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emerge as salient characteristics of Montale’s postmodern work and persona. This brings Gazzola to conclude that “[t]he real proof that Montale conforms to his postmodern times lies in the very existence of Satura and of subsequent books” (p. 201). In other words: a postmodernist must have been a modernist first. The monograph ends with an “Epilogue” in a Heideggerian key: “Art – and specifically the art of writing,“ Gazzola notes, “can serve as an antidote to the accelerating rhythm of collective life, for the production of literature, as Montale understands it, is capable of controlling time” (p. 204). While for such poets as Petrarch and Leopardi writing was the vehicle that ensured the immortality of the “I,” for the modernistMontale writing was the train bound for home, a journey back to the primal landscape of Liguria and to a past that no longer exists. Montale, for Gazzola, “was ahead of, or perhaps behind, the times” (p. 186). Yet, in our reading, Montale, the Modernist proposes a broader claim: that Montale, indeed, was a man quite of his times, albeit not obviously so. He was a symbolist during Symbolism, a modernist with the Modernists, and finally a postmodernist in Postmodernity. A reading of Montale’s work from one point of view, such as Pasolini’s, at a single given time in history, say the 1960s, does not do justice to this man who had seen and survived two world wars, the escalation of the capitalist and the socialist systems, the disrepute of the man of letters and of the intellectual in Italian society (p. 165), and, finally, the advent of mass culture, consumerism, and the mechanization of life. Montale was not behind or ahead of his times: he was and is timeless, a Janus among the poets.