Translated by the author from the Russian “В Италии” (“In Italy”), Brodsky, an exile from his native Petersburg, is brought back in mind to that architecturally Italinate hub by the physical details of a city in the poem’s eponymous country. Likely, Venice. The poem is in part a response to a lyric by Anna Akhmatova of that name. Written in an accentual meter, somewhat stricter in the Russian than the English—an eccentric outgrowth from the roots of the Russian дольник (dolnik).