Cristina Campo is a cult figure, misunderstood and elected, in our twentieth century. She is cyclically rediscovered and relaunched, but in the end she is consigned to a small niche, however prestigious. But this is the dimension that Vittoria Guerrini herself (this is, in fact, her birth name) had arranged, leaving us only a discrete number of poetic texts or essays - she who loved to frequent literature in a direct, intimate way, particularly through translation or the exchange of letters with many interlocutors. On the contrary, she felt the need to protect this sacred enclosure with extreme rigour, and when she had to break it, she used various pseudonyms, in order to preserve the solitude and concentration that were essential to her.
Giorgio Anelli would have done anything to be included among Cristina's interlocutors. And, in fact, he tried to cheat time and dialogue with her, in particular through a slim and intense little book published by Ladolfi editore: Cristina Campo. Catabasis in destiny.
Anelli is not a critic nor does he claim to wield the weapons of philology. Anelli converses with his favourite authors like a faithful lover, he lives devoted to his literary ghosts in a naive and absolute way, shameless and in love.
Cristina's crystalline beauty, who had already bewitched so many in her lifetime, would have liked this timeless declaration of love.
Who is the poet? He who has style. And style has the perfection of a flower; as if to say that this Orphic brother who is the poet possesses an unattainable gaze. The gaze of one who knows how to penetrate the beauty of a falling star, or to observe unashamedly and uninterruptedly clouds or lakes, in all their overwhelming presence in the indefinite arc of time.
Who can claim to have really seen the face of a poet? He himself is invisible. It is that of a ghost, as unforgivable as every line of his most intimate book.
(Giorgio Anelli, Cristina Campo. Catabasi nel destino, Ladolfi editore 2021, p. 54