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In the last decade in Italy, filmmakers and writers have been expressing, with increasing urgency, strong concerns about the environment while also attempting to raise awareness about the consequences of human manipulation of the natural world, the complicity of industry, government, and organized crime in illegal disposal of toxic waste, and the effects of economic and social malaise. This graduate seminar examines from an eco-critical perspective, a variety of literary texts and films, produced in Italy from the sixties to the present day. While reading foundational texts from environmental literary studies and the growing field of eco-cinema studies, we shall examine short stories and novels by Italo Calvino (Smog, A Plunge into Real Estate and Marcovaldo) and Carlo Cassola’s The Nuclear Trilogy (1978-1982), as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi. In the second part of the seminar we shall focus on contemporary novels, documentary and feature films that more explicitly deal with environmental degradation. Critical and theoretical readings will include Marco Armiero and Marcus Hall’s Nature and History in Modern Italy, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and Environmentalism of Poor, Serenella Iovino’s Ecocriticsm and Italy, and Scott Macdonald’s “Toward and Eco-cinema,” among others.