Orizzonti mantovani. Spunti e dinamiche paesaggistiche ne L'Illustrissimo di Alberto Cantoni

In the literary production of Alberto Cantoni, short story writer and novelist between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novel L'Illustrissimo is highly important both because it is the last publication of the author, from Pomponesco, a small town a few kilometers south of Mantua, both because it summarizes in a single text the different nuances and different directions that his writing has taken over the course of his literary career, also due to a writing and processing time that embraces the entire span of years of his career itself. In the foreground, in addition to the numerous and brilliant characters, one of the protagonists is the Mantuan landscape which, not a simple background, becomes a true literary parameter which in different and significant ways affects the purposes and mechanisms of the novel.