Ezra Pound is considered the greatest – and like the greatest also one of the most controversial – American poet of the twentieth century. One of his strengths was that he loved Italy and for a long time in his life the cities of Venice and Rapallo made him home, where he lived for twenty years. A tireless traveler he returns to Europe in 1908 with a few dollars in his pocket, all his possessions in just two suitcases and a desire for discovery that has always characterized his life and his pen.
Many of his writings are imbued with references to Italian literature: his famous Cantos document the American poet's passionate interest in Italian culture, in particular the art of the fifteenth century - Beato Angelico, Botticelli, Bellini, Carpaccio, Mantegna - and the city of Venice, where he died and in which he is still buried. The greatest influence suffered by the poet is that of Gabriele D'Annunzio, in which Pound sees himself poised between nineteenth-century aestheticism and avant-garde renewal, literary writing and visual arts, Decadence and Modernism.
Andrea Mirabile, Associate Professor of Italian and Cinema & Media Arts at the University of Nashville in Tennessee, who chose to focus his research on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, wrote “Ezra Pound and Italian art Between the Avant-garde and D'Annunzio” published by the Leo S. Olschki Publishing House.
Although the majority of the books are in Italian, about half of the publishing house's turnover is destined abroad and this underlines its central role in spreading our culture across borders. The acronym "with a crusader and divided heart", as Gabriele D'Annunzio defined it, is familiar to specialists, scholars, librarians from all over the world and has a particular meaning for cultural institutes and universities.
