In Pordenonelegge literature puts on a show with ‘Words on stage’

On the “literary stage” of ‘Words on stage’ a special mention goes to the Ten Pop Stories by the actress and director Laura Morante: Saturday 19 September at 7pm: at the Capitol, the national preview presentation of the upcoming book La nave di Teseo, a narrative mosaic set in Rome in the 1960s, between the Centocelle neighborhood and Romulus’ little bar. The text follows the intersecting events of a group of teenagers – Bobby, Joe, Betty, Tony, Ester, Jimmy, Patty, Fred and Michele – who use American names and facade attitudes to redefine their social identity. Morante adopts a register oscillating between irony and melancholy to photograph the exact moment in which the lightness of youth collides with the eruption of ferocious adulthood.

And alongside the trajectories outlined by Laura Morante, the festival welcomes the autobiographical story of Luca Carboni: the famous singer-songwriter will reveal himself to the public on Sunday 20 September, at 6pm at the Capitol, in a completely new guise, translating the memory of his very long career and his experience into a geography of places, encounters and memories, leafing through the pages of Luca never spoke. Bologna, the taverns, the cellars, the sea, Berlin, Rome, Milan, the Apennines, the stages and friends become the rooms of a life that remains “in progress”. A silent and musical story, where identity takes shape through the cities crossed and the people loved.

Wednesday 16 September, at 5.30 pm, in the Gabelli Space, the spotlight will be on a face loved by the general public: the Venetian actor Andrea Pennacchi presents the book A Forest of Monkeys, an investigation that interweaves thriller, comedy and historical invention starting from the sources of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. On the inaugural day of the festival, at 9.30pm at the Spazio IZC Costruzioni in Largo San Giorgio, we will meet a protagonist who is decidedly familiar to the general television and radio audience: Serena Bortone tells pordenonelegge Le dirimpettaie, a female choral novel, three women who cross Italy from the 1960s to the new millennium: like three dancing valkyries, Tina, Gabriella and Maria complete their personal metamorphosis in a Roman condominium, from chatter on the landing to a daily friendship, made up of confidences, silences and mutual observations. And again on Wednesday 16 September, at 9.30pm, the actor Ascanio Celestini in Pasolini will be on stage at the Capitol. One life, or rather two, in collaboration with the Pier Paolo Pasolini Study Center of Casarsa: in a melee with memory, a portrait without filters that forces us to look our contradictions in the face. Telling not just one Pasolini, but at least two: the Friulian poet and the Roman director, the intellectual corsair and the fragile man, the prophet of the consumer society and the victim of the violence of one of the great ‘Italian mysteries’.

Browsing the program of ‘Words in scene’ again, on Saturday 19 September (7pm, PalaFumetto – Parco Galvani), Francesco Piccolo delves into Totò’s intimate twilight and his creative bond with Pasolini in the essay Cosa sono leCloud, focused on the last years of Antonio De Curtis. Pages capable of enclosing the melancholy and disappointments, the gestures of love and failures, the tragedy and creative flair of the great Neapolitan comedian. The mirror of a very human character, who for an entire existence has built his own immortality without knowing it. Thursday 17 September (9pm, Spazio Banca 360), the public will be able to find one of the great protagonists of Italian songwriting: Lucio is there. The life and music of Lucio Dalla is the title of the meeting which will feature Marcello Balestra, historic collaborator of the Bolognese artist. His book is the journey into the soul of an extraordinary man and into the hearts of those who lived alongside him for thirty years. Marcello Balestra describes Lucio Dalla with words and images not only as an artist, but as a friend, mentor, inspirer, illuminating the behind the scenes of artistic creation, the overwhelming energy of concerts, the unforgettable friendships and the laughter that illuminated difficult moments. The frontman of Tre allegri Ragazzi Morti, Davide Toffolo, will also stop at the festival, joined by the journalist and author Giulio D’Antona for a passionate reading with images, on the centenary of the birth of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli: together they will reconstruct the historic battles, the publication of Doctor Zhivago and the epic of the revolutionary publisher through the language of the graphic novel (Thursday 17 September, 9pm – Capitol). A further national preview will be the presentation – Thursday 17 September at 10.30 in the Largo San Giorgio Auditorium – of the essay Venice and cinema. At the roots of the myth, coming out from Wetlands, signed by the critic and film historian Giuseppe Ghigi. An investigation into the cultural myth of the city, introduced by the preface of the director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera: analyzing over six hundred feature films, the author tells how cinema has progressively eroded the substance of the real city, to replace it with a mass visual stereotype, documenting a collective imagination fueled by luxury hotels, gondolas and pigeons in Piazza San Marco.

