Rafael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana (Bologna, 1782)

A Guatemalan Jesuit, expelled from America with his order in 1767, spent his Italian exile writing fifteen books of Latin hexameters about the country he would not see again: the lakes of Mexico and their floating gardens, the new volcano of Jorullo, cochineal and indigo, the silver works, the sugar mills, the herds, the beavers, the games. Menendez y Pelayo called it the Georgics transferred to American nature. The poem exists because a Spanish king deported its author.