Sense of Home and 'Exile' in Giorgio Messori's Narrative Fiction

In this essay, I explore Messori's rendering of place by focusing on the coexisting themes of home and exile in his Uzbekan diary/travel narrative, Nella citta del pane e dei postini (2005) and in some of his main short stories, which appeared posthumously in the volume Storie invisibili e altri racconti (2008). I investigate Messori's aesthetic consonance with other writers and artists, in particular with the late photographer, Luigi Ghirri, and argue that his work both builds on a long tradition of place and landscape representation, and makes an original contribution to the current critical debate on place and landscape, positing them as memory, contemplation, and imagination, highlighting the affective and relational experience of place, and voicing the postmodern condition of inhabiting displacement.