With the publication of Pianissimo in 1914, Camillo Sbarbaro's position in twentieth-century Italian poetry was assured. As Gianni Pozzi says (in his La poesia italiana del Novecento, 1967), Sbarbaro expressed "un interiorità poetica che era nell'aria" (the lyrical self of his time). And Pianissimo is still eloquent. It is also what sets him apart from his fellow Ligurian poets and what makes him Eugenio Montale's true contemporary. Giovanni Boine, a poet himself, was one of the few critics who saw the importance of this small book of poems when it first appeared. In his review of Pianissimo for the Riviera Ligure (October 1914) he prophetically called Sbarbaro's poetry "una di quelle poesie su cui i letterati non sanno ne possono dissertare a lungo, ma di cui si ricorderanno gli uomini nella vita per i millenni" (a kind of poetry about which "literati" know and can say little, but which ordinary...