The Maggio dei libri in Spoleto celebrates the modernity of Baudelaire and Montale with a videoconference with Romano Luperini and Valerio Magrelli
Wednesday 26 May (6.30 pm) live streaming on the YouTube channel of the City of Spoleto
On the occasion of the initiatives for il Maggio dei libri 2021 (the national reading-promotion campaign by the Centre for Books and Reading), the ‘Giosuè Carducci’ library in Spoleto has organised a video conference to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Baudelaire and the 40th anniversary of Eugenio Montale‘s death, to discuss the poetic experience of these two great authors, key figures not only of modern literature but of modernity tout court.
The videoconference, entitled “Il simbolo e l’allegoria: la modernità di Baudelaire e Montale”, will feature two of Italy’s most influential intellectuals and literary critics: Romano Luperini and Valerio Magrelli.
Moderated by writer and high school teacher Roberto Contu, the meeting will be streamed live on the City of Spoleto’s YouTube channel, Wednesday 26 May at 18.30.
The initiative proposes to compare the expressive universes of the two poets, their peculiarities and uniqueness, but also to bring into dialogue those affinities and consonances, those kinships and overlaps that have characterised the career of Baudelaire and Montale and still represent a decisive contribution to fully interpreting the thought and feeling of modernity. A poetry of great visionary force, of dense symbolism and figurations with astonishing links and references to that feeling of vertigo and imprisonment of existence that informs everyday life, that the close, dramatic topicality of our pandemic days has only ended up amplifying.
Two authors, Baudelaire and Montale, whose voices are indispensable for bringing us closer to the complex and cognitive disintegration brought about by modernity, as well as the impossibility of finding easy solutions to the meaning of existence and pain.
The programme of the “Maggio dei libri a Spoleto 2021” presents two more events:
On Thursday 20 May at 11 a.m. the video-story by the students of the Liceo Sansi-Leonardi-Volta “La Sala degli uccelli di Palazzo Mauri: affreschi e poesia” will be published on the social channels of the City of Spoleto, a project realised with the financing of the Centro per il Libro e la Lettura – Città che legge call for tenders.
Saturday 29 May, also at 11, the presentation of the book by Roberto Quirino and Giorgio Corino “Il convitto di piazza Campello di Spoleto e la Prima Guerra Mondiale” will be streamed live on the City of Spoleto’s YouTube channel,
Romano Luperini
Italian literary critic and writer. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Siena and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, he directs the literary theory and criticism magazines Allegoria and Moderna. Between the 1960s and 1970s he was a member of the Potere Operaio group in Pisa and for some years was on the board of Democrazia Proletaria together with personalities such as V. Foa. As a literary critic, he dealt mainly with the period between naturalism and the avant-garde and with G. Verga and E. Montale. He was co-author of the textbook, present in numerous editions designed for different types of school system, La scrittura e l’interpretazione. Storia e antologia della letteratura italiana nel quadro della civiltà europea (1996). His latest books include: L’incontro e il caso. Narrazioni moderne e destino dell’uomo occidentale (2007), Montale e l’allegoria moderna (2012) and the novels L’uso della vita. 1968 (2013), La rancura (2016) and L’ultima sillaba del verso (2017).
Valerio Magrelli
Italian poet and literary critic. His first collection of verse, Ora serrata retinae (1980), established him as a profound, thoughtful poet, yet light and ironic. With the next collection, Nature e venature (1987), he won the Viareggio Prize. These were followed by Esercizi di tiptologia (1992), Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (1999) and Disturbi del sistema binario (2006), which confirmed Magrelli’s sensitivity in lyrically rendering the contemporary condition. In 2003 he made his debut as a narrator with Nel condominio di carne, an original self-portrait in which the word is given over directly to the body. Professor of French literature at the University of Pisa and translator, in 1993 Magrelli took over the direction of the trilingual series of the Einaudi series “Scrittori tradotti da scrittori“, obtaining the National Prize for Translation from the President of the Republic (1996). In 2003 he won the Feltrinelli Prize. His most recent works include: Profilo del Dada (1990); Vedersi vedersi. Modelli e circuiti visivi nell’opera di Paul Valéry (2002); La vicevita. Treni e viaggi in treno (2009); Addio al calcio. Novanta racconti da un minuto (2010); Magica e velenosa. Roma nel racconto degli scrittori stranieri (2010); Il Sessantotto realizzato da Mediaset (2011); Geologia di un padre (2013, winner of the Mondello Prize and finalist for the Campiello Prize); the poetry collection Il sangue amaro (2014); Millennium poetry. Viaggio sentimentale nella poesia italiana (2015); Lo sciamano di famiglia. Omeopatia, pornografia e regia in 77 disegni di Fellini (2015); the essay La parola braccata. Dimenticanze, anagrammi, traduzioni e qualche esercizio pratico (2018). In 2018 his entire poetic production was edited in the volume Le cavie. Poesie 1980-2018. The collection Il commissario Magrelli is also from the same year.
Roberto Contu
Teacher of literature in upper secondary schools and writer on Italian literature, literature didactics and the school world. He published with Aguaplano “Anni di piombo, penne di latta (1963-1980. Gli scrittori dentro gli anni complicati)” in 2015 and “Insegnanti. Il più e il meglio” in 2019. With Castelvecchi he published the two novels “Il Vangelo secondo il ragazzo” in 2017 and “La tigna” in 2021.
