Beyond the Adriatic Mirror. Schiavoni’s Quaderno croato

Abstract

This contribution offers an analysis of Vanni Schiavoni’s anthology Quaderno croato, a poetry collection by the young writer, highlighting its thematic complexity and stylistic maturity and published in 2020. The book, consisting of twelve poems dedicated to twelve places on the Croatian coast, uses the poetics of travel to transform the journey from a simple geographical displacement into an existential crossing and ethical-political meditation, where sensory perception, historical memory, and ethical reflection intertwine. Schiavoni transforms Croatia into a dynamic system of energies and correspondences, evoking with rare poetic intensity its islands, cities, and human figures - from the “Kornati, like small errors of the waves”, to Dubrovnik, with its “hundred names in the long sunset”, and Šibenik, a “Venice in filigree”. Schiavoni, a member of the post-industrial Salento generation, addresses in the collection the painful memory of the Yugoslav war and the complex dialogue between personal and collective identity, mediated by reflection on history and landscape. The structure of the poems in bilingual pairs (Italian-Croatian) emphasises the tension between roots and otherness. The human figures encountered fishermen, street vendors, border guards, become epiphanies of otherness and nuclei of meaning, revealing travel as an experience of encounter and self-knowledge. The poet favours a meditative and lyrical language, avoiding ideological and declamatory drifts, and restoring to the poetic text a function of resistance to oblivion and emotional reconstruction. Quaderno croato thus marks the apex of Schiavoni’s projected “Trilogy of the Roots”, representing the point of balance between his personal linguistic experimentation and a broader poetic tradition that weaves together lyrical introspection, moral tension and responsibility. The work can therefore be inscribed in the tradition of civil and testimonial poetry, which combines the aesthetic dimension with a profound sense of historical and moral responsibility.