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first masterpieces was finally sold in 1954 and Montale was even reluctant to travel through the area by train. Italo Calvino, who grew up on the opposite side of the Italian Riviera, in the town of Sanremo, also refused to return to the places where he had grown up. And yet, in both authors, the landscape of Liguria continued to be present, often in disguised, allegorized forms. As Montale writes in the above-mentioned poem, progress is not the devastating storm that Walter Benjamin envisioned in one of his Theses on the Philosophy of History: it leaves behind tunnels, hiding places, crypts, manholes. These are the places where memory continues to nurture the ghosts that poetry may bring back to life. In the Epilogue of his elegantly written and meticulously researched book, Gazzola, a native of Genoa like his beloved poet, returns to the place where he had begun: Janus’ head, the ambivalent emblem of Genoa, god of beginnings and ends, departures and arrivals, gates and thresholds, a place he left behind a long time ago but continues to carry within, as Montale knew too well: