I. MARCH. THE SURVEY.
Wide shot. Exterior, valley, dawn. Forensic blue. A slight telephoto: distance compresses things and makes them look already guilty.
A man walks the boundary with a green notebook tucked under his arm and a wooden pencil between his fingers. The five-thirty light is still undecided, and the valley—two hectares of slope above an unnamed ditch—seems to be holding its breath.
The frost stays low, caught between the blades of grass. From the ditch rises the smell of standing water, cold mud, last year’s leaves. Higher up, toward the ridge, the plowed fields are the color of burned bread and wet iron; the clods are lined up with an old, almost domestic patience, as if someone had combed the earth before dawn to make it presentable to the day. A blackbird tries a note, then stops. Even animals, on certain mornings, understand before men do that something is about to be decided.
The man’s name is Lorenzo Castelli. Sixty-three. He has owned this land for eleven years. This is the third spring he intends to clean it up. The first two, he failed. He says this aloud, to no one, with the dignity of a man who has learned to count his defeats the way other men count their children.
Detail. The notebook open. Four printed columns: species / position / intervention / date. The page is clean. Too clean for a valley.
—Rubus ulmifolius. Blackberry bramble. West fence. Aggressive recurrence.
—Ailanthus altissima. Tree of heaven. Road. Alien.
—Robinia pseudoacacia. Black locust. Dry well. Opportunist.
—Urtica dioica. Nettle. Scattered. Low priority.
—Prunus spinosa. Blackthorn. Bertozzi boundary. Invasive.
He does not write down what will remain. What will remain, to him, does not need a name. What will remain is the lawn, the order, the view.
An orderly valley is a valley that does not answer back.
Cut. Interior, kitchen, same morning. Yellow domestic light. A slightly distorting wide angle: the room looks larger than the family inside it.
Tommaso, eleven, in pajamas, is eating cereal. His hair is flattened on one side and his face has the look of someone who woke up before his own courage. Margherita, twenty-two, is already dressed for university. White shirt, jeans, hair tied without patience. On the table in front of her, an open book: Vegetazione d’Italia by Pignatti.
The moka pot breathes on the stove. The coffee has not yet risen, but the kitchen has already taken on its smell: bitter, warm, almost metallic, the way certain mornings smell when a house seems to remember more than the people who live in it. Through the window the valley enters in pieces: a crooked row of vines, the white edge of a farmhouse, two cypresses, the ditch you cannot see but can guess from the darker thickness of the grass. A fourth chair sits against the wall, not empty: suspended. It is the mother’s place, unnamed at breakfast because certain dead, in certain families, become furniture.
Lorenzo enters, satisfied.
—Today I start.
—Start what. —Margherita does not look up from the book.
—The bonifica of the valley.
Close shot. Margherita raises her eyes from the book. Five seconds. The camera does not cut: it waits for the word to enter the room.
—What do you mean by bonifica, Dad.
Lorenzo pours himself coffee.
—The valley is a mess. I need to put it in order.
—A mess how.
—Bramble, nettles, ailanthus. Stuff that serves no purpose.
—Serves no purpose to whom.
Lorenzo smiles paternally. The smile of men who believe the world is simple because they stopped listening to it years ago.
—To us, Margherita.
—Who is us.
—Us.
Detail. Tommaso. The spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. A cornflake falls into the milk. No one watches it sink.
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
Rubus ulmifolius—blackberry bramble. Native shrub of the Mediterranean scrubland. Shelters the red-backed shrike, a protected species in steady decline across Europe. Provides nectar for bees during the lean weeks of late spring. Its thorns are not aggression: they are defensive architecture. Status in this valley as of March 14, 2026: viable.
—
II. APRIL. THE BRAMBLE.
Wide shot. Exterior, west fence, mid-morning. Hostile yellow light. The sun does not illuminate: it interrogates.
Lorenzo works with gloves, a sickle, and a small chainsaw he calls the razor. The bramble is two meters high, dense, dark, with that stubborn resistance of things that decided to stay before someone else decided for them.
Inside the dark mass there is a world of low sounds: the rustle of a lizard, a tremor of wings, the nearly invisible scraping of something moving. The thorns hold scraps of wool carried by the wind, tiny feathers, dry seeds, leaves caught from one winter to the next; everything the valley has not managed to throw away has stopped there, in the tangle, finding shelter precisely in what Lorenzo considers disorder. The bramble is not a plant. It is a neighborhood. It is an archive of small lives without a land registry.
