La festa della parola. Le fiabe di Giovan Battista Basile

On Tuesday, September 29 at 6:00 p.m. there will be a presentation of the book by Antonella Silvestrini "The Celebration of Words. The Tales of Giovan Battista Basile" (Edizioni ETS) in a conversation with Rosetta Girotto Cannarella.

In this book, Antonella Silvestrini provides an interpretation of five tales taken from “Lo cunto de li cunti”, also known as “Pentamerone”, the posthumous masterpiece of Giovan Battista Basile (1566-1632), a courtier and Neapolitan writer, written in an overflowing language rich with games and inventions, celebrating life in its anomalies, its paradoxes, its contradictions, and its unprecedented folds.
The author explores the tales, restoring their value and modernity. The richness of the language in Basile's stories serves as a pretext to reflect on life and its nuances through the reading of images, stereotypes, and parody.
Thanks to linguistic analysis, in the “cunti” Antonella Silvestrini highlights the ideas and inventions that make the journey light and surprising and debunk the ever-relevant sketches of social envy, the obliging family, the fear of old age, the fear of the end of time, and the belief in destiny. “To realize that the journey is made up of acquisitions and not of stages,” writes the author, “frees one from placing oneself in an ideal journey and from always imagining oneself either ahead of or behind the ideal destination or social expectations, dissatisfied and regretful, with the head turned backward.”