On Friday 26 April 2024, at 6.30 pm, at the Provincial Library “Bernardini” of Lecce there will be the presentation of the volume of stories with illustrations “Flagship of all rafts” (Musicaos Editore) by Paolo Colavero, Massimiliano Mandorlo, illustrated by “DrBestia” (Andrea Cavallini), with an introduction by Vincenzo Costantino Chinaski and with an introductory story by the Greek writer Sotirios Pastakas.
The meeting, moderated by the publisher Luciano Pagano, will be attended by the authors, Paolo Colavero and Massimiliano Mandorlo, and the illustrators Andrea Cavallini and Letizia Mastromauro, who during the presentation, also thanks to the suggestive setting of the press room in the Bernardini library, will perform live some linocuts among those that make up the illustrations in the volume.
All sincere literature is a double journey there and back, with escapes, confusions and losses, without compasses or sextants, in the great sea of the internet and in the suburbs, in the alleys as in the arteries, in the dry rivulets where the last drop of beer blends with laughter, moods, prayers.
“Flagship of all rafts” is an orchestra of colors and songs colored with the white and blue of a new maritime republic on the road. A work of art that can be looked at and read aloud, where stories for professional castaways and indications for getting lost without ever getting lost find completeness. Meetings and dialogues with mythical everyday characters and authentic poets such as Franco Loi, Milo De Angelis, in the outskirts of Milan, between Salento, Italy, Mexico and Greece.
Paolo Colavero and Massimiliano Mandorlo wrote the stories that drBestia (aka Andrea Cavallini) illustrated and printed with linocut technique. Vincenzo Costantino Cinaski, with an introduction and Sotirios Pastakas with a note by him, are the first to have sighted land from the flagship, ensuring the crossing by expert navigators. Readers who set sail aboard this book will thus discover a new atlas and new stars.
Paolo Colavero (Maglie 1980) immediately took Chatwin’s theory on the nomadic nature of the human being very seriously, applying himself to the exploration of the surrounding areas, the state roads and the coast, preferably moving beyond the Otranto Canal and beyond the Alps. He started reading on the trains that took him to Urbino, where he discovered himself, rebetiko, psychopathology, some irrecoverable friends, but above all tsipouro. A lover of phenomenology and Georges Perec, he lives on other people’s stories, trying to invent his own, and for some time, with mixed success, he has dedicated himself to learning the neo-Greek language and the bouzouki.
