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MARCO VIGEVANI & ASSOCIATI AGENZIA LETTERARIA S.A.S. Via Cappuccio, 14 – 20123 Milano – Italy
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London Book Fair 2015
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Marco Vigevani & Associati Agenzia Letteraria Via Cappuccio 14, 20123 Milano
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Aldo Cazzullo La mia anima è ovunque tu sia (My soul is wherever you are) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore October 2011 pp. 300 – FICTION
More than 65.000 copies sold. The war, a treasure, a woman: three good reasons to betray even the best of your friends. A novel with an epic feel that still succeeds in focussing on the hidden wounds and secret of men and their times, a work which simultaneously recounts both the Second World War and small family battles, collective passions, and the burning matters of the heart. The Langhe wine region, near Alba, 25th April 2011. The body of Moresco, a wine manufacturer, is discovered in the woods. Alba, April 1945. The treasure of the Fourth Army has arrived in the city. The money is split between the Curia and the partisans. Alba, 1963. A writer, an employee at the Tibaldi Vini wine company, tries to piece together the story of the treasure, the story of a partisan war, a lost love. Aldo Cazzullo’s novel is simultaneously a gripping crime novel, a great love story and a symbolic tale that sheds new light on the birth of a nation, Italy.
German rights sold to Beck. Aldo Cazzullo has written a thrilling and highly readable detective novel that puts forward the following thesis: if you want to understand the events that occurred at the end of the last world war, analysing the ideological and class conflict between the church, the Communist party and the Fascist party won’t suffice. Il Giornale Journalists don’t normally know how to write novels. It’s because they brood for too long about them in between one article and the next. Or maybe it’s because they’re trained to distinguish between what’s true and what’s false. But once in a while, when they tread the fine line between legend and truth, journalists are capable of writing such beautiful novels as this one. The result is cut-throat and relentless and goes right to the heart. Like revenge served cold. Il Corriere della Sera ...he has managed to convincingly reconstruct the historical context and psychological climate of the war years. Il Mattino
Aldo Cazzullo Aldo Cazzullo (Alba 1966), after fifteen years at the Italian newspaper ‘La Stampa’, has been a correspondent and leader writer for ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ since 2003. As well as writing about major events in Italy, he has covered the elections of Bush, Obama, Erdogan, Zapatero and Sarkozy, the Athens and Beijing Olympics and the football World Cups in Japan and Germany. He has published thirteen works of non-fiction and never imagined that he would write a novel. That is until, in his home city, he stumbled across a story that couldn’t be left untold.
Cocco & Magella Omicidio alla stazione centrale (Murder at the Central Station) Guanda May 2015 pp. 200 – FICTION After Futtero & Lucentini, a new couple of Italian noir. Cinematographic-like writing, a plot capable of combining the "Mediterranean noir" with the structure of the Anglo-Saxon thriller in a series of intertwining events leading to a breathtaking ending. An investigation that unfolds between the shores of Lake Como (the setting of Andrea Vitali’s novels), the “Milano da bere” of the 1980s and the Milan of the Expo 2015. It seems like a simple car accident involving a man along the shores of Lake Como, but it's not. Someone has shot him. Giampiero Colombo is now in a coma and it's up to detective Stefania Valenti to find out who did it. The investigation proves to be difficult right from the start also because the man's identification is false. Lake Como is only one of the locations where Valenti will have to work on an investigation that moves farther away, also in time. The story of the phony Colombo in fact unravels in the Milan of the 1980s and the ambiguous Café Metropolis with its businesspeople, millionaires and schemers; it stretches its tentacles toward Switzerland and border trafficking on the one hand and toward the Milan Expo with its scandals on the other. And that "simple" shooting reveals itself to be the tip of the iceberg of an international intrigue. Meanwhile, for Stefania, danger and a race against time only add to her sentimental problems.
Foreign rights sold in France to Calmann-Lévy and Spain to Al Gaida. Foreign rights to Ombre sul lago sold in France (Calmann-Levy), Germany (Rowohlt), Poland (Noir sur Blanc), Spain (Al Gaida), Holland (Ambo Anthos), Albania. World English rights sold to Penguin Viking. For the readers of Andrea Camilleri, Marco Vichi, Maurizio de Giovanni and Marco Malvaldi.
Cocco & Magella Giovanni Cocco was born in Como in 1976. He published Angeli a perdere (No Reply, 2004), La Caduta (Nutrimenti, 2013) and Il bacio dell’Assunta (Feltrinelli, 2014). Amneris Magella was born in 1958 and works as medical examiner. They both live between Como and Lenno, on the western shore of Lake Como. Their first novel Ombre sul lago (Guanda, 2013) has been sold in many countries.
