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“The world is a village. The village is a world “: the “remaining” and the return, in the work of Vito Teti, anthropologist and full professor at the University of Calabria. (IIC MONTREAL WEBINAR SERIES)

The Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal is pleased to present the work of Vito Teti, a work “of science and poetry”, as Claudio Magris once defined it, referring to one of his particular books. Anthropologist and professor at the University of Calabria, Teti has written a large number of books, including Pietre di pane, published in 2011 for Quodlibet, Macerata. Pietre di pane has been masterfully translated into English by Francesco Loriggio and Damiano Pietropaolo and published in 2018 by the Canadian publishing house Guernica Editions with the title Stones into Bread. The presentation will be attended by Vito Teti, Francesco D’Arelli, Connie Guzzo McParland, Francesco Loriggio and Damiano Pietropaolo.

Thursday, July 9, 3:00 pm EST

Click here to register

The anthropology of travel, emigration and the ethnography of abandonment are the paths particularly loved and traveled by Vito Teti, to the point of revealing step by step the sensitivity and the hidden soul of the places now imperceptible in the daily life of contemporary society, submerged by the clatter and the reflection of the images. And so when he writes in the Prologue. Del restare on Pietre di pane, almost like a prodigy: “Moving about in cities, scouring on foot the outskirts and the marginalities that constitute them, crossing villages and the surrounding countryside, looking at the newly-arrived and getting to know them requires that one be versed in the art of walking slowly, quietly, often in solitude and with circumspection. I know people who have travelled much and seen nothing. I’ve met others who have been all over and have never walked, and yet others who have always stood still where they are and known the world. Now that the far-away is no longer far but nearby, “easily negotiable perhaps even domestic,” as Antonio Prete writes, and “can be found at home, on the computer monitor, the display of cell phones, the sound that reaches us in the headphones we have on,” the undiscovered and the unexpected are perhaps to be found in places apparently closest to us, at times those we inhabit and that perhaps have become the most distant, the most far away and unrecognizable ones.”

Vito Teti is the founder and current director of the Centre for the Study of the Anthropologies and the Literatures of the Mediterranean at the University of Calabria, where he also holds the chair in cultural anthropology. In his research he has devoted particular attention to the eating habits of the peoples of the Mediterranean area, to the anthropology of travel and migration, to rituals and feasts in traditional and contemporary societies, to the representations of the Italian South. He is the author of various collections of essays, of historical novels, of short stories (which have been translated in English, French and Spanish), as well as of photo reportages and ethnographic documentaries. Among his most recent publications are Pietre di pane (Quodlibet, 2011; Stones into bread, Guernica Editions, 2018); Il patriota e la maestra (Quodlibet, 2012) Maledetto Sud (Einaudi, 2013; Fine pasto. Il cibo che verrà (Einaudi 2015); Terra Inquieta. Antropologia dell’erranza meridionale, (Rubbettino, 2015); Storia del peperoncino. Cibi, simboli e culture tra Mediterraneo e mondo (Donzelli, 2016); Quel che resta. L’Italia dei paesi, tra abbandono e ritorno, (Donzelli, 2017); A filo doppio. Un’antologia di scritture calabro-canadesi (Donzelli, 2017; con Francesco Loriggio); Prevedere l’imprevedibile. Presente, passato e futuro in tempo di coronavirus (Donzelli, 2020)

Francesco Loriggio is Professor Emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has published extensively on both modern Italian literature and Italian Canadian literature. As a translator, he has rendered into English theatre by Achille Campanile (The Inventor of the Horse and Other Short Plays, Guernica Editions) and into Italian poetry and prose by Italian Canadian authors. He has also edited various collections of essays and anthologies, including A doppio filo. Un’antologia di scritture calabro-canadesi (Donzelli, 2017), with Vito Teti.

Toronto’s Damiano Pietropaolo is an award winning writer/broadcaster, director, translator, and educator. Translations include: selections from Italian Renaissance drama and dramatic theory (Sources of Dramatic Theory, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ugo Betti’s The Queen and the Rebels (Pro Arte Productions, 1997); The Fellini Radio Plays, translated and adapted for the stage from radio plays by Federico Fellini (Stratford Festival 2002); a play Love Letters from the Empty Bed, adapted from Ovid’s Heroides, (staged at the Glenn Morris Studio Theatre and the Canadian Opera Company’s Bradshaw Amphitheatre, 2012); and the novel Between Rothko and Three Windows: Murder at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Quattro books, 2016). Essays, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Saturday Night Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Grail Magazine, CBC Radio, and Il Quotidiano della Calabria. As editor, director and producer Damiano explored the theme of exile and return and the emergence of a post-national drama in such series as Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration (Scirocco Books, 2005), Little Italies (2006, CBC Audio Books, 2007). Essays, poetry and short fiction have been translated into Italian and published in A doppio filo. Un’antologia di scritture calabro-canadesi (Donzelli, 2017), edited by Francesco Loriggio and Vito Teti.

President and co-director of Guernica Editions, Connie Guzzo McParland holds a BA in Italian Literature and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. In 2017, she received the David McKeen Award for creative writing for her thesis-novel, Girotondo. In 2005, an excerpt from this novel, Verso Halifax, won second prize of the Premio Letterario Cosseria in Cosseria, Italy. Her novel The Girls of Piazza d’Amore (Linda Leith Publishing, 2013) was shortlisted for the Concordia First Novel Award by the Quebec Writer’s Federation. Her second novel, The Women of Saturn was published in 2017 by Inanna Publications and will be published in Italian by Rubbettino Editore.