Literary Bodies

At Festivaletteratura, thousands of minds pass through the city together with thousands of bodies, which are the handy tool - the physical object - through which (our) minds offer themselves to the world: there are different bodies among them, emerging from that spectrum of those privileged enough to have the opportunity to take part in a literary festival in a provincial town in southern Europe.

A literary festival is, by nature, devoted to multiplicity - first and foremost, the multitudes of languages – and, therefore, if it really wants to speak about the world, it must be a celebration of the plurality of bodies and to the beauty of non-conformist, marginalized bodies , those that are hyper-represented precisely because of their non-conformism. In Mantua, there will be events dedicated to the "bothersome" bodies as told by Paolo Nori who infiltrate into the body of the city; the sick bodies of Pia Pera (in a reading by Lorenza Zambon and Marco Remondini ) and Clara Gallini , who made their illnesses objects of study, thought and poetry; the rebellious bodies that ignore borders, who fight for and with their own presence such as migrants in Europe and black bodies in the United States (with Wu Ming 1 and Fabrizio Puglisi ); the dead and crucified body, the weakness when nudity becomes an "extra charge of infamy" (with Erri de Luca ).

Festivaletteratura, a celebration of the mind, chooses to celebrate the body, in the singular, in its biological majesty, with an "extraordinary journey from the skull to the heel", guided by Gavin Francis . In Mantua, like everywhere, bodies have an anatomy that is partially shared ( Sissi will give a lesson on emotive anato-my) but one that also has a very personal form (the stylist Gentucca Bini will lead the audience as they create their own ensemble). And the body - which we all have - may offer up disgrace in its dignity, in its smells, in its meat, in its sexual impulses: in this vein, Sarah Waters will illuminate the stereotypical darkness of the Victorian age, speaking about female bodies.

This small map serves as a guide through the events of Festivaletteratura which speak about our bodies and those of others, in the name of collective awareness that we too have a body: a body that walks through the streets of Mantua.