Claudio Giunta Solovki (Solovki) Mondadori Spring 2016 pp. 250 – FICTION
Solovki is the first book to have been entirely crowdfunded by readers on bookabook, the first italian website of book crowdfunding, launched on April 2014.
Solovki is the name of a bleak group of islands in the Russian Arctic, originally home to an Orthodox monastery, later on to a Soviet Gulag and now sparsely populated by a mixed group of castaways and dropouts.
It is here that a group of three thirty years old Florentines, Fabio, Francesco and Enrico, disappear one day, while doing their stint of voluntary work in the restoration of an old monastery.
Alessandro Capace, a free-lance journalist and self-appointed sleuth, travels to the islands in search of the group, accompanied by a beautiful and well-meaning Russian friend, Olena. Together they will discover several dark sides hidden in the wilderness of the Solovki as well as in the past of the disappeared.
Rights sold to Mondadori in Italy, to Alfaguara in Spain and to Editions JC Lattès/Editions du Masque in France.
About Tutta la solitudine che meritate. Viaggio in Islanda: Amusing and passionate, Giunta knows how to bring out the uniqueness and the many nuances of this Arctic island. The guide is as clear as an essay, as compelling as a novel and, in places, as enlightening as a poem. Il Sole 24 Ore About Una sterminata domenica: A clear-headed, disenchanted and yet involved gaze on a disarming Italy, revisited – especially, but not exclusively – through its most popular places. This might be the key to approaching the latest book of the great Italian Studies scholar Claudio Giunta, who doesn’t back down before a comparison with the contemporary, even in its interstices. L’Espresso
Claudio Giunta Claudio Giunta teaches at the University of Trento and is an internationally authority on Dante and Medieval literature. His commentary to Dante’s Rime has been published by Mondadori in the Meridiani series. He also writes essays and reportage about Italy: Il paese più stupido del mondo (Il Mulino 2010), Come si diventa “Michelangelo” (Donzelli 2011), Una sterminata domenica (Il Mulino 2013). He collaborates with «Il Sole 24 ore» and «Internazionale» (website). His more recent publication is a travel book about Iceland: Tutta la solitudine che meritate. Viaggio in Islanda published by Humboldt.
Antonio Pagliaro Il bacio della bielorussa (The Kiss of the Belarusian) Guanda February 2015 pp. 301 – FICTION
A breath-taking thriller; an international intrigue that takes place between a disturbing springtime Holland and the envenomed beauty of Palermo. A mature, vividly written and compelling noir that blurs the lines between heroes and villains in a deadly kaleidoscope.
Two bodies fished out of a canal won’t speak. This is what Inspector Van den Bovenkamp of the Utrecht Police is up against. Too much time in the water has disfigured the bodies beyond recognition and made retrieving fingerprints impossible. All that’s left is a shred of a tattoo and a mysterious tag, as well as a rather unreliable witness.
Franz “the German” knows full well that the dead tell no tales. He’s a man of honour and a killer from Palermo; women can’t resist him but he keeps them at bay because “a soldier never falls in love”. But then, in the most unlikely of places, he meets a fragile, complicated and beautiful girl whose father has just been killed.
A tired inspector who’s determined to get to the bottom of things and a killer wrestling with a heart he didn’t know he had – two worlds apart are destined to clash. Van den Bovenkamp’s hunches lead him to Ludmilla Zamiatenko, a beautiful and shady Belarusian who has migrated to Palermo; and as the investigation pans out, it touches on the machinations of Sicilian politics and threatens international organised crime…
Pagliaro tailors flawless dialogues to match each character. Leonard’s and Higgins’ lesson have never been put into practice with such mastery in Italian fiction. Enzo Baranelli, Satisfiction
Antonio Pagliaro Antonio Pagliaro is an Italian novelist and physicist. He was born in Palermo in 1968. He has written for various newspaper including “La Repubblica” and “Liberazione”. He is the author of the novels Il sangue degli altri (Sironi, 2007) and I cani di via Lincoln (Laurana, 2010), and of a short true crime story entitled Il giapponese cannibale (Senzapatria 2010). With Guanda he has published La notte del gatto nero (2012). His website is www.antoniopagliaro.com.
