Orientamenti, a selection of Pound’s contributions to the Meridiano di Roma from 1939-1942, is regarded as a sort of devil’s bible. Of the articles Pound published in the Meridiano, Orientamenti contains those which emphasise “race as prime determinant, the denunciation of gold as a kind of ‘fetish’, the curious presentation of the American South as initially a gold-free ‘utopia’, the betrayal of the American nation in 1863 by Rothschild and co., and the presentation of the ‘people’ endlessly torn between taxation demands made on them by the state and the interest extracted from them by the usurocracy.” (Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti).
  Orientamenti omits the Meridiano articles concerned with European myth, and shows an even greater deviation from Fascist mentality (Pound’s Meridiano articles were generally totally ignored). Pound’s fascism soon revealed itself as the “enormous dream” admitted in The Pisan Cantos.

The original publication of Orientamenti, printed in the Salò Republic in September 1944, was destroyed by the publishers by the end of the month on Ally occupation. A few review copies were supposed to have been distributed. Pound’s was seized by the FBI who translated the work in preparation for Pound’s trial, and presumably returned (Gallup notes a copy at Brunnenburg in 1961). This here is the Pirated Edition, effectively the sole obtainable edition, published in 1978 by a now-defunct press in Calabria which was likely an outlet for neo-fascist publications in the seventies.

This copy particularly clean & straight, a touch of staining on side and back, and light foxing to first two leaves. Gallup A55b