Author Portraits

Classics that help you live
4 April / 2 May 2025

How can we look at the world that flows before us today without knowing what we have left behind? Part, Friday 4th April, the new edition of Portraits by experts – the classics that help you live. These are three appointments, under the direction of Gustavo Cecchini, where the protagonists are the classics of thought, those texts that They demonstrate an incredible vitality, from which we should take our cue for all forms of resistance, civil, cultural, and human, to which we are called every day. The question, then, is not whether the classics are still relevant, the question is whether we are relevant to the classics, because most likely we are not. The classics remain and each time they tell us something new. Rereading a classic, then, means becoming aware of the reasons behind this present and having the tools to understand it better and change it when the need arises. It is the path that reveals the challenge that the seekers of yesterday's thought throw to today's sedentary travellers.

To open the review è Marcello Veneziani, Friday 4th April, with a lesson dedicated to Giacomo Leopardi from the title: “L‘Sublime Leopardi, the terrible Giacomo”. Giacomo Leopardi He is the only great poet and man of letters from the distant past who still lives on in our forgetful present. Not Manzoni, not Foscolo, and not even Dante. Films and essays are dedicated to Leopardi, and even anniversaries of his poems, like the «Infinito», are celebrated. The Leopardian line is expressed on two fronts: the properly philosophical and existential, through the desperate metaphysics of the Self in a cosmos devoid of meaning; and the civil and social, critical of the rhetorical, consolatory, and apparent dimension of public life. Yet he was mistreated in his time, as he himself wrote: "I am here, mocked, spat upon, kicked by everyone, spending my entire life in a room..." Inadequate for the world, without comforting ways of escape, Leopardi laid bare the truth of life. Relentlessly. Though solitary, he remains the most fraternal among poets and thinkers. He was an incomparable genius. The greatness of poetry, the misery of life; a dwarf in many senses, a giant in literature. Giacomo passes, Leopardi remains.

On the second date, Friday 11 April, the philosopher will be the protagonist Adriana Cavarero with a reading titled: Hannah Arendt and the taste of freedom. The experience of 20th-century totalitarianism has fostered the belief that freedom begins where politics ends. Hannah Arendt rejects this common sentiment and the idea prevalent in much philosophical tradition that freedom is an inner state, an intimate space where individuals can evade external coercion and feel free even if they are enslaved. Freedom is not an attribute of the will, but of doing and acting. Man experiences being free as a concrete reality in his life in the world, in the public sphere, and in his relationships with other men. To be free, man must not only be liberated from material necessity but must also be able to actively participate in a community of citizens. Because, as the great German thinker reminds us with rigour and passion, and which is an encomium of «freedom is the reason for politics.».

Closure, Friday 2nd May Con Massimo Cacciari e a lecture dedicated to Kafka. .“”There is no "spiritual world" exists," states Franz Kafka in his Diary. 2024 marked one hundred years since the death of Franz Kafka. The great writer from Prague has left a profound mark on world literature, moving within narrow spaces, changing realities, states of mind put on paper like labyrinthine and almost unattainable buildings. His short life (just over forty years) spanned crucial years between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and highlighted a rare ability to narrate and confront the depths of the soul, both private and collective. Cacciari will pay tribute to the great writer who investigated the human psyche.

The meetings will be held at the Astra Cinema and Theatre in Misano Adriaticovia D’Annunzio, 20) starting at 21:00

Free entry until all places are filled.

• Public Library 0541618484
• IAT Misano 0541615520