Pierluigi Panza L’arte dell’oblio (The Art of Oblivion) Bompiani November 2014 pp. 200 – FICTION
A compelling historical novel interweaving history, philosophy and action. From the pages of Giordano Bruno and Leibnitz, from the Bible to the Rosicrucians, straight to the starting point of the evolution leading to the invention of computer. Germany. XVII century. Adam Brux is a successful physician and scientist chasing a dream: to invent a memory technique to exploit all the potential of the human mind. Studying the works of Giordano Bruno and the alchemical texts, the solution seems at hand, but Brux soon realizes that an all-powerful memory comes at a price: to store and collect all memories, without ever forgetting a single event, is too heavy a conviction to bear. On the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, Brux publishes his most important book claiming the right to oblivion; but his life is in danger because someone wants to reveal a secret destined to change the history of humanity forever.
A sophisticated, historical thriller with fascinating ingredients: the setting in Germany during the clashes between the Catholics and the Lutherans, the fabulous Rosicrucians of Johannes Valentinus Andreae, the secret plots, the power games and the alchemic utopias recalling Frances Yates’ extraordinary studies. Starting with just the few clues left by Brux, Panza reconstructs the life of a man ahead of his time. Panza ends up staging a mortal clash between the paladins of mnemotechnics and doctor Brux, master of forgetfulness, which is both an erudite reflection of the risks and powers of memory, the great theater of memory, and an allegory of the present. Corriere della Sera
Pierluigi Panza Graduated both in Architecture and Philosophy, he writes for the cultural section of “Il Corriere della Sera”. He teaches History of Modern Aesthetics at Politecnico di Milano. He is author and curator of many books and academic publications and has also written some novels: Italiani all'opera. Casti, Salieri, da Ponte, Mozart... Un intrigo alla corte di Vienna (Skira 2005), Il digiuno dell'anima (Bompiani 2007) and La croce e la sfinge. Vita scellerata di Giovan Battista Piranesi (Bompiani 2009) which was awarded with the prestigious Premio selezione Campiello in 2009, and Nati sotto la luna (Bompiani 2011).
Lidia Ravera Piangi pure (Cry Away) Bompiani March 2013 pp. 366 – FICTION French translation available
A touching, ironic love story in which the old age of the protagonists becomes an opportunity for a new tribute to life; a marvellously moving, joyous portrait of a woman.
Iris is an elderly woman who decides to sell the bare ownership of her apartment in order to live her latter years in relative comfort.
But meeting Carlo, a psychoanalyst living in the same building, changes her outlook and perspective by encouraging her to write a diary. As she recovers aspects of her life, Iris discovers that she is in love with Carlo. The outcome is an unexpected love story bathed in the soft light of dusk.
In the words of Lella Costa, Italian actress who impersonated Iris, in the theatrical show based on the novel: “Lidia Ravera never ceases to amaze us. For the past thirty-five years she has managed to voice the radical changes experienced by couples and society, first in her novels, and now on the stage as well.”.
Five printings. More than 35,000 copies sold in hardcover.
Forthcoming movie based on this novel directed by Daniel Auteuil and starring Daniel Auteuil and Fanny Ardant. Lidia Ravera’s best book ever... a story written to contradict the stereotypes regarding love in old age. Sandra Petrignani, L’Unità Intriguing and perfectly devised, the plot is backed up by an impressive and captivating writing. […] In the end, the tears that this novel brings to the eyes are of relief rather than desperation: relief that we are still so very much alive as the sun begins to set. la Repubblica The author addresses a number of taboos: the fear of emotional involvement, of passing time, of being alone; but also the courage to react to the “rules". Corriere della Sera Lidia Ravera tells the story of a woman who falls in love – because mature love is more earnest. Vanity Fair
Lidia Ravera Lidia Ravera was born in Turin and lives in Rome. In her twenties, she published her first book, with Marco Lombardo Radice, the international bestseller Porci con le ali. Screenwriter, journalist and writer, she then published various novel, essays and collections of stories. Among them: Eterna ragazza (Rizzoli 2006), Il dio zitto (nottetempo 2008), Le seduzioni dell’inverno (nottetempo 2008), La guerra dei figli (Garzanti 2009), Piccoli uomini (Il Saggiatore 2011).
