This first English edition of To The South of Things in a digital format follows the bilingual edition of Pasqualino Bongiovanni’s collection published by the Institute of Italian Studies at Lakehead University, Canada in 2013.Bongiovanni’s collection carries a personal note from Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008), one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. The collection was also translated into Spanish by the Argentinean scholar José M. Carcione and published with the title Al Sur de las Cosas by Artnovela in Buenos Aires in 2012.

Bongiovanni has received many commendations for these editions all over the world. With his socially engaged poetry and his high regard for the Italian South, he has been compared to some of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century; poets such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Rocco Scotellaro, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Franco Costabile.His poems also achieve a wider universal breath, some scholars have drawn parallels between Bongiovanni and several important Argentinean poets like Luis Franco and Atahualpa Yupanqui, who sang of the South American continent with great, socially engaged passion. His poetic originality springs from his clear and precise style, always capable of pondering each word and each image in order to create a strong connection between signifier and signified in a synthesis where the words seem to embody the very concepts they express, with no distinction between “word” and “thing”.