Within the wide and multifaceted cultural activity of Melo Freni, his poetic work qualitatively holds an eminent position. Freni, who is also a journalist, novelist, theater director, and filmmaker, is primarily a Sicilian writer, revealing topical affinities with other Sicilian poets such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Lucio Piccolo, and Bartolo Cattafi. Yet Freni's verse tends to exceed the limits of a strictly regional collocation as some of his social, philosophical, and existential themes may generally be found in other posthermetic Italian poetry. In Febbre, furore e fiele (Fever, Furor and Gall, 1983) critic and poet Giuseppe Zagarrio defines the sicilitudine, or insular condition, of Sicilian poets, as the painful awareness of the contradictions of their social and cultural separation from the mainland. Often, as in Freni's case, these writers left their native island and settled on the Italian peninsula, thus undergoing significant adjustments. As they share a complex feeling of...