News
Festivaletteratura 2010: all the authors from A to Z (Category: News)
We are pleased to announce you the list of authors who will speak to Festivaletteratura 2010 (Mantova-IT, September 8-12):
Chris Abani, Francesco Abate, Kader Abdolah, Guido Affini, Andrea Agapito Ludovici, Marco Aime, Enaiatollah Akbari, Dora Albanese, José Altafini, Francesco Tullio Altan, Niccolò Ammaniti, Giuseppe Antonelli, Rashed Araeen, Bruno Arpaia, Antonia Arslan, Mario Artioli, Corrado Augias, Esmahan Aykol, Charles Aznavour, Elena Baboni, Massimo Bacigalupo, Franco Bagnoli, Luigi Ballerini, Massimo Banzi, Elisabetta Bartuli, Nadia Bellini, Marco Belpoliti, Sophie Benini Pietromarchi, John Berger, Katya Berger, Francesco Berto, Enrico Bertolino, Mariella Bettarini, Gianni Biondillo, Corrado Bizzarri, Maria Luisa Boccia, Luigi Boitani, Maria Simonetta Bondoni Pastorio,...
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The World to Come According to Obama (Category: News)
In his dedicated half an hour, Pino Buongiorno, assistant editor of Panorama, talks about his new book Il Mondo che Verrà. Idee e proposte per il dopo G8(The World to Come. Ideas and suggestions after the G8).
The book, dealing with 21st century issues, is an anthology of speeches and interviews to the great leaders and expert of the Earth who express their opinion on environmental issues, economic crisis and wars.
Pino Buongiorno says that his book is not to be read in just one sitting, but to consult according to one’s needs. After answering the audience in a concise...
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Travelling on the Wrong Side of the World (Category: News)
Participating in an event moderated by Patrizio Roversi and being in stitches is no surprise for the regulars at Festivaletteratura.
But if the voice of Italy’s most famous tourist, in a broad Emilia Romagna accent, conjures up the sparkling phrases of one of the most inspiring humorous authors, Micheal Zandoorian, the evening is set on fire, like the powder keg of a galleon ablaze.
No sooner had the audience arrived than Palazzo San Sebastiano shook with a thunderous round of applause, with unstoppable and loud laughter of both the audience and Zandoorian who initially is taken aback but later...
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New York in the Eye (Category: News)
“If you make it in New York, you’ll make it anywhere”.
It was a difficult and dangerous city when Enrico Franceschini arrived there. He left penniless and without contacts, knowing only one sentence in English: “the cat is not on the table, the cat is under the table”. But as he says in his biographical book Voglio l’America, Franceschini managed to realize his dream of becoming a journalist.
In Piazza Sordello tensile structure, on Friday at 19.30, at Scintille (Sparks), Enrico Franceschini and Bruno Cartosio will entertain the audience with anecdotes and an analysis of immigration in New York. Cartosio...
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Elvira Dones (Category: News)
Elvira Dones is a fighting woman.
She grew up in a well-off family close to Enver Hoxha’s communist regime and decided to take advantage of this to study Italian. Like her fellow countrypeople, she had a fascination with Italy, a nation she only knew through the distorted images of TV ads. She soon realized that she wanted to escape from that asphyxiating cage and took advantage of a trip abroad to do it; not an easy choice since it meant leaving her only son behind. She paid a very high price. Because she was a dissident, her identity was erased...
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Family Saga (Category: News)
“Empires imprison their rulers as well as their subjects”: with George Orwell, Amitav Ghosh judges English colonial experience, in her opening words of an encyclopaedic view of the world and in particular of human beings.
Her novels’ protagonists pursue utopias and embark on extreme research, from Algerian Sahara’s borders, to Brazil and Peru. From colonial conquests, The Chromosome Calcutta seems to embody India’s own testimony: an apparently inexplicable discovery concealing a faraway truth, passed down from generation to generation up until now. But what does the Calcutta chromosome hide? Is it really the key to human DNA? Should it...
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Women from the Holy Scriptures (Category: News)
The Cavallerizza courtyard is literally invaded by hordes of people, occupying the front, back and sides around the stage. Their eyes are set on time-worn and gaunt Erri de Luca’s face who charmingly goes through the book of books, the greatest best seller ever, the Holy Scriptures.
His flow of words, occasionally interrupted by the odd sip of water, and like a Klondike’s gold digger, goes through the book with a fine tooth comb to find tiny nuggets, shining with beauty’s charming light.
