By Ismael Diadié Haidara,
Malian poet resides in Spain There are journeys that can be measured in miles, and there are journeys that are measured by the people one encounters, the memories one receives, and the voices that continue speaking long after one has left. My recent journey through Italy belonged entirely to the second kind. I did not travel through Italy as a tourist moving from one monument to another. I traveled through a landscape where poetry, philosophy, history, and friendship are still alive. Each place I visited seemed to open a page in the great book of civilization. Each encounter reminded me that literature is not confined to books. It lives in tombs, gardens, ruins, translations, conversations, and in the generosity of those who open their homes to a stranger and make him feel that he has returned to his own. Naples was my first great encounter. At the tomb of Virgil, I witnessed something that moved me deeply. Visitors climbed the 131 stone steps leading to the poet's resting place. They did not seem to come merely as tourists. They came with the reverence of pilgrims. Some people seek miracles at the tombs of saints; here, people entrusted their memories, their admiration, and perhaps even their dreams to a poet. This is one of Italy's beautiful mysteries: a country where literature is still granted the dignity of faith. Nearby rested Giacomo Leopardi. Standing before his tomb, I felt the silence of his poetry surrounding me. Leopardi transformed solitude into a universal language. His melancholy did not remain his alone; it became a music that continues to reach readers across centuries and borders. And then there was Dante. To stand before the author of the Divine Comedy was an experience that required humility. Some monuments invite admiration. Dante demands something deeper. I took a photograph, but the image was not simply a souvenir. It was a gesture of gratitude from one poet to another, across time, language, and death. Yet Italy revealed its deepest beauty not only through its monuments, but through its people. With my Italian translators, Giancarlo Cavallo and Rossella Nicolò, and with my publishers, Raffaella Marzano and Sergio Iagulli, I discovered another homeland—not the homeland of birth, but the homeland of affection. Friendship became the true language of my journey. I have often thought that sad is the person who has no reasons to be grateful. Italy gave me many reasons. The Italian language, in my experience, became more than a language into which my work was translated. It became a language of hospitality. At the Casa della Poesia in Baronissi, I understood that its name was not merely symbolic. It truly is a house of poetry—a place where a poet can feel at home. Under the devoted guidance of Sergio Iagulli, whose work has contributed so much to contemporary Italian poetry, literature appeared not as an institution, but as a family. The intellectual heart of my journey unfolded at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, where I delivered my lecture, Della sobrietà come arte del vivere—“Sobriety as the Art of Living.” The place itself seemed to demand such a reflection. Hans-Georg Gadamer once praised the Institute as one of those rare institutions capable of renewing the cultural spirit of Europe beyond bureaucracy and economic calculation, in favor of a civilization founded upon solidarity and peace. I found myself in agreement with that vision. For me, sobriety is not poverty. It is measure. It is the wisdom of knowing what is enough. In a world that continually demands more, perhaps true wisdom begins with the courage to desire less. From there, my journey led me toward one of the forgotten sanctuaries of philosophy. On the hill of Posillipo, overlooking the Bay of Naples, I visited the ancient Epicurean school associated with Siro and Philodemus of Gadara. The place bears the Greek name Pausilypon—“where sorrow ends.” What a beautiful name for a place of thought. Here, away from political ambition and the noise of the world, philosophers cultivated friendship, tranquility, and the disciplined pursuit of happiness. It was here that the young Virgil once studied. It was here that, according to tradition, after the death of his teacher, the poet inherited the villa where parts of the Georgics were composed. Nearby, the volcanic ashes of Herculaneum preserved carbonized papyrus scrolls. Two thousand years later, these fragile remains continue to reveal the voices of Epicurean thought. In such a landscape, philosophy, poetry, and archaeology no longer appear as separate disciplines. They become one conversation across time. Further south, Paestum opened another chapter. Among the Doric temples of Magna Graecia, beneath the Mediterranean sky, I felt once again that civilizations do not disappear. They change languages. They change forms. They enter new memories. I am grateful to Rossella