Beginning with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s prophetic allegory of the disappearance of fireflies due to pollution, this chapter traces the ecological and sensory consequences of Italy’s postwar modernization. Reading Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Cecilia Mangini alongside propaganda for Taranto’s steelworks, it examines how the aesthetics of Italian cinema contested the economic miracle’s re-education of the senses. Filmmakers and artists are approached as ethnographic guides: the chapter attends to Mangini’s 1960 film on ritual mourning and her return to Puglia amid environmental struggles, as well as to Alessandra Guttagliere’s reworking of her 2012 photographs of children swimming in toxic waters. It develops “flickering” as a mode of reading the disjunctive temporality of poisonous images, which haunt the present as prophetic inscriptions, spectral returns, and memories of impossible futures. Through dark re-enchantments, these images mourn vanished worlds and reactivate the past in the present, rendering perceptible forms of life endangered by industrial toxicity.

This chapter interrogates the archives of Ernesto de Martino’s 1959 study of tarantismo, a possession ritual in Puglia. It reads photographs, drawings, and field notes as inscriptions whose afterlives invite a rereading of his work amid contemporary ecological crisis. Attending to the archive’s spectrality, the chapter traces feminine forms of knowledge within the history of anthropology—corporeal techniques that articulate suffering through therapeutic yet poisonous bonds between women and tarantulas. De Martino’s “crisis of presence” is analyzed as a crisis of embodiment disclosed through spaesamento, the unsettling of landscape, and appaesamento, the fragile work of reconstituting a relation to the environment. Bringing de Martino’s writings on the apocalypse into contact with contemporary toxicity, the chapter unearths a prefigurative anthropology of environmental destruction attentive to disturbances in the material coordinates of inhabitable worlds. It thereby reorients ritual anthropology toward the protracted temporalities of crisis and the everyday work of inhabiting toxicity.

When a scorpion falls onto a letter sent by Michela Margiotta—one of Puglia’s possessed women—to anthropologist-photographer Annabella Rossi, the ritual of tarantismo enters the material scene and nervous rhythms of epistolary writing. Through a feminist rereading of Ernesto de Martino’s archives, the chapter traces writing as a performance that carries poison and possession beyond ritual and fieldwork encounters into the ongoingness of everyday life. Focusing on the challenges of translating Anna’s letters, the chapter attends to their unpunctuated flow and rhythms of interruption; it approaches translation as an ethical and political practice grounded in attentiveness to what resists translation. Writing emerges as a pharmakon, poison and remedy, channeling voices from elsewhere into material form, while the letters’ defiance of easy readability unsettles the desires to know and narrate animating the ethnographic encounter. Translation becomes a practice of accompaniment that preserves opacity while opening intermittent forms of selfhood and relation.

This chapter draws on dialogues with Taranto artist Isabella Mongelli to explore aesthetics and the affective life of toxicity. It centers on tristezza siderurgica, the “sadness of steel,” an expression akin to solastalgia elaborated through Mongelli’s work as a poisonous affect that names the estrangement and the noncathartic ongoingness of life in the late-industrial city. Moving across photography, performance, and a glossary of words and gestures, it shows how artistic practice renders slow violence perceptible in everyday life. Mongelli’s photographic estrangement creates distance from chemical embodiment while gathering traces of what she calls Taranto’s “pockets of unencoded reality”; her performances return these images to the body, locating a gendered politics of perception in the realm of social reproduction. Through stare, which is an idiom of staying, and inherited practices of irony and bricolage, artistic practice becomes a mode of inhabiting a poisoned world while momentarily suspending the sadness of steel.

Moving across nocturnal photographs, workers’ testimonies, unburials, and prophetic dreams, this ethnography enters Taranto’s contaminated cemetery, where gravediggers’ photographs reveal ore dust from the neighboring steel factory. Photography turns dust into a material witness to toxicity, suspended between aesthetic apparition and forensic evidence. The chapter explores how death and finitude are experienced as forms of ecological violence and traces how contamination blurs the boundaries between factory, city, and cemetery, between the living and the dead, and between the latency of slow violence and the eventfulness of catastrophe. It centers on the 2019 decontamination (bonifica), whose promise of purification required the unburial of children’s remains and forced families into renewed labors of mourning. Read through the spectral temporality of the “future anterior,” the cemetery’s images and the dreams of its workers and mourners acquire their prophetic force belatedly, linking the slow catastrophe of pollution to experiences of bodily exposure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This narration-driven chapter enters the everyday presence of cancer in Taranto through the wig, an uncanny prosthesis poised between aesthetics and abjection, concealment and exposure, life and death. Following the wig seller Andrea delle Parrucche (Andrea of Wigs), it traces how this object mediates gendered experiences of illness and chemical embodiment, offering relief as women negotiate appearance and the visibility of illness. The chapter turns to Audre Lorde’s critique of cosmetic normalcy and approaches concealment through the ethics of everyday negotiation with toxicity’s ongoingness. Andrea’s work exhibits a paradox of care: his livelihood depends upon the illnesses to which he responds through humor, play, and attentive accompaniment. His renaming of parrucca (“wig”) as a “hair bonnet” reveals plasticity across language, material form, and subjectivity. Andrea’s inheritance of his parents’ salon becomes a toxic inheritance, wherein the wig registers the suspended temporality of recovery and the uneventful textures of environmental crisis.

Moving across psychoanalytic conversations, Family Constellation Therapy, near-death dreams, and accounts of cancer patients, this chapter examines toxic inheritance as a poisonous gift transmitted across generations. At its center is sanare, a verb meaning to heal, purify, remediate, and repay a debt. By tracing how intergenerational relations are shaped by the troubling transmission of industrial labor, political commitments, illness, and care, the chapter places social reproduction within toxicity’s delayed chemical time. Daniela’s account of holding her dying father’s hand and later developing cancer shows how material inheritance enters psychic life through incorporation and embodiment: the metaphor of receiving a parent’s legacy becomes real in a bodily sense. Through demetaphorization and failed mourning, poison appears as both substance and relation, entering bodies, landscapes, and kinship lines. Healing emerges as the ambivalent work of loosening inherited obligations while recovering forms of continuity, belonging, and corporeal relation to a sick earth.