Going along the liquid chronotope: the Po Delta waterscape through Gianni Celati's narration

The chapter explores the Po Delta area, located at the mouth of the longest Italian river. Our aim is to read this geographical region as a site for cultural heritage by using the concept of the chronotope . We will interpret the Po River as a liquid chronotope that works on both a metaphorical-narrative and physical-geographical level in shaping the Po Delta area as a liquid landscape. Through Gianni Celati’s travel diaries, Verso la Foce, we tried to read the landscape through the lens of literature during experimental fi eldwork done in March 2015. In the chapter, we fi rst introduce the geographical context, its importance as a cultural waterscape in the Italian panorama and the fi gure of the writer-geographer Gianni Celati. We then trace the methodology we used to conceive of the Po River as a chronotope bridging fi ctional and real-world landscapes and to prepare the performative fi eldwork aimed at exploring the interconnections between literary pages and actual places of the Po Delta. Finally, we present observations that emerged through our study based on the exchange between text analysis and embodied fi eldwork experience to present the Po Delta area as a site of dynamic cultural heritage due to its spatio-temporally stratification.