Lorenzo does not hear this. He hears only friction.
He knows, as an amateur agronomist, that bramble grows back stronger if you cut it at the center. So he does not cut it at the center. He circles it. Isolates it. Empties it from the outside in.
—Resistant. Stubborn. Infiltrated—he tells himself, and smiles.
Detail. The chainsaw meets a main branch. The bramble gives way in a single movement. The sound is brief, almost elegant. This is often how living things fall when the man cutting them has learned to call them a problem.
Freeze frame. Inside the collapsed mass, something small breaks apart with a different kind of rustle. Not vegetable. Eight seconds. Lorenzo does not look.
—A mouse—he tells himself.
Cut. Flashback. Interior, corporate office, 2011. Cold fluorescent light. The camera holds still, like minutes from a meeting. A plaque on the door:
LORENZO CASTELLI — HR BUSINESS PARTNER — TRANSFORMATION DEPARTMENT.
There was a young man, in those years. His name was Federico. Brilliant, too much so. He would not integrate. He asked questions, resisted, his roots were elsewhere, he was predictable in counterattack, stubborn in principle.
Lorenzo had done clean work—nothing official, only a series of evaluations that converged—and Federico had left for the good of the team.
He had not fired him. That was the beauty of procedure. The best procedure never pushes: it tilts the floor.
Donatella from HR, that day, had told him, leaning against his office doorframe:
—You’re surgical, Castelli.
Lorenzo had smiled.
Hard cut. Exterior, valley, 1:00 p.m.
Lorenzo looks at the place where the bramble had been. Now there is only earth. The earth is dark, virgin, ready. A metallic smell rises from the wound in the ground, mixed with the green milk of cut branches, the hot dust of the chainsaw, the already rotten sweetness of crushed flowers. To another man it would be the smell of amputation; to Lorenzo it is freshness, possibility, surface returned to the discipline of the gaze.
Cut. Interior, kitchen, lunch. The light is flatter. The moka pot is cold now.
Margherita stands by the sink, a glass of water in her hand. She does not drink. Tommaso draws on the back of an old utility bill.
—I saw the bramble —Margherita says.
—I took it out.
—It was full of nests, Dad.
Lorenzo pours wine.
—Margherita, it’s a bramble.
—It’s our bramble. Eight generations of shrikes.
—Now you sound like the university.
—Now I sound like reality.
Three seconds. Cutlery. A fly against the window.
—Listen —Lorenzo says, calm, instructional. —You study. I have the consortium notebook. Things have official names. The bramble is invasive. It’s written.
—Where.
—In the notebook.
—Who wrote it in the notebook.
Close shot. Lorenzo. A micro-pause. Then he smiles the way one smiles at a daughter who still does not know how the world works.
—Eat, Margherita.
Detail. Tommaso is drawing.
He has drawn a man with a chainsaw and below him, very small, a turtle. He shows it to no one. The turtle has eyes larger than the man’s.
Cut. Exterior, dirt road, afternoon. Handheld, low. The world at the height of a child’s knees.
Tommaso, school backpack on, walks along the ditch. He stops. Bends down. Picks something up from the ground—small dark clusters, dry, left over from last winter. Bramble seeds. He puts them in a sandwich bag he saved from his snack. He starts walking home again.
He says nothing. He tells no one.
Children learn very early that certain rescues must be carried out without witnesses.
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
The nest destroyed this morning held four red-backed shrike eggs. Three were viable. Local population: to be reassessed in the next breeding season. Reassessed is one of the ways adults teach the dead to wait for paperwork.
—
III. MAY. THE HERBICIDE.
Wide shot. Exterior, lower slope, noon. Neutral white light, operating-room light. The shadows have been dismissed.
A twenty-liter blue canister. A backpack sprayer. The high sun erases the short shadows.
Detail. The product label. Total systemic broad-spectrum herbicide. Standard formulation for professional agricultural use. Very small characters, very clean. The word systemic appears twice.
Lorenzo mixes the proportions carefully. He is a man who respects protocols. He doesn’t like improvisation. Improvisation is how things escape the governance of serious men.
He applies it slowly, the way a priest blesses something he has already decided is cursed.
