Wednesday 28 June 2023 at 12.00 at Trinity College Dublin – Long Room Hub
In the context of the International Conference “Italo Calvino and World Culture: A Hundred-Year Legacy”, you are warmly invited to the book launch of “Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore” (Hoepli 2023) (Calvino Makes the Shell: Construction of a Writer), with a talk by the author, Prof. Domenico Scarpa.
This book-sphere, or book-mosaic, aims to provide a vivid and detailed snapshot of the writer Italo Calvino. In fact, its ambition is to depict all the different identities that, under the same name Italo Calvino, have presented themselves to the audience disguised in diverse and surprising shapes.
Through the vivid metaphor of the shell, Scarpa will tell us how Calvino spent all his life constructing his short-stories, essays, novels, while he was simultaneously intent on constructing his self.
On the centenary of the author’s birth, Calvino fa la conchiglia – precise and charming like the perfect shell – revisits all the important milestones of Calvino’s life and work.
The event will be in English
Free admission upon registration here.
Domenico Scarpa (b. 1965) is a literary critic, publishing consultant, translator, and lecturer. He works for the Turin-based Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi since 2008. In this capacity, he authored the Annotations of The Complete Works of Primo Levi (ed. Ann Goldstein: New York, Liveright 2015) and edited or co-edited for Einaudi and Mondadori (with Fabio Levi, Martina Mengoni, Roberta Mori, and Daniela Muraca) several books by or on Levi: Così fu Auschwitz. Testimonianze 1945-1986; Album Primo Levi; Lezioni Primo Levi; Auschwitz, città tranquilla; Storie naturali.
In 2022, his Bibliografia di Primo Levi ovvero Il primo Atlante was published by Einaudi. Scarpa has also co-authored, with Valter Malosti, the stage version of Se questo è un uomo, and with Bruna Bertani the TV documentary Gli sci di Primo Levi.
Other authored works include: Storie avventurose di libri necessari (Gaffi, 2010), and Uno. Doppio ritratto di Franco Lucentini (:duepunti, 2011), overall winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2012. As an editor, Scarpa published the third volume of Atlante della letteratura italiana Einaudi titled Dal Romanticismo a oggi (2012); Opere di bottega (2019) by Fruttero & Lucentini, within the “Meridiani” Mondadori series. He is currently the editor of Natalia Ginzburg’s works for Einaudi and of Graham Greene’s novels for Sellerio.
Scarpa has been researching on Italo Calvino since the mid-1980s. His monograph Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore, recently published by Hoepli, Milan, summarizes his work to date on the Ligurian author.
Reservation no longer available