Still on the cinematographic level, on Friday 18 September, at 5.30 pm in the Largo San Giorgio Auditorium, the journalist Antonio Caiazza presents the essay Una storia inconvenient. The secret war on the film with Mastroianni about Italians in Albania in the years of fascism, revealing the geopolitical background behind the boycott and censorship of the 1983 film The General of the Dead Army with Marcello Mastroianni. His investigation reconstructs the mysterious disappearance from Italian cinemas of the 1983 film The General of the Dead Army, directed by Luciano Tovoli: a work capable of reopening a historical wound in the relations between Italy and Albania.

On Sunday 20 September the event featuring the well-known television critic Aldo Grasso will stop at the festival: Dear television. A story of love and other feelings (12pm, Auditorium Istituto Vendramini) will focus its gaze on Italian television, becoming the great popular mirror of a country, with its vices, its passions, its talent and its trash. Aldo Grasso, in dialogue with Marco Damilano, retraces the profession of television critic claiming a curious and democratic gaze, capable of crossing successful programs and disastrous failures without snobbery or indulgence. And in pordenonelegge the biting irony of Arianna Porcelli Safonov will illuminate the contradictions of the present, offering a non-conformist reading of social customs. Saturday 19 September, at 9pm at the Capitol with Nostalgia dei dinosauri the paradoxes of our time will parade, among tired suburbs, art that marginalizes and forgotten music: demonstrating that humor can still save human existence. On a scientific level: on Wednesday 16 September, at 9.30pm in the Region’s Auditorium, the monologue of the popularizer Roberto Mercadini will focus on Galileo Galilei: I say the universe. The scientific revolution and Galileo: the unknown who shocked the world gives us a fascinating journey into the life and times of the great astronomer. To remember that the history of science is, first of all, an extraordinary human adventure.

On Friday 18 September the attention shifts to the historical memory of the territory: at 4.30pm at Spazio Zero, Luca Giuliani and Roberto Calabretto analyze Pasolini’s opera I Turcs tal Friùl and the evolution of its directions from 1976 to today. The event, in collaboration with Cinemazero, recounts the stagings after Pasolini’s death, by Elio De Capitani and now by Alessandro Serra. The overwhelming comedy of the Papu (Andrea Appi and Ramiro Besa) will be the common thread of the meeting scheduled for Saturday 19 September at 7pm at the Spazio IZC Costruzioni: the opportunity to present the volume of territorial portraits A laugh will bury us, dedicated to the great Pordenone figures from Lino Zanussi to Beato Odorico.

Sunday 20 September, at 6.30pm in the Civic Library, appointment with the Arlecchino Mondologo. Spiritual trilogy of the mask: Claudia Contin Arlecchino, Petra Alzetta and Sabrina Bastone guide us through the history, art and culture of the most iconic mask of the Commedia dell’arte. And ‘Words on stage’ will also host the aloud readings of Sara’s Library, on the theme Love in the great foreign classics, The voice of the roots, The horizon of freedom, Horizons of peace and the readings dedicated to Italian “sentimental” literature, from Wednesday to Saturday in the Sala Caminetto of Palazzo Montereale Mantica.