On Saturday at 10am the Urbino Capoluogo association will host the writer Umberto Piersanti at its headquarters in via Matteotti 21 who will present his latest book “La Giostra di Federico” (Affinità elective, 2024), a gripping historical novel, fourth issue of the series “I quaderni di Athena”, published with the contribution of the Pantarei company of Petriano and dedicated to the chivalric tournament of 1451 during which Federico da Montefeltro lost his right eye. In the Piersanti joust, the famous tournament during which the Italian Renaissance risked losing one of its greatest supporters before he could create his marvelous city in the form of a palace which today would be just an anonymous village lost in the mountains, is the backdrop to the events of a series of characters of the time, outlined by the author with delicate hatchings, sometimes poetic, sometimes pictorial. Daily lives of young artists, poets, courtiers, hermits, who will not end up in books or even in the chronicles of the time, crossed together like threads in a weaving. The result is a colorful tapestry of various humanity destined to accommodate the clash between Guidangelo de’ Ranieri and Federico, the epilogue of a novel in which Piersanti’s pen always flows in the balance between prose and poetry, always with the usual mastery that makes reading of the book a journey through time without the weight of suitcases.
Tiziano Mancini