Massimo Recalcati Le mani della madre (A Mother’s Hands) Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Aprile 2015 pp. 168 – NON FICTION
Translation rights: Feltrinelli/MVAL
After the success of his books devoted to the figure of the father and the forgiveness in love relationships, the new essay of one of Italian best-selling authors. A mother’s hands exist not only to care for and cuddle a child. Nor do they exist merely to stifle or traumatize her children, as psychoanalysis would have us believe in its attempt to explain the so-called disorders of the soul. Following his brilliant and epochal description of the figure of the father in Il complesso di Telemaco (The Telemachus Complex), Massimo Recalcati here turns his attention to the mother. He begins, in fact, by debunking the simplified view of the maternal figure as either a balm or a poison. The mother, according to Recalcati, is an ever-changing creature of many different possibilities, including—in addition to being her partner’s collaborator in procreation—a wife, a lover, a woman. Using examples from his clinical experience as well as current events, cinema, and literature including the Bible, Recalcati introduces us to a variety of maternal figures that in combination help us to see what’s real about a mother, rather than what’s ideal. He reminds us never to forget that first and foremost a mother is a woman whose femininity is essential to her motherhood but also to her own survival. When a woman vanishes into motherhood, the entire family suffers and even risks catastrophe.
Spanish rights for Non è più come prima. Elogio del perdono nella vita amorosa sold to Anagrama, Brazilian rights sold to Zahar and German rights sold to Klett-Cotta. About Non è più come prima: It takes a lot of bravery to compose the verbal vertigo of Lacan and the same idea of bestseller, the ambition to reach a general audience, not only the specialists. And yet, Massimo Recalcati, psychanalist and author, a person who likes the word “bravery”, is succeeeding exactly in this kind of enterprise. La Stampa
Massimo Recalcati Massimo Recalcati, one of the best reputed Lacanian psychoanalysts in Italy, is a member analyst of the Italian Lacanian Association of Psychoanalysis. His many publications have been translated into several languages. Among his works: L’uomo senza inconscio (Raffaello Cortina 2010) Cosa resta del padre? (Raffaello Cortina 2011), Ritratti del desiderio (Raffaello Cortina 2012), Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre (Feltrinelli 2013), Non è più come prima. Elogio del perdono nella vita amorosa (Raffaello Cortina 2013), L’ora di lezione. Per un’erotica dell’insegnamento (Einaudi 2014).
Enrico Regazzoni La parete sottile (A Thin Wall) Neri Pozza November 2014 pp. 192 – FICTION
A boy, a woman pianist: two worlds divided by a thin wall. A deeply moving coming of age novel, a celebration of the overwhelming power of music and its role in our lives. A surprising fiction debut.
The boy has been living since he was three years old in a secluded atmosphere : alone with his widowed mother in a modest, small apartment in a provincial town of northern Italy. The apartment was cut out of a larger , much more elegant house, which is the home of a rich family with four children, the embodiment of harmony and happiness. Only a thin wall separates the bedroom of the boy from the sitting room of the adjoining house, where the family gathers every night and where the mother, a blond elegant woman, masterfully plays the piano. A loner and a reader, the boy doesn’t know much about music but he is enthralled by the invisible pianist, as if she were performing for him alone.
The happy years of the big family come to a tragic end with the death of the father and husband: the pianist from then on will express and elaborate her grief through the piano and will take the boy with her in an unchartered journey through the darkest side of life that will change him forever.
Winner of the Bagutta Prize 2014. The absolute main character is the thin wall, which, yes, divides the first-person narrator’s room from the neighbors’ apartment but also, and perhaps above all, childhood from adolescence; unreality from reality, fantasies, dreams from the real world. Corriere della Sera An extraordinary debut that has the ambition of the classics tells the story of a teenager’s inner life on the trail of secret music. D-Repubblica
Enrico Regazzoni Enrico Regazzoni (1948) has worked in publishing, has collaborated to newspapers (Europeo and Repubblica), created weekly magazines and taught at several universities. He lives in Milan and this is his first novel.
Paolo Rumiz Transeuropa Express (The Fault Line) Feltrinelli/Rizzoli USA 2012/2015 pp. 252 – NON FICTION
An award-winning writer travels the eastern front of Europe, where the push/pull between old empires and new possibilities has never been more evident.
Paolo Rumiz traces the path that has twice cut Europe in two—first by the Iron Curtain and then by the artificial scaffolding of the EU—moving through vibrant cities and abandoned villages, some places still gloomy under the ghost of these imposing borders, some that have sought to erase all memory of it and jump with both feet into the West (if only the West would have them). In The Fault Line, he is a sublime and lively guide through these unfamiliar landscapes, piecing together an atlas that has been erased by modern states, delighting in the discovery of communities that were once engulfed by geopolitics then all but forgotten, until now. The farther south he goes, the more he feels he is traveling not along some abandoned Eastern frontier, but right in the middle of things: Mitteleuropa was to be found beyond even Budapest and Warsaw. As in Ukraine, these remain places in flux, where the political and cultural values of the East and West have stared each other down for centuries. Rumiz gives a human face not just to what the Cold War left behind but to the ancient ties of empire and ethnicity that are still at the root of modern politics in flash-point areas as this.