Tracking forward. The thin cloud of product suspended in the May air. The camera moves through the chemical dust as if entering an invisible room.
The smell is barely perceptible. It does not stink. This is one of its worst qualities. Truly dangerous things often learn not to disturb, to enter the world without impact, without scandal, with the almost polite discretion of irreversible decisions; they settle on the grass like a mist of common sense, pass through the breathing of insects, the skin of leaves, the invisible edge of water, and when something finally falls, it is already too late to call it cause.
Detail. A solitary wasp crosses the cloud. It falls to the ground three meters farther on. Five seconds. Legs still moving, then nothing. Lorenzo doesn’t see it. He leaves the frame.
Cut. Flashback. Interior, conference room, a Wednesday in 2014. On the screen, a slide:
STRATEGIC REPOSITIONING 2014 — OPERATING PLAN.
Sixty-two people in twelve weeks. Lorenzo had designed the flow—that was what he had called it, the flow—so that every individual interview seemed, to the person sitting on the other side, like a personal conversation and not part of a design.
In front of the CEO, at the slide, he had said:
—Perimeter clearance. Surgical intervention. Dignity of the person in every email. No expected litigation.
The CEO had nodded with the same slowness with which a good wine comes down to temperature.
No one in that room had asked whether dignity was compatible with a calendar that had already been closed.
Hard cut. Exterior, valley, afternoon.
Lorenzo wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his glove. He smells the product on his skin—not unpleasant, neutral, like the smell of well-managed hospitals.
Cut. Exterior, courtyard, evening. Long orange light. Dead things look smaller when the day is ending.
Tommaso sits on the steps of the house with his phone in his hand. He is not playing. He is looking. In front of him, on the concrete, four motionless wasps.
—Dad.
—Tell me.
—The wasps are dead.
—That’s normal in spring. They wear themselves out.
—There are four. In a line.
Freeze frame. Lorenzo looks. Three seconds. His face makes the shape of concern, but nothing happens behind it.
—It’s been a strange year.
—Has been. Not is?
—Go inside, Tommaso. It’s getting cold.
Cut. Interior, Tommaso’s room, night. Blue moonlight filtered through the shutter. Children’s worlds often begin under blankets, with a small flashlight and an enormous disobedience.
Tommaso is under the covers. He switches on a small flashlight. He opens a notebook with four columns. He has copied it from his father’s. Above the columns, in a child’s block letters:
species / position / action / date.
In the first row, he writes:
Rubus ulmifolius — east ditch — sowing — 04.14.2026
He switches off the flashlight. Sleeps.
He does not dream of a forest. He dreams of a black point under the ash tree. The point opens. Something comes out.
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
Total systemic herbicide. Classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as probably carcinogenic to humans. Documented effects on pollinators: direct contact mortality. The wasps Tommaso counted were founding females. The nests they were beginning will not be built.
—
IV. JUNE. THE CONSORTIUM.
Wide shot. Interior, agricultural consortium office, afternoon. Cold fluorescent, institutional light. The same light found in offices, corridors, waiting rooms: a light that takes no position, and therefore always favors the person who signs.
A metal desk, a pale blue shirt, an empty espresso cup, the photograph of the consortium president pinned to a corkboard wall.
—So, Castelli—says the official. —Phytosanitary license and loan agreement for the mower.
—Correct.
—May I ask why.
—Land maintenance. Fire prevention. Landscape decorum.
Detail. The official nods. They are words he has heard a thousand times and that comfort him every time. Expected words reduce the risk of having to think.
—Good. We need landowners like you. Most people let themselves go. They look like woods, but they are abandonment.
Sign. Stamp. Hand over.
The stamp makes a brief, definitive sound. A small blow, but authorized.
Cut. Exterior, parking lot, late afternoon. Horizontal light, institutional honey.
Lorenzo loads the new mower onto the trailer. For the first time in many years, he feels recognized.
Recognition is a subtle drug: it does not alter the face, it alters the threshold of doubt.
Cut. Flashback. Interior, hotel in Milan, November 2014. Above Lorenzo’s head, a projector displays:
HR ITALIA AWARD — BEST ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE YEAR.
At the microphone:
—The true courage of this profession is knowing when an organization needs to become an organization again.
Detail. Sincere applause. Donatella from HR cries a little, discreetly, behind her glass of prosecco.
