Andrea Gibellini (1965) works in a bookshop in his birthplace Sassuolo, where he still lives – a low-lying industrial town surrounded by hills situated halfway between Modena and Bologna. That landscape, with its permanent conflict between hardly charming industrial areas and the Arcadian setting is important for his emotional life and plays a regular role in his poetry. Beacons for him in the Italian poetic landscape are Attilio Bertolucci (the epos of his family before and during the war in the mountainous countryside above Parma) and Vittorio Sereni (the stylisation in verse of industrial Milan), along with Leopardi (the doomed pastoral of the 19th century) and Montale (modern bourgeois life with a lyrical interpretation). He is also interested in such writers as T.S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden and Seamus Heaney.