And bear in mind:Come cavalli che dormono in piedi, Feltrinelli, p. 272, November 2014 The great unsettled and itinerant journalist sets off in search of his ancestors, in search of those who were kids and didn't return home a century ago, of those who lost their lives in the Great War, on the Eastern Front. Rumiz travels the lands he loves in the atmosphere made eternal by Joseph Roth.Mario Calabresi, TuttoLibri - La Stampa
French rights sold to Etonnants Voyageurs, World-English rights sold to Rizzoli USA. Foreign editions of Rumiz’ works: France: Aux Frontières de L’Europe; Pô, le roman d'un fleuve; L’ombre d’Hannibal (Etonnants Voyageurs) Usa: The Fault Line (Rizzoli USA) Spain: Trans Europa Express (Altair) Poland: La leggenda dei monti naviganti (Czarne) Rumiz reveals his strength in his travels, in the journey that slowly nuilds up as each and every page is turned… It would be difficult to find another writer who is as well-equipped to adapt and enter into the world that he is passing through with such simplicity. Il Mattino A richly detailed journey into Europe’s dark past and vulnerable present. Kirkus Reviews Beautiful writing suffused with shadows and sun, bathed in love and melancholia, steeped in delicate and powerful fragrances. Le Figaro
Paolo Rumiz Paolo Rumiz has been a correspondent for Italy’s “La Repubblica” since 1986, focusing on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He was a frontline correspondent during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Afghanistan, and has won many prizes for his journalism and nonfiction.
Marco Santagata Come donna innamorata (Like An Enamoured Lady) Guanda October 2014 pp. 200 – FICTION
Dante, Beatrice: one of the most famous and intense love stories in world literature freely revisited by a novelist who has dedicated his life to the poet. How do you keep writing after the death of your Muse? This is the dilemma Dante has to face on the 8th of June 1290 in front of the body of his beloved Beatrice, resting in eternal sleep. He won’t ever look again into her emerald eyes nor he will see her smile again. Now everything has changed. It’s from this dramatic incipit that the greatest literary love story of all times comes to life in Marco Santagata’s intense new novel. From the first encounter between Dante and Bice, to the human and literary crisis the poet suffered after her death, until the inspiration for his most ambitious work, the Divine Comedy, Marco Santagata portrays a private and passionate Dante, drawing athe same time atmosphere, words and turmoils of the Middle Ages.
World English rights for Dante. Il romanzo della sua vita sold to Harvard University Press; French rights to Editions Laffont. Rights for Il maestro dei santi pallidi sold in Spain (Destino) and Poland (WAB). Romanian rights for L’amore in sé sold to to Humanitas. In this delicate story of love and friendship ... words and silence work together, allowing the unspeakable to enter the discourse and become a surprising novel of the highest poetic experience in literature – not just Italian literature. Il Sole 24 Ore Santagata follows Dante all the way to exile, reconstructing his emotions and thoughts, ambitions and disillusions, with the pace of a narrator in historic subject matter. Il Corriere della Sera Very intimate, almost familiar, among Florentine piazzas, evoking the events of his love marked by destiny, coming to terms with the temptations of power, the wounds of betrayal, the desire for glory. Il Messaggero
Marco Santagata Born near Modena in 1947, Marco Santagata is a renowned literary critic and professor of Italian Literature. He is a leading scholar on Petrarch, Dante and Italian lyric poetry. In addition to his activity as essayist, he has published several novels: Papà non era comunista (Guanda 1996), Il maestro dei santi pallidi (Guanda 2003, winner of the Premio Campiello), L’amore in sé (Guanda 2006), Il salto degli Orlandi (Sellerio 2007), Voglio una vita come la mia (Guanda 2008) and Dante, il romanzo della sua vita (Mondadori 2012).