Corporate tears, on average, last less than the toast that follows them.
Cut. Interior, house, dinner.
Three plates. Margherita, Tommaso, Lorenzo. The fourth chair is empty—the mother’s place, unnamed in this scene, registered by the reader only later.
The pasta steams in the center of the table. No one takes the bread. From the open window comes the low sound of the June valley: a distant tractor, cicadas still hesitating, a dog barking at an invisible authority, the dry slam of a shutter closing in a nearby house. Silence has already eaten.
—They gave you the big mower—Margherita says.
—Yes.
—You make more noise than before.
—It’s more efficient.
—Where did the barn owl go, the one that used to sleep in the shed.
Freeze frame. Lorenzo. He chews. Doesn’t answer right away.
—It must have moved on.
—It, or you.
Detail. Tommaso. He is watching his father. No expression in the child’s eyes. Only recording.
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
Abandonment, in Italian agricultural law, is the name given to land that is not actively worked. Renaturalization, in landscape ecology, is the name given to the same land. The two disciplines do not speak to each other. One produces authorizations. The other produces consequences.
—
V. JULY. THE HEAT.
Wide shot. Exterior, valley, late afternoon. Crushing, opaque zenith light. The shadows are erased. A valley without shade is a valley without defenses.
Thirty-nine degrees Celsius under the pergola. Lorenzo stops beneath the ash tree he decided to spare in March and drinks from his water bottle.
He thinks: hotter than last year. He attributes it to climate change, which is a broad and courteous name for everyone’s responsibility, and therefore no one’s.
He doesn’t connect the heat to the removal of the hedges. He doesn’t know he has stripped two degrees of evapotranspiration from his valley. He doesn’t know he has altered the local microclimate in the span of a single spring. He doesn’t know that a hedge is not a border but a shade machine, a corridor of moisture, a secret grammar between soil and air; and that when you take it out, you don’t free the view, you let the heat in like a creditor who already knows the way to the kitchen.
Tracking shot. A Hermann’s tortoise crosses the dirt track slowly, toward the gate. Each step is a prehistoric objection to human speed.
Detail. Lorenzo’s face. Tenderness.
He stops. Approaches. Photographs it with his phone. Posts the image to a local Facebook group with the caption: The wonder of our land.
Detail. The post. Forty-seven likes. Three emotional comments. A red heart. A woman writes: “What a spectacle nature is when you take care of it.”
Cut. Flashback. Interior, corporate corridor, a Friday in 2014. Cold light.
A woman, Chiara, had stopped him in the corridor during the last week of the Repositioning. She had cried, briefly.
—Do you know what you’re really doing?
Lorenzo, calm, professional:
—I’m doing my job, Chiara.
Freeze frame. Chiara. She looks at him for a long moment.
—That isn’t what I meant.
Cut. Exterior, porch, evening. Orange light.
Tommaso sits on the steps with an illustrated book about endangered animals. His aunt gave it to him at Christmas. He is reading Testudo hermanni.
—Dad.
—Yes.
—The tortoise you photographed is protected.
—I know.
—Then why are you cutting the blackthorn.
—Blackthorn is something else.
—It says here they eat blackthorn.
Detail. The book. The page about the tortoise. Lower margin: Habitat: scrubland, meadow, blackberry and blackthorn hedges.
Freeze frame. Lorenzo. Five seconds.
—Tommaso, go brush your teeth.
Cut. Interior, Tommaso’s room, night. Blue moonlight.
He opens the four-column notebook. Adds three rows:
Prunus spinosa — south margin — sowing — 07.19.2026
Sambucus nigra — east ditch — sowing — 07.19.2026
Cornus sanguinea — west ditch — sowing — 07.19.2026
Beneath the flashlight he keeps three sandwich bags, labeled in his child’s handwriting:
BRAMBLE / BLACKTHORN / ELDER.
The handwriting is crooked. The strategy is not.
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
The Hermann’s tortoise needs an environmental mosaic: scrubland, meadow, hedges. The removal of hedges and brambles destroys its niche within two hundred meters. Local extinction predicted within eighteen months.
—
VI. SEPTEMBER. THE WORD.
Wide shot. Exterior, valley gate, morning. Amber light, complicit. Whenever the light is too beautiful, someone is preparing a comfortable version of the facts.
