To mark the 100th anniversary of Italo Calvino’s birth and as part of the initiatives organised by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation to celebrate the great author, the Italian Embassy in Bulgaria and the Italian Cultural Institute of Sofia are presenting the exhibition “Calvino qui e altrove” (Calvino here and elsewhere) from 1 September. Produced by Fondazione Mondadori and Laboratorio Calvino on the initiative of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Italian Cooperation, the exhibition offers a visual itinerary of the covers of Calvino’s most famous books in eight trilingual panels (Italian/Bulgarian/English) to reconstruct the journey of his works around the world, “here and elsewhere”.
A ninth panel set up for the exhibition in Bulgaria presents Calvino’s literary fortune in this country. It is a way of recounting in images the international fortune of the author and his characters.
Each panel of the exhibition is dedicated to one of Calvino’s works and contains, among other things, a wide selection of Italian and foreign covers and quotations, as well as the work’s incipits and endings. The covers reproduced, in many cases relating to volumes that are difficult to obtain, come from the holdings of Laboratorio Calvino and constitute a still unpublished source that can stimulate comparison between scholars, translators, publishers and readers from all countries.
The curator of the Bulgarian version of the exhibition is Prof. Daria Karapetkova.
