From Thursday 4 to Monday 8 December returns to the Nuvola dell’Eur in Rome ‘More books, more free’ (PLPL), the National Fair of Small and Medium-Sized Publishing. For the third and last time it was the program curator Chiara Valeriowhich during the press conference to present the event has already announced the passing of the baton to Giorgio Zanchini.
AGI contacted her to find out from her voice what confirmations and what surprises we can expect from the 2025 edition of one of the most loved and attended events on the Italian cultural calendar.
In addition to being a writer, editor and radio host, she is also a mathematician: what are the most important numbers of PLPL 2025?
I’ll say one: 51,915, that is, the number of new releases published in 2024 by medium and small publishing houses. I’ll say another: there are 5,349 active publishing houses. After all, a percentage: 46.4% is the market share. Almost half of the whole. Think of the research, the tenacity, the pervasiveness, the colorful lawn of these small, medium and micro industries.
Among the names of the most anticipated guests at the Nuvola, Jovanotti stands out: in addition to interviewing him, which PLPL 2025 matches would you advise him not to miss?
I’ve been careful about giving advice for years. I think since I was seven and my sister Silvia was 4 and I advised her not to eat courgettes and to run away from home with me. We did it, I won’t tell you how it ended. I hope that no one misses, in addition to Lorenzo Cherubini’s answers, the two meetings on nuclear power. PLPL falls in the middle of two anniversaries, the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster which falls on April 26th. Starting from Hiroshima, Maurizio Maggiani, Marco Malvaldi, Luisa Bienati and Viola Di Grado will speak, introduced and moderated by Marco Filoni. The Chernobyl disaster will be remembered by Stefano Mancuso, Francesco Cataluccio, Vanni Santoni, Annalena Benini, introduced and moderated by Paolo Di Paolo. As Sergio Mattarella recalled when speaking to the Bundestag, “New ‘Doctor Strangelove’ appears on the horizon, with the claim that we must ‘love the bomb’. We love books, not bombs.
Over 560 publishing houses will participate in PLPL. In your opinion, will all the souls of small and medium-sized Italian publishing have space this year within the Nuvola?
All souls is impossible, perhaps on Judgment Day, beyond time. In Gloria, to quote a title and a concept by Giuseppe Berto. Before judgment day, in human time and space, and especially in independent publishing it is impossible to contain all souls in one place. There will be many, others will be in other places, continuing that exceptional work which is looking for voices and forms to make books inside and out.
From Jane Austen, the theme of PLPL 2025 is ‘Reasons and feelings’: what are yours at the end of a three-year period as curator of the programme?
A great joy, a certain reasonable effort, the logical satisfaction of having contributed to the growth of a much loved and frequented fair and of having woven connections beyond the junction, I am thinking, obviously, of Più Libri Più Laguna, the meetings organized together with Palazzo Grassi and the Marcopolo Bookshop.
What legacy do you feel you are leaving to your successor Giorgio Zanchini?
I leave him the fair that I have curated over the past three years. The strip of Writers who talk about writers, Radio Franca, the radio of the fair, the news of the fair (which over the years has been entrusted to Emmanuela Carbé, Giordano Meacci and this year to Stefano Pisani, also a former mathematician and one of the founders of Lercio.it), a consolidated scientific rib, a patchwork of contradictions which is what a cultural debate should resemble. And I advise him, with the friendship that has bound us for years, to respond to interviews in writing.