“Come d’Aria” by Ada D’Adamo (published by Elliot) is undoubtedly the book of 2023. The writer, screenwriter and journalist Elena Stancanelli talks about it like this: «Come d’aria is a magical book. You read it and think that no one can cope with so much anguish, and at the same time you think that no, it’s not true, it can be done because they have done it and many people can do it, because this is nothing other than life ».
Saturday 4 May at 6pm at Palazzo Della Corgna last spring appointment of “Narrations: stories, tales, writings”, the book and culture format of the Municipality of Castiglione del Lago, in collaboration with the bookshop “Libri Parlanti Books & Coffee” and the Municipal Library. It will be Loretta Santini, editorial director of Elliot and editor of the book, interviewed by Maria Grazia Virgilio of Libri Parlanti, who will talk about the winner of the 2023 Strega Prize and the author Ada D’Adamo, who passed away prematurely last year after a long illness.
It was Elena Stancanelli herself who proposed it in March among the nominations for the 2023 Strega Prize, launching it towards winning the most prestigious Italian literary prize with this motivation: «“Come d’aria” is a book that searches inside the heart of the reader. The exact and implacable language of this writer was needed to be able to sustain such a ferocious feeling. There is all the anger and all the love in the world in the story of this dance that binds two women. Clinging to each other, in absolute and mutual dependence. Daria, her daughter, who communicates only through her irresistible smile, Ada, her mother, catapulted into this love story despite her. She was a dancer, Ada. And the body of both is the center of this “memoir” dazzling with intelligence, courage and mercy. You enter this book with enormous ease, but you leave this book changed. There is such an amount of life in its pages that it leaves us breathless. There is us, the effort, our useless beauty. From the first reading I thought it was a golden nugget, a gift, a hug. As Bobi Bazlen would have said, a perfect and lacerating “first time”.
The book collects the story of Daria, whose fate has been marked since birth by a missed diagnosis. Ada is her mother, who on the threshold of fifty years old discovers that she has fallen ill. This discovery becomes an opportunity for her to address her daughter directly and tell their story. Everything passes through the bodies of Ada and Daria: daily hardships, anger, secrets, but also unexpected joys and moments of infinite tenderness. Words cross time, in a constant intertwining of past and present. A story of extraordinary strength and truth, in which every moment experienced is offered to the reader as a gift.
Ada D’Adamo was an Italian author. She was born in Ortona in 1967, she graduated from the National Dance Academy and graduated in Entertainment Disciplines. You have spent a lot of time observing the body and its variations on the contemporary scene, and you have written about it in several essays on dance and theatre. In 2023, Come d’aria, the book that won the Premio Strega Giovani and the Premio Strega 2023, was published by Elliot Edizioni.
A few days after her nomination for the award, Ada D’Adamo, who had been fighting an illness for some time, passed away in Rome. Elliot’s publishing house made the announcement: “A little piece of our heart goes with her.”
Entrance to the meetings is free: reservations on 075.9658260, 075.951822 and 348.6416096.
