Consumables

Italy Guest of Honour 2024 at Frankfurt Book Fair: the literary program on Wednesday, Oct. 16

Wednesday 16. October 2024 - It is the beauty of words that opens on Wednesday morning, Oct. 16, the literary program of Italy Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse at the Pavilion designed by the Stefano Boeri Interiors studio and located at Forum Level 1.

Curated by the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) with the consultancy of Ex Libris and with the coordination of the Extraordinary Commissioner of the Government, the program is constructed to represent the richness, variety and depth of our publishing industry through the participation of 86 authors selected through an ongoing dialogue with small, medium and large publishing houses. The program will be opened by a double meeting with a multidisciplinary approach (protagonists a writer, a philosopher, a scientist and a theologian) and an uncompromising look at the lights and shadows of our time. All events in the literary program are available in Italian, English and German through simultaneous translation via headphones.
In the first appointment Susanna Tamaro, author of one of the best-known and best-loved Italian novels in the world (Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, published in 1994 and translated into more than thirty languages), and philosopher Stefano Zecchi will dialogue precisely on the beauty of words (10 a.m., Arena). Immediately afterwards, it will be up to Carlo Rovelli, the scientist whose “short lectures” have made the complexity of physics understandable to all, and Luigi Maria Epicoco, the theologian and author of Per custodire il fuoco – Vademecum dopo l’apocalisse, to address such an uncomfortable and definitive topic as the end of the world, which the combined action of viruses, wars and environmental crises is abruptly transferring from long-term religious perspectives to public discussion and contemporary anxieties (11 a.m., Arena). Beauty and apocalypse, love and fear, science and faith, present and future, a takeoff on the wings of the big issues and the words we use to understand them.
Italy, Germany, and literary nomadisms
One of the paths destined to run through the entire literary program will also start from the first day: the encounter/comparison between Italy and Germany. And it will do so with a late morning meeting that will take its cue from the historical fascination that the city of Berlin has exerted on Italian writers, often becoming their beloved refuge and creative muse. Andrea Bajani, who has lived there in the past, and Mario Desiati, who set a significant portion of his Spatriati, winner of the Strega Prize in 2022, know something about this, as does the moderator of the meeting, Maria Carolina Foi, who directed the Istituto Italiano di Cultura based in the German capital (11:30 a.m., Caffè letterario). But Berlin will be just the springboard for a conversation that is sure to push on to other destinations as well, lapping up that idea and attitude of literary nomadism that will come back to illuminate so many Buchmesse meetings. One example? A few hours later to confront each other will be Olga Campofreda, a writer from Caserta who works in London as a researcher in Italian and Cultural Studies, and Igiaba Scego, a Roman author who has always dedicated much of her literary efforts to researching and reflecting on her own Somali origins and the theme of identity (3:30 p.m., Caffè Letterario). We will thus move naturally from Il libro delle case (among Bajani’s latest works) to “La mia casa è dove scrivo” (title of the meeting with Campofreda and Scego), following one of the many invisible threads on which the interweaving of the literary program unfolds.
Between pleasure and the abyss, from D’Annunzio to Generation Z
Another common thread that will bind many of the meetings is that of time. There will be evidence of this on the first day with three appointments that – though different from each other – will offer as many visions and narratives in which the relationship between writing, culture and human feelings will be filtered through the lens of the historical period. The comparison between Italy and Germany will be rekindled in the dialogue between Marina Valensise and Uwe Wittstock, authors respectively of Sul baratro and Febbraio 1933. L’inverno della letteratura, two essays on the role and fate of intellectuals on the eve of the outbreak of World War II (4 p.m., Arena). If Valensise’s and Wittstock’s will be a slide show of a dramatic instant in modern human history, far broader will be the temporal spectrum addressed by historian Giordano Bruno Guerri and writer Giuseppe Culicchia, in a reconnaissance that will start from the release of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (135 years ago) and continue to Culicchia’s debut Tutti giù per terra (30 years ago), accompanied by a doubt with a sociological-literary flavor: is it possible that in the last century and a half society and its representation in books have gone from the age of pleasure to the age of discomfort (12:30 p.m., Caffè Letterario)? A question to which – with a further fast-forward beyond the borders of the third millennium – who knows they might not add an answer also Ginevra Lamberti and Alice Urciolo, protagonists of the meeting that will close Wednesday’s program, among the most interesting voices of the new contemporary Italian fiction, observers of emotions, challenges and “ogres” of the present between eco-dystopias and Generation Z (5:30 p.m., Caffè Letterario).
360-degree publishing
Italian publishing is a prism with a thousand faces. The objective of the literary program in Frankfurt will be to try to photograph them all, or almost all. For example through the unprecedented and privileged perspective of Antonio Franchini and Chiara Valerio, not only authors of successful books (such as the latest Il fuoco che ti porti dentro and Chi dice e chi tace), but also editors, contributors to literary magazines and radio programs. Theirs will be the eyes of those who live books and really know them inside out (4:30 p.m., Caffè Letterario). With Teresa Radice and Stefano Turconi, on the other hand, another window will open, the one on the lively world of comics and illustration, which will remain wide open for the entire week thanks to a strip of daily appointments. What will be seen from this window? In the case of Radice and Turconi, a world full of adventures and exotic settings to serve as a backdrop for stories of personal growth, as in their latest graphic novel Il contastorie (2:30 p.m., Caffè Letterario). Extending the scope, Italy’s first day in Frankfurt will also see the opening of two exhibitions set up in the national pavilion (“Face Value. 60 Italian Writers of the Twentieth Century” curated by Alberto Saibene from an idea of The Italian Literary Agency, and ” From Illustration to Comics. Pencils in Talented Young Hands,” organized by Bologna Fiere/Bologna Children’s Book Fair and curated by Accademia Drosselmeier) and where the “Reading in the Dark” will begin, curated by Fondazione LIA – Libri Italiani Accessibili, which for five days will involve guest authors at the Buchmesse in experiences in which all distinctions between those who read with their eyes, those with their hands and those with their ears will be annulled. Letting only words and their stories reign.
Innocenzo Cipolletta, president of AIE: “The first day of the literary program will range from fiction to non-fiction of a humanistic, scientific and religious nature, moving on to comics and the world of illustration. We will have on stage established authors who were already known in the last decades of the twentieth century and others who, in those years, were just born. As we had announced, it is the plurality and richness of Italian publishing, in dialogue with the world, that is the hallmark of our program.”