The organizing committee of A Mountain of Books, the international literature festival of Cortina d’Ampezzo, together with the friends of the Festival and all the collaborators who help its realization, is shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden, heartbreaking death of Vera Slepoj, Honorary President of A Mountain of Booksa festival she helped found in 2009, Honorary President of the Cortina d’Ampezzo Prize, friend of Cortina.
Vera Slepoj, a well-known psychologist, was found dead in her home, struck down by a probable heart attackhe was 70 years old
“I am personally heartbroken, we are all heartbroken together. It seems impossible at this moment to find the words to describe the great pain that the loss of Vera means for me and for us. It doesn’t feel real,” he says Francesco Chiamulera, Responsible for A Mountain of Books. “Moving between books, ideas, words, the profession of psychotherapist, and an unforgettable human trait, Vera had determined with her motivating and truly enthusiastic character the initial, decisive push for A Mountain of Books to be born. It was Vera who encouraged me in 2009 to start this which has become the most important adventure of a lifetime. For this I will forever be grateful. She was the one who thought of her name, A Mountain of Books. We were close and far away, without ever completely detaching ourselves. We spoke via text yesterday. Her latest book, Cortina’s unconscious, short texts accompanied by images by Lorenzo Capellini, was an act of love for the Ampezzo valley, published by Minerva. But Vera was so many things that I had the chance to get to know: her strong-willed and generous character, her messy and multifaceted flair, her voracious, uncontainable curiosity, her warmth and passion in personal relationships, an inexhaustible, astonishing desire to create. and start new things and projects, to reinvent himself, with a vibrant youth of mind, all his own. And then there are a thousand things that pertain to a personal relationship, between two, which testify to the infinite complexity of human relationships, which will remain in my heart forever and I will keep for the rest of my life.”
They join in mourning the death of Vera Slepoj: Gianluca LorenziMayor of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Roberta AlveràDeputy Mayor of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Gian Arturo FerrariPresident of the Jury of the Cortina d’Ampezzo Prize, Marina ValensisePresident of the Jury of the Cortina d’Ampezzo Mountain Award, la Sovilla family of Cortina.
“Vera Slepoj or generosity: this was the fundamental trait of her character. She wanted everyone to participate in those gifts, in those goods that she and her friends were able to dispense. Gifts and cultural goods, of course, because those of another nature were of little interest to her. Hence a flood of initiatives, an incessant busyness, a whole industrious hive of ideas, projects, committees, juries, trips and meetings. Vera dedicated herself body and soul, and without any personal compensation, to the promotion of culture, especially literary culture, in our country. And even if its range of action extended not only to the extreme South of Italy, but reached India, the Middle and the Far East, the ideal, emotional and affective center even before cultural, was always Cortina was and always has remained. Cortina as a pivot and as a symbol of an open, cordial and generous culture as she herself has been able to be”, says Gian Arturo Ferrari.
“I learned with pain the news of the sudden passing of Professor Vera Slepoj”, he adds Luca Zaiapresident of the Veneto Region, “ororiginally from Portogruaro and Paduan by adoption, she was an important figure in the last decades of social life in Veneto and throughout the country. She is among the professionals who deserve credit for having brought psychology to universal familiarity, with careful and competent dissemination work in the media as well as with her profession and academic activity. I would also like to remember her for the civic commitment with which she participated in public life, alongside and intertwined with that of a psychologist and sociologist. Commitment thanks to which she has managed to give lucid readings and answers to the new questions that are characterizing our society. In this painful moment, I express my closeness to her family and to those who loved her. I send you a thought.”
Photo credit: Giacomo Pompanin
