“Fra’ mondi innumerabili.” Proto-fantascienza italiana dei secoli XVIII e XIX.

What better line to conjure images of distant worlds and speculative realities than “fra’ mondi innumerabili”? Giacomo Leopardi expresses this sentiment in his canto “Alla sua donna” (canto 18), as he yearns for a beloved who has transcended earthly suffering. He imagines her among the limitless worlds that populate the universe, warmed by a sun more radiant and distant than our own while breathing the cleaner air of a different sky: “O s'altra terra ne’ superni giri / Fra’ mondi innumerabili t'accoglie, / E più vaga del Sol prossima stella / T'irraggia, e più benigno etere spiri” (“or if you are received in another earth, / in the highest circling, among / the innumerable worlds, and a star / closer and brighter than the sun / illuminates you, who breathe a purer air”; Leopardi, lines 50–53; trans. by A. S. Kline). Francesca Savoia evokes this fitting imagery from Leopardi's poem to introduce a collection of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian proto-science fiction, a contested term for a genre that often overlaps with others within speculative fiction, especially during this historical period.This carefully curated volume, born of a 2022 international conference panel held in Bologna (6), features a collective narrative about the evolution of speculative imagination in Italy. Its eight chapters, each written by a different contributor, are organized in chronological order, beginning with essays on such eighteenth-century writers as Zaccaria Seriman, Antonio Conti, Carlo Goldoni, Saverio Bettinelli, and Giacomo Casanova, then moving on to Demetrio Emilio Diamilla-Müller and Francesco Viganò from the nineteenth century. The range of authors, styles, and genres offers a wide breadth of perspectives on how proto-science/speculative fiction intersects with other disciplines, creating historical, philosophical, scientific, and political studies.As a whole, the collection argues that Italian writers from the Enlightenment to the Risorgimento period experimented with many of what would later constitute science fiction tropes long before the genre was codified. Francesca Savoia, Sabrina Ferri, and William Spaggiari analyze themes of exploration and alternative worlds, either through lunar adventures in the works of Seriman, Goldoni, and Bettinelli or in a subterranean hollow-Earth utopia in Casanova's Icosameron. Anna Maria Salvadè and Gianmarco Gaspari explore proto-technoscience with ruminations on early literary depictions of flight and space travel in eighteenth-century poetry or allegorical journeys through the cosmos in Conti's Globo di Venere respectively. Sabrina Ferri, Roberto Risso, and Alberto Iozzia all consider the themes of utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse, whether through the lens of an enlightened egalitarian society in Casanova's work, the destruction and regeneration of the earth in Diamilla-Müller's Della fine del mondo, or speculative musings on Italy's political futures in the wake of the Risorgimento in the fantapolitica subgenre. This last demonstrates how speculative fiction served as a vehicle for political commentary and social critique during Italy's transformation into a nation-state, similarly echoed in Franco Arato's analysis of Viganò’s Masonic-infused cosmic journey Viaggio nell'universo.Risso's analysis of Diamilla-Müller's Della fine del mondo proves particularly incisive, demonstrating the relevance of speculative fiction on the “real world.” Risso writes that Diamilla-Müller references climate change as the cause of Earth's demise, that it will die a “natural” death caused by heat at the hands of mankind (142–43). The author almost predicts that this will become an enormous problem a hundred years in the future from the time of his writing (i.e., the 1970s): “Se negli anni Settanta del Novecento, durante le crisi petrolifere ci si fosse ricordati di questo piccolo libro molti apocalittici avrebbero gridato alla profezia” (“If in the 1970s, during the oil crises, this little book had been remembered, many doomsayers would have cried out prophecy”; 143; my trans.). This evokes the main point of this book, in a way. These rediscovered works should hold a more prominent place, not just in the history of science/speculative fiction alongside the more globally recognized works in French and English, but also to demonstrate the true impact of the genre on the real world (in this case, a warning—albeit unheeded—for the future).This collection brings attention to these texts of Italian proto-science/speculative fiction, which were often overshadowed by Anglo-French works of the same eras. Although connections to more widely studied authors could have clarified how the Italian tradition parallels, diverges from, or anticipates global developments in speculative fiction, the contributors of this collection effectively argue that the works they analyze deserve a place among Europe's broader literary innovations of these centuries. This collection proves particularly useful for scholars of science/speculative fiction and its connected disciplines, contributing to the broader scholarship on the genre's origins and expanding its roots beyond Anglo-American narratives. The reach remains limited to Italophones, however; to suit the action to the word—namely, contextualizing the overlooked texts of Italian proto-science/speculative fiction narrative; a translation of this collection would be advantageous.