I met some poets, both domestic and international. I won't claim they were great figures, but they were certainly among the most prominent of their time. Beside them, I felt admiration and respect. Next to Cambana, who didn't have the style of a poet, let alone a sage, but rather that of a brigand, standing beside Cambana, poetry felt like an electric shock, a powerful explosive material.

There was a subtle mark, fateful and corporeal, you might say, a genuine seal of his genius. Those he called "the ultimate emotions of his life" guided his rhythm into a choral, folk gait. And especially in landscape, Cambana was elevated within an Italian beauty, specifically Tuscan, with an old and venerable allure. His impulsive sensitivity, as a wanderer and persecuted soul, did not exclude his pursuit, partly his journey, towards a classical way of life and art, towards the idea of a "Mediterranean" happiness as he called it — an idea that seemed to breathe in the Etruscan cities of our 14th century.

No one learned how Cambana, with the lightning-fast and extensive fragmentation of verse and poetic prose, proved to be so excessively modern and yet natural, popular. He passed like a comet. Beyond purely formal reasons, in a broader and warmer sphere, his influence on the young was immeasurable, and it still has not faded. He set an example of heroic faith in poetry: an example of poetry truly offered with blood.

Emilio Cecchi