Hamburg – Literature, the “Poeta dell’aria” by Chicca Gagliardo stars in Germany

“Lightness” has always been very popular among Italian writers: from Guido Cavalcanti’s little spirits, Ariosto’s cruet on the Moon, Calvino’s cities, all the way to Daniele Del Giudice’s flights of fancy in the company of ghosts in moon-lit nights. These were all sources of inspiration for Chicca Gagliardo’s “Poeta dell’aria” (“Poet of the Air”). The Italian Institute of Culture in Hamburg will host a meeting with the authoress, moderated by Francesca Bravi in Italian and German, at 7 p.m. on 19 June. The event is organised in partnership with the Seminar of Roman Studies of the University of Kiel (CAU). Besides being a writer, journalist and curator of the “Ho un libro in testa” website, Chicca Gagliardo is primarily a careful observer of lightness in all its forms. “Il poeta dell’aria” is the sum total of all her thought, expressed in the form of a narrative, an invitation to a flight of fancy, a travel guide for a journey through poetry and imagination. The novel’s main character is the reader whom the poet talks to. It is us to whom the flight of fancy lessons are addressed: young and inexperienced, we neither know how to live “lightheartedly” nor how to seek the “beauty” in our lives. We learn something day after day: how to live our life and how to change its course, how to go with the current and exploit opportunities, how to take shelter from a storm and how not to succumb to daily worries in 33 chapters and 33 extremely dense daily classes. At the end however, we realize that, if we have paid attention, the world will seem a better place in which to live. Rarely has the voice of a young Italian authoress been so broadly echoed abroad. The “leggìIO” project launched by the Italian lectorship of the Seminar of Roman Studies of the University of Kiel promotes meetings between young Italian writers and their German readers. On the sidelines of the meeting of 15 June, a 150-page limited edition was published with excerpts from the novel in Italian and German.