Spoken Stories: Poets of Rapallo by William Wall

This time commissioned authors were prompted to consider the theme of The State of Us and make their own of it in a new story.

In Poets of Rappallo, a retired teacher is navigating recent widowhood. He is in Italy for the first time, a place he has always wanted to visit, but never thought he would do so alone. For Wall, the relationship between the past and the present never seemed so fraught as it is now in Italy, with political descendants of Mussolini’s fascists in power, and memories of the poet Ezra Pound who lived in Rapallo and became a devoted follower of Il Duce.