A special edition for the 25th year of life of the Pordenonelegge festival which in its renewed title, «festival of books and freedom»sums up the meaning of meeting among books and with books. Which are written and read, as Michelangelo Agrusti, president of Fondazione Pordenonelegge, recalled, where there is freedom, because where it is missing books cannot be written or even read. With him to present the 25th edition, in Rome, Gian Mario Villalta, artistic director, and Mario Anzil, vice president and councilor for Culture of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region. Present were the director of Fondazione Pordenonelegge.it Michela Zin and the curators of the festival, Alberto Garlini and Valentina Gasparet.
Pordenone will be a party city, from 18th to 22nd Septemberfor five intense days of culture, meetings, listening, which bring together and unite very different interests, citizens of all ages and roles and classes, and associations, “all ready to participate in this festival-city – Villalta recalled – which suspends ordinary time to become a fervent laboratory of experiences”. And in the “five days of Pordenone” – as Anzil called them – the city that will be colored yellow to strengthen the spirit of reflection and thought, becomes “the beating heart of a region that is itself the beating heart at the center of Europe”. A border region that makes the border “a new opportunity for friendship and meetings”, and cannot help but propose “a frontier culture, polyphonic, pluralistic, which welcomes within itself the different theses, in which the border is not a closure, finis, wall, but a crossing, hinge, bridge, meeting”.
This is the magic of Pordenonelegge whose rich program, increasingly internationalwas illustrated by Villalta: 43 meeting places, over 600 authors and more than 300 events. Special effects, thanks to a video mapping project, with the most beautiful libraries in the world projected onto the facades of the buildings in the historic center of Pordenone and onto the Teatro Verdi. And new street furniture projects with squares and streets that will be a widespread library, a world of books to browse through (and it is in fact the “sfoglia”, a sweet and book to browse through, the symbol of this edition).
Space for all knowledge and topicsfrom philosophy to art, from science to history, from economics to artificial intelligence (which will be discussed by neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer and philosopher Miguel Benasayag), from novels to the story of places (with a dedicated prize), from current events, with a focus always on the tragedy of wars, to ecology (and the relationship between ecology and creation with Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi who will inaugurate the event) to sport.
One special space for poetrywith many poets (including Antonella Anedda, winner of the fourth Saba Prize) and documentaries (including «Parola di poeta. Autoritratto di Giovanni Raboni», 20 years after his death with Patrizia Valduga) and the meeting between poetry and music. A small section for teacher training, workshops and two initiatives for students: «Dear author, I am writing to you» and, in collaboration with the Treccani Dictionary for children and the linguist Giuseppe Antonelli, the reflection on lemmas and the invitation to imagine one of your own.
Authors from all over the world, and many Italians obviously, everyone “on the threshold of history”, on the threshold of the time we live in, from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Eshkol Nevo, from Azar Nafisi (who will receive the Crédit Agricole Prize) to Richard Ford (in preview with the last act of the saga by Frank Bascombe), Fernando Aramburu, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, Michel Onfray. Among the Italian authors, from Donatella Di Pietrantonio (recent winner of the Strega Prize) to Rosella Postorino from Reggio, from Eraldo Affinati to Dario Voltolini, to Umberto Galimberti and Massimo Recalcati, Massimo Cacciari and Vittorino Andreoli and many others. “Watching over” the city, the “Angels”, the young volunteers. And finally the concert of the Orchestra del Friuli Venezia Giulia, “this too is a way of telling in place of those books that are not there”.