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In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, published in 1988, Italo Calvino wrote that “fantasy is a place where it rains” (1993 109), in reference to a line of Dante‟s Purgatorio “Poi piovve dentro a l‟alta fantasia” (XVII, 25: “Then rained down into the high fantasy”). And, in order to introduce an ecocritical analysis of Luigi Meneghello‟s literary production, we could move this observation from a visionary to a strictly textual field: if ecocriticism investigates the link between literature and environment, taking an earth-centered perspective, in Luigi Meneghello‟s writing the nature element appears from his first book, Libera nos a malo, published in 1963. The title of the book refers not only to the Latin version of the last line of the Lord‟s Prayer, but also to Malo, a small town near Vicenza, where he was born and lived until 1947, when he left Italy to go to England (a few years later, he founded a highly influential Italian Studies department at the University of Reading, which he directed until his retirement in 1980). This is the first line of Libera nos a malo (We quote from the english translation, under the title Deliver Us): “In the beginning there was a thunderstorm” (Meneghello 2011: 3). This shows how the relationship between text and biosphere is obvious and clear from the start, giving rise to a narrative fluid which pervades all his works. There is a secret capillarity in Meneghello‟s writing. As he himself said: “all of my books are connected, like communicating vessels: there‟s the same fluid, which passes from one to the other” 1 . It seems like an underground river, a primordial soup whose textual vitality is constantly nourished by experience. However, if the meteorological phenomenon (the thunderstorm of the first book) becomes source, the author‟s relationship with Nature is delineated in other works, forming concentric circles, a perfectly balanced system. We can consider, for example, Trapianti [Transplants], published in 2004, where Meneghello translates, in the dialect of Vicenza, authors like Shakespeare, Yeats, Hopkins, etc., and where the title is related to the botanical field (transplants like bedding plants); or we can refer to Quaggiù nella biosfera [Down Here in the Biosphere], essays on the aesthetic qualities of literary works (qualities which Meneghello defines as “poetic yeast”). This last point is one of the most important, recalling the observations put forward by Joseph Meeker in The Comedy of Survival: “literature”, Meeker stressed, is “an important characteristic of the human species” (Meeker 1972:3); and we can apply this concept to the title of Meneghello‟s book, because the biosphere is the domain of literature, its poetic yeast.

Does Literature belongs to the Biosphere? The Italian Case of Luigi Meneghello