Antonio Scurati Il tempo migliore della nostra vita (The Best Time of Our Life) Bompiani Aprile 2015 pp. 250 – FICTION On January 8, 1934, Leone Ginzburg refuses to swear his allegiance to fascism. Openly stating his “no”, he takes the hard road that will lead him to become a hero of the Resistance. A mild-mannered, righteous and unbreakable fighter who will never take up arms. While Europe is being crushed by the triumphal march of fascism, this young and extraordinary intellectual takes a stand against the servile world surrounding him and the madness of the century. He founds the publishing house Einaudi, organizes dissension, and has his beloved family despite every persecution. This is his true story from the day he was kicked out of university to the day he was killed in prison by the Nazis. In the rigorous and passionate story in which Scurati evokes the lives of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg, also those of Antonio and Peppino, Ida and Angela (the author’s grandparents) are also conveyed; common folk born during the same years, who lived under the dictatorship and bombs of World War II. From the rural-turned-industrial suburbs of Milan to the miserable “Corpo di Napoli” alleyways, facing drawn rifles, the humble lives of workers and peasants, would-be artists and courageous mothers resonate with the lives of illustrious men. Linking individuals to major events through documents, photographs and letters, melding family memories and collective memory, Antonio Scurati resurrects our past. It’s both an engaging and moving story in which exemplary figures with their priceless legacy and those of ordinary people stand out until discovering their profound commonality: birth and death, books and children, inhabited or abandoned houses. Everyone’s private life conforms to the same basic plot in which memorable as well as irrelevant facts resonate and where the “big story” meets all of our stories.
Spanish rights to Il padre infedele sold to Libros del Asteroide.
Rights to Il bambino che sognava la fine del mondo sold in Germany (Rowohlt), France (Flammarion), Greece (Polis Publishers), Croatia (Fraktura), Serbia (Clio Publishing), Portugal (Euthalia Novadelphi). About Il padre infedele: Behind this intensely realistic story of a marriage struggling with the absence of physical love, Scurati vouches for the strength of paternity and pedagogy, frankly invoking the courage to resist. Walter Siti Il padre infedele is Scurati’s best novel since Il sopravvissuto... a triumphant literary achievement. Daniele Giglioli, Il Corriere della Sera About Il bambino che sognava la fine del mondo: Antonio Scurati “is one of the few Italian authors today who, à la Manzoni, is able to use a language that is both modern and classical at the same time … A novel about fear and the impossibility to imagine a future, typical of our time where only the present seems to exist”. Massimo Grammellini
Antonio Scurati Born in Naples, Antonio Scurati has lived in Venice, New York and Paris and now lives in Milan. He currently teaches Sociology of Communication at the University of Bergamo. Among his works, all published by Bompiani: Il sopravvissuto (2005), winner of the Campiello Prize, Il rumore sordo della battaglia (2006), Una storia romantica (2007), Il bambino che sognava la fine del mondo (2009) which has been shortlisted for the Strega Prize, Gli anni che non stiamo vivendo (2010), La seconda mezzanotte (2011) and Il padre infedele, shortlisted for the Strega Prize (2013).
Salvatore Settis Se Venezia muore (If Venice Dies) Einaudi November 2014 pp. 200 – NON FICTION
Historic cities are threatened by false modernity, by depopulation, by self-oblivion. Venice is a prime example of this threat, as well as of how to offset it. We must rediscover Venice’s soul and claim our right to the city. There are three ways for cities to die: when they are destroyed by a merciless enemy, when a foreign people take over by force, or when they give in to self-oblivion. Venice will die if it loses its memory, if we fail to understand the city’s soul and rebuild its destiny. Fragile, old and unique in its relationship with the environment, Venice is haemorrhaging inhabitants while being targeted by countless projects which, in an attempt to “save Venice from isolation”, are killing the city’s diversity and turning it into a flat monoculture of standardised “modernity”, mere merchandise for tourists and hotel owners. Salvatore Settis takes Venice’s emblematic case and makes an all-encompassing consideration: from L’Aquila to Chongqing – a Chinese city whose population shot up from 600000 in 1930 to 32 million today –, frantic changes due to production or to the market violate the natural context and the social space, mortifying the right to the city and to democracy.
French rights sold to Hazan, German rights sold to Wagenbach. World English rights sold to New Vessel Press. A world-class art historian on the impeding ruin of a symbol of Western civilization and the threaths that all historic cities in Europe must face.
Salvatore Settis An archaeologist and art historian, Salvatore Settis has directed the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles and the Normale of Pisa. He is the chairman of the Scientific Council of the Louvre. He writes for La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 Ore and L’Espresso. His books published by Einaudi include Italia S.p.A. (2002), Futuro del ‘classico’ (2004), Paesaggio Costituzione cemento (2010), Azione popolare (2012) and Costituzione incompiuta (2013, with A. Leone, P. Maddalena and T. Montanari).
