Multipli Forti: Day 3 of the Italian Literary Fiction Festival at Rizzoli

Please join us for the conclusion of this year's Multipli Forti: Voices from Contemporary Italian Literature, the third annual festival of contemporary Italian literature in New York.

The Italian Cultural Institute in New York

in collaboration with

FUIS (Italian Unitary Writers’ Federation) — THE BRIDGE Book Award – Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò New York University – CUNY Hunter College – CIMA (The Center for Italian Modern Art) — RIZZOLI Bookstore

present Multipli Forti: Voices from Contemporary Italian Literature, the third annual festival of contemporary Italian literature in New York.

To learn more about the event and see the full program, please click here.

ABOUT MULTIPLI FORTI 2024

Featured authors:
Francesca Archibugi, Annalena Benini, Matteo B. Bianchi, Giulia Calenda, Giulia Caminito, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Viola Di Grado, Alain Elkann, Emily Greenhouse, Isabella Hammad, Rea Hederman, Lorenza Honorati, Daniele Mencarelli, Andrea Molesini, Carmen Pellegrino, Saif Raja, Loretta Santini per Ada D’Adamo, Nadeesha Uyangoda, Alice Urciolo, Marina Valensise, Massimo Vallerani.

Featured themes:

We asked the guest authors—in conversation with each other and with American scholars, translators, editors and specialists—to reflect on six major themes of current literature. Each Multipli Forti event, at various places and times over the three days, will open with unpublished texts they have written as a response to these themes: the first is individual and collective destinies, along a line that connects Dante to contemporary attempts to write in the first person and, at the same time, still write about the whole world; we then move to “Italianness” itself, and how Italian literature is informed by foreign, alien and estranging, vital influences; to the encounter with reality, which connects the chivalric concept of inchiesta to the current political engagement and literary reportage; and to myth, as either a fellow or an enemy to history, as two reservoirs of images which blur the boundaries between shared notions of fantasy and reality and build communities. Then, we have the issue of bodies, to which we associate that of power (as an invitation to think about how power relations attempt to discipline our bodies in relation to political, literary, and psychological institutions); and, finally, the theme of Genius loci, the spirit of places, of vernacular and dialectal traditions in a land of proudly different territories, of the thin line separating the familiar from the unknown.

In addition to these six topics of discussion, this third edition will also deal with an issue that is at the core of our contemporary literature, namely the interaction and interweaving of fiction with audiovisual languages.

THE SCHEDULE AT RIZZOLI BOOKSTORE

2:00 p.m.

The Bridge Prize

With the 2023 winners - Loretta Santini for Ada D’Adamo, Isabella Hammad, Alison Cornish – the director of John D. Calandra Italian American Institute Anthony Tamburri and representatives of the institutions supporting the prize. Nominees for the 2024 edition will be announced.

Chairs Fabio Finotti - Maria Ida Gaeta

3:30 p.m.

Giulia Caminito – Saif Raja – Hope Campbell Gustafson - Aaron Robertson

Chairs Alessandro Giammei – Clara Ramazzotti

5:00 p.m.

Giancarlo De Cataldo - Daniele Mencarelli – Octavian Macewen – Alice Urciuolo

Chairs Chiara Benetollo - Luca Briasco