“Nuove voci: dentro & fuori”: the Turin International Book Fair crosses Italian borders with a project in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. In three stops, three Italian writers meet the international audience at the Italian Institutes of Culture of Edinburgh, Oslo, and Vienna on the occasion of the 22nd edition of the Week of the Italian Language in the World (17 – 23 October 2022).
The project “Nuove voci: dentro & fuori” aims to promote young Italian literature around the world, after the successful collaboration of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affair and International Cooperation with the Turin International Book Fair on the occasion of “Book To Screen”, a video series dedicated to adaptations from bestsellers to TV series.
On Thursday, 27th October at 6:00 pm, the Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh will welcome author, journalist and translator Lorenza Pieri, in conversation with multilingual scholar and writer Esa Aldegheri. Lorenza Pieri will discuss her novel Il giardino dei mostri (e/o, 2019), translated into English as The Garden of Monsters (Europa, 2020). It will also be an opportunity to announce her most recent novel Erosione, also published by e/o.
“Our wealth compared to […] those who do not read is that they are living and will live only their life and we have lived many,” and, Eco continues, we remember along with our childhood or our loves those of the characters in the books we read. And so, reading Lorenza Pieri and the stories of the Biagini and Sanfilippi families, their stories and those of a town in Maremma and a country in transformation, Italy between the 1980s and 1990s, become part of our memory. We will meet Lorenza Pieri and her characters from The Garden of Monsters together with Esa Aldegheri at the Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh, the first UNESCO City of Literature, from an idea of the largest Italian event dedicated to books. What better combination?” Chiara Avanzato, director, Italian Cultural Institute of Edinburgh.
The three events will be available to watch back on SalTo+, the digital platform of the Turin International Book Fair, creating a real “mini” literature festival online.
The Garden of Monsters is a rural epic about warring families in modern Italy and an intimate bildungsroman of the artist’s journey.
Set over ten years in an unnamed town in the Maremma region of Southern Tuscany, this novel tells the story of two families against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming country. The Biagini are local ranchers, while the wealthy Sanfilippi belong to Rome’s upper middle-class. When Sauro, an ambitious rancher, and Filippo, a hedonistic politician, become friends and business partners, the stories of their families become irrevocably intertwined. As an influx of new money—and the excitement that comes with it—invests the town, political allegiances, family loyalties, moral codes, and sexual identities all begin to shift.
Sauro and Filippo, their wives Miriam and Giulia, and the sons Saverio and Luca are the prototypes of the new Italy, ostensibly emancipated from traditional mores, but at the same time, insecure and blinkered. Fifteen-year-old Annamaria, fragile and anxious, struggles to find her place among them and feels overshadowed by the beautiful and confident Lisa. Luckily, a parallel world is taking shape nearby, the Tarot Garden, the monumental sculpture garden created by the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. It is in this magical place, through her conversations with the artist, that Annamaria will slowly find a sense of identity and belonging.
Lorenza Pieri is an author, journalist, and translator. She grew up in Tuscany and spent long periods in Paris, Turin, and Rome, where she worked in publishing. She lived for eight years in Washington D.C., where she continued to write about politics and culture for a variety of outlets. Lesser Islands (Europa, 2023) was the winner of numerous prizes and has been translated into six languages. The Garden of Monsters (Europa, 2020) was a finalist for the Strega Prize. Pieri now lives in Milan.
Esa Aldegheri is a multilingual writer, educator and researcher with a PhD in community education and migration studies. She works at the University of Glasgow. Her non-fiction debut Free to Go (John Murray Press, 2022) moves beyond the parameters of a simple travel narrative to explore different aspects of freedom and borders, both geopolitical and personal. Esa’s non-fiction writing has also been published by Granta, Gutter Press, the Dangerous Women Project and others. Her poetry has been read on Radio 4 and Radio Scotland and features in several anthologies. She is from Scotland and Italy, and lives with her husband and children by the sea near Edinburgh.
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