Vittorio Sermonti, born in Rome in 1929, is a writer, a translator for theater, a radio and TV journalist, a professor of Italian-Latin in high school at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica, a novelist, a poet. From the nineties he has combined his work as author, translator for theater and poetry and professor with his interest in the relationship between writing and reading. Between 1997 and 2007 he recites a few classics - from the Aeneid of Virgil to Dante's Divine Comedy - in crowded public reading rooms.

Monday November 22nd 2010 at Palazzo Grassi, at 5pm

Gianni Biondillo was born in Milan in 1966. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture Politecnico in Milan. He published for the Universal Exhibition of Architecture directed by Bruno Zevi, Carlo Levi and Elio Vittorini. Writings on Architecture (1997) and Giovanni Michelucci. Brani di città aperti a tutti (1999). In 2001 he published, for Unicopli: Pasolini. Il corpo della città, with an introduction by Vincenzo Consolo, and in 2008, for Guanda, a collection of essays on architecture, territory and society, Metropoli per precipianti. He published his first novel, Per cosa si uccide, in 2004.

Thursday October 28th 2010 at Palazzo Grassi, at 5pm

The cycle Stories of Art continues with a meeting with Michael Cunningham.
Michael Cunningham grew up in Los Angeles and lives in New York. For Bompiani he published: The hours (1999), translated into twenty-seven languages and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Award Grinzane Cavour 2000 for the Section Foreign Fiction, Flesh and Blood (2000), for which he received the Whiting Writer's Award, A Home at the End of the World (2001), Mr. Brother (2002), Land's End: A Walk through Provincetown (2003) and Specimen Days (2007).

Thursday June 24th at Palazzo Grassi, at 5pm

The cycle Stories of Art continues with a meeting with Francesco Bonami.
Born in Florence in 1955, Francesco Bonami has lived and worked in New York since 1987. He was the curator of the 75th Whitney Biennial of American Art that took place in New York in 2010 and designated by François Pinault as a co-curator with Alison Gingeras of the exhibition Mapping the Studio at Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in June 2009.

Thursday May 27th 2010 at Palazzo Grassi, at 9pm

"Painting or writing are, for me, basically the same thing. Whether I am writing or painting, I am pursuing the same aim: to tell a story.” (Dino Buzzati).

Monday March 29th at Palazzo Grassi, at 5 pm

Edoardo Boncinelli, former professor of Biology and Genetics at the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, was Director of SISSA, the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste. Member of Academia Europaea and of the EMBO, the European Organization for Molecular Biology, he was President of the Società Italiana di Biofisica e Biologia Molecolare. In 2005, he received the EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences.

Thursday February 25th at Palazzo Grassi, at 5 pm

The next lecture of the cycle Stories of Art will be held on 25 February 2010, again at Palazzo Grassi at 5 pm. This time the prestigious guest will be Melania G. Mazzucco, who will talk on the theme of L’angelo di Tintoretto. Winner of the Premio Strega in 2003, Melania G. Mazzucco would, in 2009, win various awards – including the Premio Bagutta – for her latest novel Tintoretto e i suoi figli. Storia di una famiglia veneziana (published by Rizzoli) which recounts the final days in the life of the painter Tintoretto.


Photo: © Riccardo De Luca

Monday January 25th at Palazzo Grassi, 5pm

The eclectism of Umberto Eco gives vertigo: philosopher, medievalist, semiotician, international columnist, translator of French and British nineteenth-century authors, world specialist of James Joyce, friend and librettist of musicians such as Luciano Berio and great connoisseur of contemporary art. He wrote numerous essays and five novels. In 2004 he edited the volume illustrated History of Beauty followed in 2007 by the History of Ugliness. In November 2009 was invited by the Louvre in Paris, where he supervised the review of The Vertigo of the List, which inspired his latest book.

Photo: © Lea Crespi