A journey in the river-bed looking for memories

A beautiful journey in the river bed of Adige, in Zevio (Verona). For thirty years. The poet Luigi Lineri has been making it when, for long periods, the river dries up because of an artificial barrage. There’s a symphony raising from stones and pebbles, smooth and transformed by the flowing river water, with secret powers and ever unforesseable ways.
The journey fascinates and charms Lineri; he can hear an ancestral recall, not limited and closed, sometimes malicious and sensual, light and deep, giuding him to tormenting and joyful researches. He listens to its mythical and human accents and its simplicity rich in echoes. Fragments have vital aspects and reveal a pure, living and current lyric; they have slightly sketched lines, classical words, near to our hearts.
And Lineri walks and comes back and starts again without stopping. Those stones, those shapes, in their sourness, enchant him; he turns and turns them in his hands, caresses and kisses them in order to reach a fantastic world. It’s not a silent or empty world; Lineri finds a singing suprem illusion in it, which by a miracle stands up after all other illusions have been destroyed.
Lineri believes the “morfo” of those stones are atavic votive offerings rejected by a mythological offended and angry god. And he perceives a menace, a warning to society to make it find again good sense and right balance which are reflected in the stones he’s picking up.
For decades he has studies the enigmatic stone evidence picked up near Adige river. He has gathered and drawn them according to their dimension, shape and direction.
He has enjoyed the richness of motives and images as if they were one of his just created dialectal poems, able to make evoked things live in the light of a survived world. He has arranged those shapes as letters or notes of a huge chapter, of an ancient refound symphony. “To the words – Luigi Lineri says – I preferred the silences of “giaroni” (screes). To written words I preferred the image. To personal opinions the all together vision”.
Every stone is connected with the others. Every panel leads to the others.
A pilgrimage bringing us to the source. And the poet’s soul once again can’t deprive itself of its dreams and idols; it embraces the “wrinkled reality”, is struck by the hard existence, but nevertheless it can perceive the tale in it, the myth in the coloured cosmical appearances, in the different faces of life, and the prickly shiver in the menaced disgregation as well.
The volume “Adige, a river full of memories” is splendidly illustrated by beautiful pictures, divided into seventeen groups: from human face to male symbol, fish head, sheep head, dog head, equid head, heavy jaw, great mother, female symbol, pig head, bovine head, indefinite shapes, superimposed shapes, “two-snouts snout”, tools.
Luigi Lineri moves up in his journey on Adige bed in the stretch of the native land with intelligent curiosity. He leaves emotions in their seductive indeterminateness and overbearingly inhales the research with an absolute signification that has brought for years its demands. And the stones grow into image signs, cosmical symbols, created by the Almighty.
The ancestral gift, offered by the researcher-poet opens to light and expresses itself in his words with an unknown voice, like a “buried” voice singing in him.