The Writer and the City

If one admits that a writer’s work can be influenced by the environment in which it is produced, by the elements of the surrounding scenery, then one has to admit that Turin is the ideal city in which to be a writer. I do not understand how one could manage to write in one of those cities where images of the present are so overwhelming and powerful that they leave the writer no margin of space or silence. Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the writer towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

[Unpublished note on Turin from 1960.]