Massimiliano Corteselli

“And thus, in me one sees the law of counter-penalty,” writes Massimiliano Cortesellli in the introduction to Contrapasso. The phrase comes from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, which starts with the author taking a journey through hell with the Roman poet Virgil, meeting the deceased. These people are being punished according to their sins, either in a way that resembles this sin or contrasts with it, in a process known as ‘contrapasso’. For Corteselli, climate change is meting out a similar punishment in the Mediterranean, transforming an area once known for its fertility into a desert. Many of the wildfires in this region are actually manmade disasters, he adds, set as vengeance, or to access government funding, or even to ensure work for firefighters; it’s often hard to know, because it’s in the nature of such fires that their causes are obscure. For Corteselli, though, tracing cause and effect has become essential if humans are to take responsibility for the Anthropocene.