Italo Calvino is among the Italian writers who need no introduction. His novels including the trilogy Our Ancestors, Difficult Loves, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Invisible Cities, just to name a few, are modern classics that have accompanied and continue to accompany generations of readers in Italy and around the world.
A light conversation with Domenico Scarpa, author of Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore published last year by Hoepli, will offer an insight into the life and works of one of the most influential Italian authors of the second half of the 20th century.
The meeting, moderated by professor Eugenio Bolongaro, is open to the curious and fans of the writer and will be held in French.
Wednesday, February 14th, 2024 – 6:30pm
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
1200, av. Dr. Penfield
Montréal, Québec
Domenico Scarpa is a literary critic, publishing consultant, translator, and lecturer. He has worked for the Turin-based Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi since 2008 and has edited or co-edited for Einaudi and Mondadori several books by or on Levi. Scarpa has also been – for 25 years – the editor of almost all the books by Natalia Ginzburg published by Einaudi; particularly noteworthy are his editions of Tutto il teatro (2005), Un’assenza. Racconti, memorie, cronache 1933-1988 (2016), Vita immaginaria (2021); he is currently editing the 1934-36 correspondence between Leone and Natalia Ginzburg. Scarpa has been researching Italo Calvino since the mid-1980s and his monumental centenary monograph Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore (2023) published by Hoepli summarizes his work to date. Moreover, since 2019, Scarpa has been the editor of Graham Greene’s novels for Sellerio.
Eugenio Bolongaro is a professor at McGill University. His research focuses on Italian literature and film from the end of World War 2 to the present. Among his publications, we’d like to mention Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, where Prof. Bolongaro examines the fictional works published by Calvino during the 1950s and early 1960s and relates them to the intellectual debates that took place in Italy at the time, such as the debate surrounding neorealism and the commitment of intellectuals. In his work, Prof. Bolongaro has tackled Italian cinematic neorealism, US writer Thomas Pynchon’s works and contemporary Italian writers.
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