A journalist from the Corriere Adriatico. Andrea, thirty, notebook, recorder. He has come to do a piece on the guardians of the Marche landscape.
They walk along the cleaned valley. September has given the fields that precise, deceptive light that makes even mistakes look noble: the stubble shines low, the ditch smells of wild mint and old water, and in the background the Marche hills fold into one another with a sweetness so perfect it seems innocent. But the sweetness of a landscape, here, absolves no one.
Tracking. The two men walking. Lorenzo shows him the difference between a 2023 photo on his phone—the wild woodland—and the valley now—clean, orderly, readable.
He likes the word readable. He doesn’t say it aloud, but he thinks it. A readable valley does not pose too many interpretations.
—How would you define your work?
Lorenzo stops. Thinks for a moment.
Detail. Lorenzo. The camera lingers half a second longer than necessary.
He is about to say maintenance. He is about to say care.
—Bonifica.
Freeze frame. Andrea. He notes it down. He does not pause on the word.
This is the true efficiency of dangerous words: they pass inspection like luggage with no metal inside.
The article appears the following Tuesday. Headline: The Guardian of the Valley: Bonifica and Order on Two Hectares in the Marche. Lorenzo makes a photocopy and places it in his recognition folder, beside the plaque from the HR Italia Award 2014.
Cut. Interior, house, evening.
Margherita comes home from university. Sets down her bag. Sees the article open on the table. Reads it standing up.
—Bonifica.
—Yes.
—Do you know what that word meant under Fascism, Dad.
—Margherita, it’s an agricultural term.
—It’s also an agricultural term.
—It’s an agricultural term, period.
Detail. Margherita. Three seconds. She has a fold at the corner of her mouth that her father, in twenty years of performance reviews, has learned to recognize in people who are about to leave. But he doesn’t recognize it on his daughter.
—All right, Dad.
She leaves the kitchen.
Detail. Tommaso at the table. He is watching. He says nothing.
[No flashback here. Here the reader does the flashback.]
TAXONOMIC NOTE.
Bonifica—feminine noun, from Latin bonificare.
Meaning 1, agricultural: reclamation of unproductive land.
Meaning 2, historical: in the policies of Italy’s Fascist regime, the integral transformation of territory through drainage, deforestation, displacement, and population replacement.
Meaning 3, military and police, twentieth-century Europe: clearing operations and removal of a presence deemed undesirable from a perimeter.
Meaning 4, organizational, Italian HR jargon after 2010: a structured process of removing personnel deemed non-aligned.
The four meanings do not speak to one another. They share the same root.
—
VII. NOVEMBER. THE ORDERED VALLEY.
Wide shot. Exterior, valley, sunset. Cold copper light. Oblique, sharp, final. The day looks like a blade someone has left resting on the horizon.
In front of Lorenzo, the valley.
The November sky hangs low, pewter-colored. The surrounding fields have already lost their gold; what remains is brown, gray, spent green, bent under the first damp of evening. The ditch sends up a cold breath. Distant houses light a window at a time, as if every family were confessing its own existence with caution. Everything seems composed, withdrawn, pacified; precisely for that reason, everything is more terrible.
There is no bramble now. No blackthorn. No dogwood, no ailanthus, no nettle. No fireflies. No shrikes. No Hermann’s tortoise. No wild bees, which haven’t nested here for two springs.
There is the lawn. There is the order. There is the view.
A view, sometimes, is only the elegant name for something that no longer prevents the gaze from giving orders; it is land made obedient to the eye, complexity shaved down until it becomes panorama, the silence of insects mistaken for peace by someone who has never learned to tell a truce from a surrender.
Slow lateral tracking. Lorenzo leans against the surviving ash tree—the only witness—and looks at his work.
Freeze frame. Eight seconds.
For a moment he remembers Chiara in the corridor in 2014, telling him that isn’t what I meant, and now, before the ordered valley, it crosses his mind that perhaps Chiara had meant this—the valley—but the thought slides away the way a sheet of paper slides off a tidy stack. He doesn’t hold onto it.
Lorenzo speaks aloud, to himself, with the same satisfied tone with which, in November 2014, he had closed the Strategic Repositioning:
—Finally it’s become a valley again.
Freeze frame. The ash tree. It does not answer. It is a tree. It is alone.
