Antinferni

Antinferni is a collection of poetry and prose texts by three contemporary authors (Umberto Fiori, Claudio Recalcati and Michele Mari), accompanied by illustrations by Roberto Recchioni. Poems and prose consciously move away from traditional scenarios of eternal fire and the shipwreck of reason to approach contemporary and personal visions, inspired by everyday cruelty, illness and dreams.

An everyday otherworld peeps out in Umberto Fiori's poems, populated by corpses unaware that they are dead. The hell of hospital wards is suddenly revealed to the eyes of the narrator in Claudio Recalcati's verses, which make one ask "why [does the world] make such a theatre of the bloody / beauty of death?". Michele Mari's prose instead lapses into a ‘classical’ hell through the dreams of an adolescent, Corrado Marlenghi, who superimposes the history of 13th-century Italy and references to Dante's Inferno on his own contrasts with his schoolmates.

Antinferni is published on the occasion of ‘I Giovedì alla Fondazione’ at the Fondazione Pomodoro in Milan, and is printed in a limited and numbered edition of 800 copies.