“Il Geco e il Girasole” (G.C.L. Edizioni, 2024) is the new collection of poems by Francesco Vito Ciaravino, a writer from La Spezia born in 2001. The author is currently a student at the Faculty of Modern Literature at the University of Pisa and has also studied screenwriting at the School of Cinematographic Art in Genoa. In 2023 he published his first poetic work ‘Combaciarsi’ for G.C.L. Edizioni, for which he won the Firenze Giovani Prize. “Il Geco e il Girasole” is a collection of ninety-nine poems introduced by an elegant, figurative capilettera; the poems, taken as a whole, form a kind of dialogue in which two lovers exchange their impressions of a relationship that has come to an end. These poems speak of love and passion, but also of loss and nostalgia; the poet reflects on the meaning of an emotion that is almost always a risky risk and can be the bearer of deep pain, and he becomes aware of what drives him to love, of what makes him stubbornly throw himself into the void without a parachute – “to be a virgin to nature, then to sink into the usual pit and let himself be buried by the earth and its inhabitants”. Yes, I did that for whole summers.
Then I rested beside your pillow, and the physiological response matured in me to return to the cave and give myself life for the first time. Forever’. In these fascinating poems, the author tries to unravel the mystery of the feeling of love, aware that it is an unsuccessful attempt; love cannot be pigeonholed, it cannot be measured by the yardstick of rationality: only with the senses can one timidly approach the enigma it bears, content to glimpse what lies behind the veil – “I will try to decipher the cloudburst on the mountain, the thirst, the impatient landing and the coffee beans on the golden beach. Finally, the walls, the castles and the strangest trees. The journey to get inside you: incomprehensible’. Francesco Vito Ciaravino sings of carnal, redeeming, tormented and lost love, and at the same time tells us of the difficulty of living in a reality that is less and less full of love and grace. This world is as cruel as it is possible to imagine,” says the author in one of his poems, “but he retains the hope of seeing his beloved again: that is why, in an extraordinarily romantic gesture, the poet lets us know that he has reserved the hundredth verse only for the eyes of the one he misses, leaving us with a burning desire to know its contents.
