Passioni Italiane will first and foremost be a great festival of authors, but also an international stage for Sicily, which is increasingly at the heart of the cultural scene and a source of artistic and literary inspiration.
“I am happy to take part to the Paris Book Festival’ – says Antonella Ferrara, President and Artistic Director of the Taobuk International Book Festival. ‘This year the Festival will see Italy as Guest country and will also open a cultural window on Sicily, thanks to the meeting with Stefania Auci and Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, two extraordinary tellers of a land that is both the Mediterrean cultural point of gravity and a source of inspiration for its intellectuals. Moreover, the literary Sicily has often turned its gaze to France: the Sicilian writers from Verism, such as Luigi Capuana, Federico De Roberto and Giovanni Verga, were influenced by French naturalism; Sciascia read Voltaire; Camilleri adopted Georges Simenon’s Maigret for Italian television,’
‘This meeting will also be an opportunity to tell the French public about the creative richness cultural, editorial and artistic wealth of the Island, the same wealth that every year enlivens Taobuk Festival in Taormina and that on 23 April will be ideally retraced in Paris through a semantic walk inside a ‘decomposed vocabulary’ made up of names, themes and topoi of literary Sicily of the last century. Auci and Buttafuoco have a different pen, but a common sensibility capable of delving into Sicily’s millenary history and ferrying it outside its regional coordinates, fixing an image of our land that lasts trought time, speaks to an international audience and rises to the status of cultural archetype and living imprint of all Mediterranean cultures’.
During the Parisian week, space will be given to two parallel paths: Italy’s participation as Guest of Honour at the Festival du Livre de Paris (from 21 to 23 April at the Grand Palais Éphémère) and the eighth edition of ITALISSIMO, the Festival of Italian Literature and Culture (from 18 to 23 April in different venues around the city). And it will include over fifty special ambassadors of our country’s creativity: women writers, invited to present their most recent books and translations coming onto the French-speaking market, in a moving snapshot of national publishing, including fiction and non-fiction, travel and children’s literature, poetry, philosophy, history, music, and much more.