Nicolò and Giancarlo Cavallo for guiding me through what I called the Greek world of Italy. Throughout the journey, literature remained my constant companion. In Naples, in the gardens of the Bourbon Palace, I presented the new Italian edition of Tebrae, translated from French by Rossella Nicolò and Giancarlo Cavallo and published by Multimedia Edizione in 2026. Alongside Sergio Iagulli, Raffaella Marzano, and the literary critic Silvio Perrella, we celebrated not simply the publication of a book, but the passage of a text from one language to another, from one culture to another, from one group of readers to another. A second presentation followed the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Casa della Poesia. I shared the stage with Raffaella Marzano, paying tribute to an institution that has become one of Italy's enduring homes for international poetry. But perhaps the image that best preserves the spirit of my Italian journey was captured inside the Casa della Poesia. Sergio Iagulli took a photograph of me standing before the image of my beloved friend, the Bosnian poet Izet Sarajlić. I stood before the face of a friend who was no longer physically present, yet who remained completely alive in memory. In that moment, I understood once again that poets continue to accompany one another beyond generations and beyond mortality. They meet in books, in photographs, in translations, and in the mysterious territory of memory. By the time my journey came to an end, Italy had revealed itself to me as more than a country. It was a place where philosophers still speak through ancient institutions; where Epicurus still seems to whisper from the hills of Posillipo; where Virgil still receives the devotion of pilgrims; where Dante continues to command humility; where Leopardi teaches us the eloquence of silence; and where poetry remains woven into daily life with extraordinary naturalness. For me, the journey became something larger than literary travel. It became a reminder that culture survives not only in museums and libraries. It survives in friendship. It survives in translation. It survives in gratitude. It survives whenever one civilization opens its door to another. Perhaps this is Italy's greatest poem: a country where the past is never entirely past, because every new traveler is invited to continue writing its eternal story. The Broom Flower: A Living Memory of Leopardi During my literary pilgrimage through Italy, I stood before the tomb of Giacomo Leopardi, where the ginestra—the broom flower immortalized in his final masterpiece, La Ginestra, or The Broom, or the Flower of the Desert—still blooms on the slopes once overshadowed by Vesuvius. I was deeply moved by that encounter. I placed one of those delicate blossoms inside my copy of Canti (Songs), preserving it as a small relic of my journey. It was more than a flower. It became a message passed from one poet to another. The flower carried the fragrance of memory. It carried the silence of the place. It carried, perhaps, the voice of Leopardi himself. In the barren landscape of Vesuvius, the broom flower blooms without arrogance. It does not deny the power of nature. It does not pretend that the desert is a garden. It simply grows. And perhaps this is why Leopardi loved it. The flower becomes an image of quiet resilience—not the resilience of those who believe themselves invincible, but of those who understand their fragility and still choose to bloom. “Here, upon the barren flank of dread Vesuvius, where neither tree nor blossom dares to gladden the land, you alone scatter your lonely shrubs, fragrant broom, content to dwell within the desert.” I carried the flower away with me. But I also carried something else: the conviction that poetry, like the broom flower, can grow in difficult soil. It can survive the ashes of history. It can emerge from solitude. It can cross languages and generations. And perhaps, in the end, this is what a literary journey truly is: not the movement of a person through places, but the movement of memory from one human being to another. Italy gave me many memories. Among them, one small yellow flower remains. I would like to end by noting some of the poems I read during my travelogue, Translated by Dr. Virginia Fernandez Collado. BRIEF STORY OF MY LIFE I was three years old in the year of independence of this country I was six years old in the year of the Northern war I was nine years old in the cholera year I was twelve years old in the year of the great famine I was fifteen years old in the year of the other war When the jihadist shells fell, I was fifty-four years old I chose between the coffin and the suitcase, and I left with my daughter and my son I left my city like fifty-four other people on a barge. Ten years have passed and every night shells fall in my dreams Every night I sit on a suitcase and wait, and the snow falls. Only the snow falls.