Cut. Exterior, house porch, same sunset. Human lens—for the first time in the whole film. The camera is still, at Tommaso’s eye level. For the first time it is not on Lorenzo’s side.
Tommaso stands beside the pillar. He is eleven years old. He has been there the whole time, listening to his father speak to the valley. In his hands, hidden behind his back, a sandwich bag full of bramble seeds.
Detail. Tommaso. Real time.
In a low voice, not to his father, not to anyone in particular, while the light behind him turns copper:
—You said the bramble was infiltrated.
—You said the locust was opportunistic.
—You said the ailanthus was alien.
—You said the nettle was low priority.
—You said the blackthorn was invasive.
—You once said, on the phone in your study, that Federico at the office was predictable in counterattack.
—You said the sixty-two people in 2014 were perimeter clearance.
—They are the same words, Dad.
—In a different order, but they are the same words.
Freeze frame. Tommaso. Five seconds. The boy does not have the face of a hero. He has the face of someone who has understood too soon how adults speak when they want to destroy something without feeling like destroyers.
Softer, almost to himself:
—Tomorrow at five I’ll sow thirty bramble seeds under the ash tree. Then forty blackthorn seeds along the east ditch. Then elder and dogwood at the south margin. I have a notebook too.
—You won’t know.
—The valley will never have become a valley again.
—It is becoming one again, Dad.
—But not because of you.
Freeze frame. Ten seconds.
Cut. The ash tree. Behind Lorenzo. The light drops by one degree.
Fade to white.
FINAL TAXONOMIC NOTE.
The biodiversity of a two-hectare Marche valley, in a state of ecological mosaic, oscillates between one hundred eighty and two hundred forty documented species. The biodiversity of this valley, as of November 30, 2026: seventeen. Predicted biodiversity as of November 30, 2027, according to the clandestine seeding plan currently underway (author: T. Castelli, eleven years old, four-column notebook): thirty-four, and rising.
—
PROJECT CLOSURE REPORT
PROJECT: BONIFICA VALLE CASTELLI 2026
Project Owner: L. Castelli
Period: March – November 2026
| Indicator | Target | Actual |
| Area cleared (ha) | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| Invasive species removed | 5 | 5 |
| Reduction in spontaneous vegetation | 95% | 97% |
| Institutional recognitions | 0 | 1 |
| Local press articles | 0 | 1 |
| Biodiversity reduction | n/a | -87% |
| Locally extinct protected species | n/a | 3 |
| Increase in average valley temperature | n/a | +1.8°C |
LESSONS LEARNED.
1. Taxonomic nomenclature is a powerful management tool: renaming a species invasive frees operational action from the perception of any moral constraint around protection.
2. The bonifica framework proves transferable between organizational and ecological contexts without significant loss of effectiveness.
3. The principal project risk is minor domestic witnesses.
The model is replicable.
L. Castelli, November 30, 2026.
—
—second document, unfiled—
—
VALLEY REOPENING SHEET
Tommaso Castelli’s notebook. Page found under the mattress.
| Species | Position | Action | When |
| Bramble | under the ash tree | sow | first useful dawn |
| Blackthorn | east ditch | sow | after rain |
| Elder | south margin | sow | when no one is looking |
| Dogwood | Bertozzi boundary | sow | before the heat |
| Nettle | near the well | leave alone | always |
T. Castelli, age eleven.
Mini-interview with Gabriele Micozzi
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
GM: One of the moments that shaped me as a writer was not dramatic. No revelation, no thunder. It was the first time I understood that language can make violence feel reasonable.
For years I have worked inside organizations: companies, boards, decision-making rooms, places where language becomes a tool before it becomes a thought. I have heard human beings called resources, resistance, low performers, misaligned profiles, perimeter problems. Nobody thought they were being cruel. That was the problem. Procedure had already washed the blood off the sentence.
Later I began to hear the same mechanism elsewhere: in ecology, in politics, in agriculture, in family systems. A plant becomes invasive. A person becomes non-aligned. A valley becomes abandoned. A memory becomes inconvenient. Once the name changes, the action becomes easier.
That continues to shape me. I write from the suspicion that the monster often appears first as vocabulary. Before destruction comes classification. Before removal comes a clean word.
My fiction begins there: at the exact point where a sentence becomes permission.
HFR: What are you reading?