Women’s stories, normally forgotten, central figures of a monotheism which in the Vulgate of the different versions, Jewish, Christian...
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Necessary Love (Category: News)
What does having a disabled person in the family mean? It’s impossible to convey this concept to those who have not experienced it.
Clara Sereni and Valeria Di Napoli, stage and web name Pulsatilla, have shared this experience with us.
Clara Sereni has recently published a book, Amore Caro, where show business people, journalists and scholars have shared their experience of having in the family a mentally ill person, talking about their problems in the form of a letter. The collection is mainly about disabled children, the author’s experience, and the mechanisms that this situation sets off such as...
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Masayo Ave's Workshop (Category: News)
Masayo Ave, a graduate in architecture and a great design innovator, will guide you through a new and exciting workshop (events 88, 151 and 192 at Palazzo Plattis) where you will explore an enchanted world full of flowers, branches, leaves and magic.
In a typical Mantua’s enveloping atmosphere, created by fog and light, the Japanese artist will combine her professionalism, knowledge and creativity with her audience’s imagination. The fun will continue even after the end of the event when people will be able to “install” Masayo Ave’s creations.
Petros Markaris with Paolo Zaccagnini (Category: News)
Who has not been visited by unwanted guests who come to your door ignoring your refusal? This is the way officer Kostas Charitos introduced himself to his author, Petros Markaris, forcing him to write his stories thus creating the successful series of crime novels. The author, in his interview with Paolo Zaccagnini, describes some of his novels’ fundamental characteristics. From their crime plots, with exhilarating everyday scenes, to their marked cinema style with chaotic and noisy Athens as a background.
Markaris says that in his novels there is “a story within a story”, like in real life where work gives...
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Nadine Gordimer (Category: News)
It’s 18.30 and Piazza Castello is filled with solemn expectation; something extraordinary is about to happen. The crowd is waiting for Nadine Gordimer, 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. The great South African writer, born in 1923, turned up on time. She is dressed in a long and austere black frock and immediately said: “I will now read to you a goodnight fairytale, despite being a little early”.
She then carried on reading the whole short story Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, a story of dramatic change, or revolution, of how being black today, although by one sixteenth, can be a reason...
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Melania Mazzucco with Stefano Salis (Category: News)
Melania Mazzucco impressed the audience with the great love for her books, for her characters and her need to research before starting her stories. Every word she says is carefully thought out, nuances are important for her, as it appears in her latest book.“Rather than a book it is a project”. Everything started a few years back, when she met Jacomo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto, in front of the picture of The Blessed Vergin Mary taken to the Temple that she finds extraordinary and feels very emotional about. The same feeling experienced when she realized the existence of a...
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Sparkling. Take That! (Category: News)
Chris Riddell draws something with his pencil on a large sheet on a wall. The audience tries to anticipate what will come out of his sharp and precise strokes: “it looks like, perhaps it’s him...” As soon as he draws a little of his bald head, they all recognize Sivio disguised as a little duck who is thumbing his nose at the audience. Everybody tried to immortalise the cartoon on their mobile phones. In Tenda Sordello there is a sparkling atmosphere, without technology or computers.
The Silvio cartoon falls to the floor. “This is just censorship” joked Riddell, igniting laughter...
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Thank you, Daniel (Category: News)
Gad Lerner introduced Mendelsohn and described him as an unusual writer. A Jewish intellectual with a classic background, for five years, he tried to find an answer to the question bothering him since he was a child: What happened to his grandfather Shmiel in Poland during the Holocaust? His quest resulted in the masterpiece Gli Scomparsi published last year by Neri Pozza and followed recently by Bellezza e fragilità.
First in perfect Italian and then with the typical nasal New York accent, Mendelsohn answered Lerner’s questions in a calm and friendly way. The first question was about the writer’s background:...
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Boris Ryzhy (Category: News)
Boris Ryzhy is a poèt maudit and his suicide when he was only 26 could be taken for granted. But it is not! In the movie we clearly understand what role desolation and his townsmen’s hardness played in first in his life and then in his extreme choice. The choice of setting the movie in his native city, Yekaterinenburg, covered with snow, adds and ethereal and poetic dimension of pessimism which is amplified by the choice of using his sister as a narrator and alternating music with silence. Other people who had a role in his life, his mother and...
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