The poem “il fuoco che produce luce e fumo” by Giuseppe Conte begins with a list of visual flashes about the Twin Towers tragedy: the sudden light caused by the crash of the planes, the horrifying boom and the following slaughter and finally the smoke and the dust which covered and hid everything as symbols of desolation and death.

The images recalled by Conte are vivid and bloody.

He describes the scene of the disaster saying that it seemed an infernal scenery.

In antithesis to it, Conte closes the poem with a reference to God, exhorting everybody to pray no matter what his or her religions is.

In the last two lines, he says than our God must not be a killer God and this is a clear reference to religions, which justify any kind of massacre in the name of their God.

The intelligent reader can also notice that in this poem there is a constant repetition of the sound “r”, this sound is used to underline the sadness and the terrific aspect of the scene, which takes place in front of the eyes of the protagonist.

Finally, I would like to say that there is a very significant comparison between that disaster and Hell (“come se avessero preso dominio gli Inferi”)

In the poem “ 11 settembre” the poet Mario Luzi describes the Twin Towers tragedy as an extreme affront because it was generated by a raving desire/ wish to kill human beings in the name of religious and cultural differences.

However, Luzi continues by stating that was this massacre and the consequential sorrow it lead to which united people belonging to many different races.

Then the poet addresses directly to the towers and asks them to resurrect as symbols of peace (lilies) and of prayer.

In conclusion, this poem is a kind of desperate prayer that events like those would not happened again. Indeed the poet suggests to the reader that the Twin Towers now must become a place in which people of every kind of religion go to pray and to symbolize their wishes that these terrible massacres would finish forever.