Landscapes in Between examines the way in which a number of prominent Italian writers and filmmakers have engaged with what the author defines as ‘interstitial landscapes’, ‘spaces that bridge areas of defined use, such as built structures and cultivated plots, with undeveloped land’ (p. 4). The author suggests that the analysis of the representation of interstitial landscapes, heavily modified yet abandoned spaces, can provide a starting point for understanding Italy’s natural environment in its entirety. The book is divided into six chapters. While the first chapter introduces the definition of ‘interstitial’ and clarifies the book’s position in relation to a number of historiographical, philosophical and literary debates, the remaining five sections of the book are each dedicated to the work of an Italian author or filmmaker. Some of the figures discussed by Seger, such as Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, are widely known to international audiences, while the others – Gianni Celati, Simona Vinci and the duo Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco – have found little popularity in the English-speaking world. The chapters are roughly organised in chronological order and deal with the analysis of both literary and cinematic texts. In doing so the author attempts to map the evolution of the representation of Italian landscape from the 1950s until now.

Chapter 2 discusses two of Calvino’s novellas written in the 1950s, La speculazione edilizia (A Plunge into Real Estate, 1957) and La nuvola di smog (Smog, 1958). The economic boom depicted in both stories represents a crucial turning point in the country’s history as it led Italians from a rural tradition into a modern, industrialised world. According to Seger, Calvino expresses a divided view about the environmental change depicted in these texts – ‘something between bitter acceptance of the “new ugliness” of the urban and a fragile hope for contact with an adapted nature’ (p. 8). Pasolini’s films of the 1960s examined in Chapter 3 are characterised by a more pessimistic tone; he depicts the transition from agrarian ways of life to industrialisation as an assault on the human spirit. Chapter 4 focuses on an analysis of Gianni Celati’s Verso la foce (Towards the River Mouth, 1989) a series of first-person musings about the Po river valley where distinctions between urban and rural have become increasingly blurred. Seger is particularly interested in the way in which Celati sketches a realistic portrayal of Italian nature threatened by industrial pollution and nuclear disaster. In the work of Simona Vinci, discussed in Chapter 5, the ideas of environmental threat and crisis that emerge in Celati’s book are incorporated into the culture of the everyday. Seger suggests that in Vinci’s work the land is unquestionably damaged; however, the characters of her novels seem to find a sense of belonging in the degraded landscapes they inhabit. The final chapter is then dedicated to an analysis of films directed by Cipri and Maresco, which signal the emergence of a new stage in the evolution of contemporary Italian landscape characterised by a proliferation of postindustrial, interstitial spaces.

The book offers a sophisticated, original analysis of the selected literary and cinematic texts. Seger’s examination of these books and films is complemented by a deep understanding of the political and historical context in which they take place. It is also fruitfully informed by a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ to Kristeva’s notion of the ‘semiotic’ and Ulrick Beck’s theory of ‘risk society’. Sometimes, however, the author seems to privilege an in-depth analysis of the selected texts at the expense of a broader discussion of the representation of contemporary Italian landscape. The book ends with a short afterword (less than two pages), yet perhaps a longer final section would have allowed the author to draw more encompassing conclusions and further unpack some of the issues addressed in previous chapters. Similarly, the book would have benefited from a stronger introduction. However, Landscapes in Between does not aim to offer a comprehensive overview of the representation of interstitial spaces in Italian cinema and literature. The author deliberately chooses not to engage with the discussion of writers and filmmakers who have confronted environmental change in the contemporary Italian landscape (Antonioni is perhaps the most notable omission here). She also gives precedence to the discussion of texts that have not already received extensive scholarly attention. This approach would have been appropriate if the author had provided a brief overview of the issues not addressed in the book; otherwise, it reads as if the author takes for granted the reader’s familiarity with those preexisting debates. Despite these minor shortcomings, Landscapes in Between constitutes an important addition to the growing literature on ecocriticism. At the same time, the book also represents a major contribution to the field of Italian studies, since it succeeds in proposing an innovative approach to the study of Italian landscape by effectively bringing together a variety of fields of inquiry from history and philosophy to film, literature and environmental studies.