Like Byron in the early nineteenth century, Ezra Pound inaugurates twentieth-century Modernism with a poetic journey along the Mediterranean coasts: from Gibraltar to Provence, to Homeric Greece, to Renaissance Italy and rugged exotic landscapes – "Like the sculptor sees the form in the air..."

With some stops in Paris and London, where he finds, among other things, a contemporary Hell where those "who have placed the desire for money before the pleasures of the senses" end up.

Written during the avant-garde era, amid intense exchanges with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot and excursions following troubadours and commanders, collected in a volume in 1930, the "XXX cantos" constitute the first adventurous cantica of the poem Pound worked on all his life, a completed book in which the passionately relived past dialogues with the slaughter of the First World War and offers libertarian and fulfilling models.

This new annotated translation allows rediscovery of one of the epochal works of modernity, a tangle of rewritings and revelations, in all its sparkling freshness and vision.