It was in the 1980s that Tomlinson revisited the region of Northern Italy in which he had written his first characteristic poems, those published in The Necklace in 1955.Apoemwritten a few years after his first visit, ‘Up at La Serra’ (A Peopled Landscape, 1963; CP p. 78), recalls the landscape and the people of the place; its principal character is the young poet Paolo Bertolani. In the poem sequence ‘The Return’ (The Return, 1987; p. 7) describing his return visit, Tomlinson speaks more directly of their friendship:

In ‘Up at La Serra’, with its refrain of Soldi soldi, we hear of Bertolani's ‘deprivations’ but not of Tomlinson's; accustomed to the personal reticence of his poems, we are startled by these confessions of a ‘bitterness at want of use’, a ‘youthful sickness'of perhaps self-pitying resentment, ‘cure’ of which ‘came in part’, he says, from what ‘I grew to know’ living in that place: after the storms that greeted his arrival, ‘a time of storms’ to match the mood of that time of life, he writes, ‘I felt the sunlight prise me from myself’. Returning to Serra thirty years after his first visit, Tomlinson discovered that Bertolani had never left. The second poem of the sequence records a walk with him from Serra to Rocchetta. Taking in the scene once more, confronting the remembered image with ‘all that meets the eye and all that does not’, with what has persisted and what has not, he reflects on their common reverence for ‘those lesser deities / We still believe in’, to whom both poets have dedicated their poetry—‘For place is always an embodiment / And incarnation beyond argument’.The poets had shared ‘poetry and poverty’: now, ‘returning’ brings general recognition of riches and abidingness but also of losses and impoverishment. Man is poisoning the earth. The fireflies were in danger of extinction, though ‘Under the vines the fireflies are returning’: but some things are beyond return.