More than forty years since his death, and in spite of the sympathetic attention of many of the most important Italian critics and writers of the century, from Gianfranco Contini to Giuseppe Ungaretti to Nobel laureate poet Eugenio Montale, Enrico Pea remains a peripheral and marginalized figure in the landscape of modern Italian literature. Both his eccentric and nontraditional background and the difficulty of locating his body of works within the major currents of twentieth-century literature have reinforced the image of Pea as a "scrittore d'eccezione" (exceptional writer), to use the definition coined by one of his earliest critics, Pietro Pancrazi in Scrittori d'oggi (Writers of Today, 1946). In spite of the limitations that this prejudice has imposed upon critical investigations of the author, it is not totally unfounded. For the most part, Pea kept himself away from the literary debates of his times, preferring to cultivate, in a...