Shelley Project will be present with its own info point at Lucca Città di Carta, the free-entry cultural festival entirely dedicated to books and paper which will be held in the splendid historical setting of the Royal College of Lucca tomorrow 27th and Sunday (28th April).
Shelley Project (click here) is a format that was born around the figure of Mary Shelley and to his famous novel Frankenstein which was published for the first time in 1818, the year in which the Shelleys arrived in Italy, and after Venice and other cities, barely touched, with visits of a few days, they decided to settle for a few months in Bagni di Lucca. It is said that precisely that summer, in the garden of Villa Bertini, Mary Shelley began to revise her novel which was published again, first in France in 1823, and then in 1831 with many changes desired by the author.
The genesis of Frankenstein it is totally fantastic due to its places and circumstances and it is precisely in this sphere of dreams and imagination that the Shelley Project intends to move, enveloping writers in these places, in a parallel space-time, managing to fully free the imagination. Mary Shelley’s bond with this backbone of Lucca, which extends from Bagni di Lucca to the sea, is truly profound. Percy and Mary Shelley arrived in Lucca at the beginning of their Grand Tour in 1818 and then moved to the rest of Italy up to Naples and then settled in San Terenzo in the bay of Lerici.
The first edition of Shelley Project kicks off in 2024 and will involve the entire Lucca area linked to the passage of Mary Shelley. Two new categories of comparison: one aimed at high school students and the other at young emerging writers. Furthermore, of course, the Editor Writers comparison will be repeated: 5 new writers will compete in the writing of five new unpublished fantastic stories.
In Lucca City of Paper characters in nineteenth-century clothes will await you in the premises of the Royal College to remember the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinwho conceived the story on a night in June 1816 when, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati estate in Cologny, the romantic poet George Gordon Noel Byron proposed to the friends present (including Mary Shelley herself, the half-sister Claire Clairmont, the doctor John William Polidori and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) to try their hand at writing an unpublished and fantastic story.
On this occasion, the brand new Shelley Project bookmarks dedicated to our contest on Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein will be distributed.
The event is organized by Loga Studio Art Vision which with its artistic director Stefano Nannizzi has been involved in the creation of cultural formats and event organization for more than twenty years: among the main ones we remember Halloween Celebration, the first and largest Halloween fest in Italy, which this year arrives in its 30th edition (www.halloweencelebration.it).