GM: I read as if I were trying to keep several nervous systems alive at the same time.
I return often to Leopardi, especially L’Infinito, because he understood something modern systems have forgotten: a hedge is not only an obstruction. It is also a threshold. It prevents the eye from possessing everything, and precisely because it interrupts the view, it allows the infinite to begin.
I keep close to Dino Buzzati, who knew how to place metaphysical terror inside ordinary rooms — a desk, a corridor, a fortress where nothing arrives. And to Emmanuel Carrère, for his surgical way of standing dangerously close to truth without pretending to own it.
These writers, across different centuries and registers, share something that interests me deeply: they do not separate ethics from form. They understand that a sentence is never just a sentence. It can console, accuse, hide, confess, save, or clear the ground before someone comes with a machine.
I am drawn to writers who treat form as a moral instrument. The rest follows.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Bonifica / Clearance”?
GM: “Bonifica / Clearance” began with a word.
In Italian, bonifica can mean agricultural reclamation: making land productive, ordered, clean. But the word also carries historical, political, military, and bureaucratic shadows. It can suggest drainage, clearing, removal, normalization, purification. It is a word that looks practical and behaves ideologically.
I wanted to write a story in which that word slowly reveals its family tree.
There is also a hidden conversation with Leopardi’s L’Infinito. In that poem, the hedge does not block the view: it creates the infinite. It gives the imagination something to cross. Lorenzo, the protagonist, does the opposite. He removes hedges, brambles, thorns, shade, resistance. He thinks he is opening the landscape. In fact, he is making it smaller.
He believes he is restoring a valley. He cuts brambles, uses herbicide, obtains permits, receives public recognition. But the story gradually shows that his ecological actions repeat an older pattern from his corporate life: classifying what resists as invasive, what does not align as expendable, what interrupts the view as a problem to be cleared.
What prompted the piece was rage, probably. But also tenderness. The tenderness belongs to Tommaso, the child who understands that repair often begins quietly, before dawn, with seeds hidden in a sandwich bag.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
GM: I am working on a collection of literary dark fiction titled PERSI — Lost: Everyday Demons. The central question is: where does the human being disappear when the system works perfectly?
The stories are about ordinary systems that become monstrous not because they fail, but because they succeed too completely: families, companies, rituals, platforms, performance cultures, medical protocols. I am interested in horror without thunder. Horror with good formatting. Horror that arrives in a PDF, a dashboard, a polite email.
I am also writing Cronache dell’Antropocene, an unpublished poetry collection on environment, climate grief, extinction, and the ethical collapse of language in the age of catastrophe. Many of these poems are calligrams: thermometers, wounds, maps, lungs, rivers—small graphic bodies made of words. I want the poem not only to say the crisis, but to become its shape.
Across both projects I work with a form I call FilmBook: a book that can be read as narrative, seen as cinema, heard as theatre, and inhabited as a living archive. It is one possible body of a larger idea I call literary biodiversity.
For me these projects are not separate. They are different organs of the same animal.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
GM: The future will be decided by the words we allow to sound harmless.
We are surrounded by words that have been disinfected. Optimization. Security. Alignment. Transition. Reclamation. Clearance. They enter public life wearing gloves. They do not shout. They do not look violent. They are invited into meetings, policies, agricultural plans, environmental strategies. Then, quietly, they authorize disappearance.
A hedge disappears because it is disorder. A worker disappears because he is misaligned. A dialect disappears because it is not useful.
This is why form matters. I do not believe form is aesthetic furniture. Form is ethics. If power speaks through reports, permits, categories, and procedures, then literature must enter those forms and contaminate them from inside.
I believe in literary biodiversity as a political and ecological necessity. Monocultures are efficient until the first disease arrives. Then they collapse. The same is true of fields, companies, languages, families, and books. Biodiversity on the page is not decoration. It is the right of literature to remain alive, impure, contradictory, fertile.
I want to keep writing forms that are not obedient. Forms with mud, teeth, roots, and unresolved weather.
I am fanatical about this: not everything that grows without permission is a threat.
Sometimes it is the future trying to come back.
Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian writer whose work moves between dark fiction, poetry, humor, and essays on language, power, and social systems. His English-language work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3Elements Review, ONE ART, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Literary Hatchet, and Kaidankai Podcast. He writes from Italy.
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