Verdant Narratives: The Botanical Tapestry of Italian Cinema and Literature offers a timely, interdisciplinary examination of botanical agency as a symbolic and aesthetic force in Italian literature and Italian cinema. This work critiques the traditional notion of plants as merely sessile and passive, and instead explores the significant role of botanical agency in symbolic, aesthetic, and psycho-cultural Italian traditions. Structured in a dipartite manner, the first part comprises two sections – The Male Muse and The Female Muse that investigate and interpret the employment of vegetal metaphors in Italian literature, and the second part explores botanical symbolism in Italian fairy tales, offering philosophical and psychological interpretations of plant-related narratives. The book weaves together literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy to reveal the dynamic agency of plants in Italian cultural imagination.

Barbara Gabriella Renzi is a lecturer in general psychology, a clinical psychologist specialized in CBT and integrative therapy, and has dual doctorates in philosophy and psychology.