Marco Cardetta's 'Nero di Odessa' Reimagines the City as a Mental Space

Italian author Marco Cardetta returns with '…dal mare – Nero di Odessa' (Les Flâneurs, 2026), a narrative poem published a decade after his debut novel 'Sergente Romano' (LiberAria, 2016). The work explores themes of identity, memory, and contamination, depicting Odessa not as a geographic city but as a mental crossroads of languages, religions, and peoples. Cardetta's poetry mixes Italian with archaic, dialectal, Slavic, and foreign terms, creating an unstable language that reflects his rejection of rigid identities. The poem features characters like Romàn, Elia, nonna Ljubka, Drshy, and zio Pesja, and includes an epitaph that plays with life and death as metamorphosis. Cardetta draws on Jungian dream logic and the philosophy of Raimon Panikkar to oppose binary thinking. The sea serves as a central image, symbolizing the impossibility of pure origins. The work continues Cardetta's commitment to a 'language of liberation,' as he stated in 2016, and radicalizes the linguistic experimentation of his earlier novel, which dealt with post-unification brigandage. The review by Giuseppe Balducci highlights the poem's grotesque and Rabelaisian vein, where bodily elements coexist with metaphysical questions.