“Letter 40 writers? They are the ones who discriminate”

“They are the ones who discriminate, not us.” This was stated by the Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, on the sidelines of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Il Giornale in Milan, regarding the letter sent by forty writers to the director of the Frankfurter Buchmesse Jürgen Boos and to the president of the Aie Innocenzo Cipolletta.

“If you look at the list of writers who were invited to the Buchmesse, then you go through the publishers’ association, there are many writers who think very differently from me and it’s good that they are there. I’m happy that there are people who think differently from me but who can freely express their thoughts,” Sangiuliano said. “It seems to me that the problem is that we added someone to this list. So it’s them who are discriminating, not us,” the minister added, highlighting that “Saviano himself had not been reported by his publisher despite this Mauro Mazza invited him, but what more should we do?”

Valensise does not sign the letter

When you participate in an “international demonstration” you do not represent the government in office but Italy. It is in light of this motivation that the journalist and writer Marina Valensise did not sign the letter sent to Jurgen Boos, director of the Buchmesse, and to Innocenzo Cipoletta, president of the Italian Publishers Association, by forty writers who express their “concern” for the management implemented by our country, complaining about “political interference”.

“I too – Valensise tells AdnKronos – received this letter and I did not sign it. I think that when someone represents Italy, they represent the country and not the Italian government. Therefore, going to an international demonstration with a hostile spirit towards the institutions does not seem to me to be the right choice”, observes Valensise who reflects: “We do not move in a local, territorial or municipal context where we can assert the factions of one over the others, but we move in an international context. We do not represent the government, we are representatives of the culture and of the Italian nation”.

“In short – says Valensise – the idea of ​​placing oneself in a situation of antagonism with the institutions does not seem good to me. That is why I did not join”. If a writer is invited “to participate in an international event, he represents the national culture and not the government. He must therefore respect the mandate that places him as a voice of Italian literature or culture. I also think – but it is a hypothesis – that if Saviano had been invited he would have refused the invitation. So in the face of a possible refusal, perhaps the organizers thought it best to ignore it. It is a hypothesis that I make, I have no elements to say so”, specifies Valensise.

Fields: “I received the letter and I did not join”

“I received the letter and I did not join”. This is what historian Alessandro Campi, who did not sign the letter sent to Boos and Cipolletta, told AdnKronos.

“I do not agree with Giordano’s letter’s polemical aim, not even too implicit: to accredit the idea that in Italy there is a climate of intolerance and persecution against writers and intellectuals. And that the blame for this climate would be, it goes without saying, the right-wing government in office. The alarmism that they want to spread is surreal and even a little ridiculous. In reality, in Italy there is a regime of full cultural pluralism that certain circles of the left, self-referential, not interested in the comparison of ideas, not without intolerant streaks, accustomed to having every cultural space under their control, evidently do not like. Among the one hundred authors called to represent Italy in Frankfurt, just read their names, the most diverse sensibilities and experiences are represented. Why do they not want to recognize it just for a banal and manifest ideological prejudice disguised as moral indignation?”, Campi asks.

The letter signed by 40 writers

From Silvia Avallone to Nicola Lagioia, passing through authors such as Dacia Maraini, Donatella Di Pietrantonio and Melania Mazzucco. Writers who are joined by Mario Desiati, Paolo Giordano, Maurizio de Giovanni, Chiara Valerio and Sandro Veronesi. These are some of the 40 writers who have taken pen and paper to write to the director of the Frankfurter Buchmesse Jürgen Boos and the president of the Aie Innocenzo Cipolletta in which they express “concern” underlining the fact that “Italy will be present at the Buchmesse in an insular way, through a program of duets between Italian authors, an anomaly that we know has few precedents in the history of the host countries and that denotes a serious lack of cultural and editorial strategy on the part of the extraordinary commission appointed in Italy”.

The signatories of the letter, including Teresa Ciabatti, Mauro Covacich, Marco Missiroli and Emanuele Trevi, return to the exclusion of Roberto Saviano, judging it “too obvious not to be a deliberate act” and stressing that “it is not an isolated event in Italy. It is part of a sequence of abuses, of different forms and severity, which we have witnessed in the last two years”. For these reasons, they ask for “a moment of public meeting with German writers”, and more generally international ones, during the Buchmesse 2024, in which to discuss “precisely these topics, outside the limited spaces that have been designed by the Italian commission for us”.

Completing the list of writers who signed the letter are: Viola Ardone; Andrea Bajani; Marco Balzano; Guido Barbujani; Franco Buffoni; Giulia Caminito; Olga Campofreda; Mauro Covacich; Antonio Franchini; Vins Gallico; Igort; Helena Janeczek; Vivian Lamarque; Ginevra Lamberti Vincenzo Latronico; Beatrice Masini; Francesca Melandri; Daniele Mencarelli; Valeria Parrella; Rosella Postorino; Paolo Rumiz; Roberto Saviano; Antonio Scurati; Gianluigi Simonetti; Fabio Stassi; Carlo Vecce; Alice Urciuolo.

“Each of us – the writers underline – would have liked, during our stay in Frankfurt, to interact with the protagonists of German publishing and not only, with our European and international colleagues, in a historical moment in which we need more than ever to feel like we belong to a unique culture. Instead, Italy will be present at the Buchmesse in an insular way, through a program of duets between Italian authors, an anomaly that we know has few precedents in the history of the host countries and that denotes a serious lack of cultural and editorial strategy on the part of the extraordinary commission in charge in Italy. Only the initiative of the individual authors and their German publishers will allow us to at least partially overcome this reckless approach”.

: Regarding the ‘Saviano case’ the authors state that “Commissioner Mazza provided an answer that left many of us indignant, so much so that some of the guests decided not to participate in the delegation. The clumsy attempt to explain the exclusion with bureaucratic reasons only made us even more disheartened. Although the Buchmesse reacted immediately by inviting Saviano, the wound was profound for many of us, and remains. From that moment we started a process of collective discussion, in which many of the Italian delegates participated together with other colleagues, an unusual process for writers, the outcome of which is first of all this letter that we are addressing to you. What we would like to be clear is that ‘the Saviano incident at the Buchmesse’ is not an isolated event in Italy. It is part of a sequence of abuses, of different forms and severity, that we have witnessed in the last two years and of which we are often the object, individual events that show an explicit desire for increasingly suffocating interference by the politics in cultural spaces. This interference is expressed not only in the systematic occupation of every decision-making role in culture according to criteria of political loyalty, but also in more or less explicit forms of censorship, in personal attacks aimed at discrediting and in an unscrupulous use of complaints against writers, journalists and intellectuals by those who occupy positions of power”.

“All this, we think, is unacceptable within the Europe in which we believe. And it is irreconcilable with a healthy expression of democracy. The outcome of the last European elections has added to these considerations on the bitter condition of Italian culture a sense of anxiety about what could happen in the future in other countries. And it pushes us to share with you – and through you with the entire community of authors and readers, with the entire publishing world – our discomfort”, the writers conclude in their letter.