Un viaggio chiamato amore (2002)

The film tells the troubled love story between the writer Sibilla Aleramo and the poet Dino Campana, mainly through their letters. In 1916, the poet Sibilla receives letters and verses from Dino Campana, an unconventional poet regarded as mentally unstable in Florence’s literary circles. Nevertheless, she is fascinated by him and goes to visit him in his village in the Tuscan Apennines, where he is known as “the madman”; Sibilla falls in love with him immediately. After moving into an isolated villa, the two write poetry together. The film alternates between present-day and past sequences, with various flashbacks alluding to Sibilla’s painful childhood, her mentally unstable mother, and Ulderico, her subordinate, who harassed her for several weeks, eventually sexually assaulting her and taking advantage of her mental state. The idyll between Sibilla and Dino begins to unravel when she sees the mental illness taking hold of the poet, who is constantly prone to mood swings and outbursts against the Florentine intellectual elite, whom Campana accuses of doing everything they can to obstruct his literary rise. Dino even insults Sibilla over her friendships with Papini, Soffici, Prezzolini, and other intellectuals, reminding her how Soffici lost the manuscript of his Canti Orfici, which Campana had sent him for his opinion. After a quarrel, being committed to an asylum and then released, Dino returns to seek Sibilla and is welcomed into her villa. But soon his illness returns, and the young man runs away from the house after a violent argument. The film ends with an intertitle explaining that the idyll between the two poets ended in 1918, when Campana was admitted to the asylum at Villa Castelpulci, where he remained until his death in 1932.