Published by Maney Publishing (c) American Association for Italian Studies © American Association for Italian Studies 2012 DOI 10.1179/0161-462211Z.0000000002 italian culture, Vol. xxx No. 1, March, 2012, 38–50 The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema Giorgio Bertellini University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA The essay discusses contemporary Italian filmmakers’ sustained interest in the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony. Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodra- mas, Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto Saviano and Salvatore Settis. keywords Contemporary Italian cinema, Italian landscape, space, environ- ment, tutela del paesaggio, Protezione civile, Mario Martone, Luca Guadagnino, Sabina Guzzanti The Italian city, ancient or modern, is prodigiously photogenic. André Bazin, 1948 (Bazin, 1967: 28) In recent years Italian cinema seems to have developed a special interest for the nar- ratives and characters of migration. In early September 2011, from their observation post of the Venice Film Festival, Jacques Mandelbaum and Philippe Ridet (2011) of Le Monde referred to this production trend in Italian cinema as something akin to a genre in and of itself (un genre en soi). This pronouncement was made public even before Emanuele Crialese’s travel drama, Terraferma, received the Jury Award at the Lido. While discussing the festival presentations of Francesco Patierno’s Cose dell’altro mondo, Barbara Cupisti’s Storie di schiavitù, and Ermanno Olmi’s Villaggio di cartone, Mandelbaum and Ridet explained their assessment in terms of poetic justice: given that geopolitically Italy has been one of the European countries most exposed to the phenomenon of migration, its national film productions have responded accordingly. 1 As a result, the wealth of recent films and the amount of critical atten- tion to film works on migration narratives and characters, particularly from North Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, was somewhat unsurprising. 2