LIBRI IN CANTINA – the national fair of small and medium publishing – TURNS 20 AND… REINVENTS ITSELF.
All eyes are on Libri in Cantina which this year reaches an important milestone: the famous fair dedicated to small and medium publishing celebrates its twentieth anniversary. The event is at Castello San Salvatore in Susegana (Treviso), on October 5 and 6, 2024.
Such an important birthday certainly deserved reflection. Hence the turning point and the significant change of pace, under the banner… of slowness.
The 2024 edition is indeed titled “LentaMente” and aims to revolutionize the Treviso festival. After all, 20 years have flown by. They have been 20 years full of meetings with publishers and authors, book presentations and projects, research, culture, and territory. The event has arrived at its twentieth edition so quickly that it seemed necessary to everyone… to slow down. The people at Libri in Cantina were visionaries even 20 years ago. The fair had bet on small publishing, always a niche sector. Dedicating resources, energy, and ideas to cultural production. A winning bet, even though it was by no means a foregone conclusion. The book, instead, persists. Becoming the undisputed protagonist of our region’s cultural offering.
What to propose differently then?
Fewer meetings with authors, but all of the highest quality and with more time.
For example, the one with Franco Arminio, poet and land scholar, who will stop on the very green holm oak terrace of Palazzo Odoardo. Who better than Arminio could be the witness for this change of pace of the festival? Arminio, always, like a dowser, searches for the vein where words full of meaning and light still flow. His verses offer themselves as an opportunity to open the heart to wonder, they sing the importance of paying attention to the tiny to feel part of the immense. The author has made a banner of his love for his village (Bisaccia, in Irpinia) – which he never left, staying and resisting depopulation – founding paesologia, an ethical discipline that teaches us to love the landscape. Even the inner one.
Similarly Matteo Saudino, creator of Barbasophia, a place of virtual dissemination that combines the two most obvious peculiarities of the author: beard and philosophy. Saudino teaches history and philosophy to kids and writes books. To tell us serious things but with brilliant flourishes that take history out of the dust to transport it into the contemporary.
Writer, YouTuber, and activist, Saudino tests tools and sharpens minds to reason about society, politics, institutions, education, rights, and social justice, because “doing philosophy – as he always repeats – is an act of rebellion”.
And also new collaborations with partners already friends of the fair: the Benetton Foundation Studies and Research for a qualified look at the landscape. And with the Stepan Zavrel Foundation, international school of illustration, with the suggestions of fantasy.
What to expect then?
Not the usual bulimic festival where you jump from one theme or author to another. Not the usual presentation, then, but a day chatting under the holm oak, drawing in a meadow, thinking while looking at the landscape, listening to music. Long encounters that satisfy the spirit.
Slow presentations that whet the appetite for knowledge, make us hungry for books, greedy for stories. But also for walks. With noses up, looking at the sky, immersed in the green of our hills: a place that seems to come from a fairy tale book.
Today everything is fast: culture is consumed and often not savored, we are in contact with the whole world and in relation with no one. We really need to slow down.
LentaMente proposes a different rhythm, to give the soul time to catch up with us. Because thought needs time: to leave room for imagination; to fully enjoy words.
But also to contemplate the landscape, to listen to silence, to feel the scents. To remain human.
