Verso la cuna del mondo

In February 1912, Gozzano set sail for India by explicit order of his doctors, and immediately began to cheat – backdating the journey, extending his stay and adding stops he never actually made to the itinerary – all in an attempt to emulate Pierre Loti, who turned his own journey into a book entitled L'Inde (sans les Anglais) in 1903. And so, after Ceylon, the journey described in these pages becomes imaginary. Using Loti as a sort of Baedeker, Gozzano ventures, sceptical and ironic, into a remote, inexplicable and dead world, scattered with ruined cities, dense with “demented” and “monstrous” vegetation, populated by beings seemingly descended from another planet. And, of course, full of traces of Western civilisation: wicker chairs, sagging sofas, Empire-style shelves, Robert clocks, oleographs of the Royal Family of England…