of the waves in Neruda’s Ode brings home to the postman his own surroundings in an estranged manner