Le coordinate del limite: Luigi Meneghello e le geografie del "Dispatrio"

In 1947, after the conclusion of the Resistance movement, the Italian writer Luigi Meneghello emigrated to England. At first, the English environment proved to be harsh, as he would admit years later in his autobiographical work, Il dispatrio (1993). It was a journey of initiation and break-up at the same time. Focusing on Il dispatrio, this essay aims to analyse the geographies of boundary, paying a particular attention on how the social and linguistic differences between Italy and England are filtered and expressed through a peculiar syntax of the space. All this leads to the possibility of reading Meneghello’s work as a crossing narration, by which writing attempts at mapping the movement of the protagonist from the margin to the centre.