The City of Naples Crime Crime Festival it is an inclusive and shared project and will take place this year in the Villa Floridiana from 23 to 26 May.
It is inclusive because a group of entrepreneurs, two associations and over one hundred volunteers believe that books, stories and popular literature can contribute to improving this city. Shared because the Festival brand is only the final event of a year of comparisons and cultural exchanges. We plan and network, we work and involve very different age groups who find new meanings and develop through the Festival enterprise.
Three years ago it seemed like just a game. The right opportunity had arrived for a great festival linked to genre literature. Naples claimed the paternity of crime fiction in Italy and established itself as the capital capable of presenting dozens of writers published by medium-large publishing houses to the general public. It had to be done and we did it. In three years the Festival has never stopped growing. Producing dozens of parallel initiatives, establishing relationships and collaborations that have made it truly great.
The Tourism Department, the V Arenella-Vomero Municipality, the Italian School of Comix, Sergio Bonelli Editore, the Giallo Mondadori, the French and Spanish Cultural Institutes, the Mann, the Floridiana, the Duca di Martina Museum, the Comicon , Drop events. Three years and we have networked. Three years and we brought to Naples only those who really had a project that could interest us. The Luigi Bernardi Foundation (the father of Italian noir), just to give an example. Because that is the group that is a piece of detective story history in Italy. A publishing center that imposed Gruppo 13 of Bologna, and launched writers of the caliber of Carlo Lucarelli.
“Three years – says Ciro Sabatino, artistic director of the May event – and we are one of the major Italian companies dealing with genre literature. The youngest, but largest crime fiction festival in Italy. In quality and quantity of proposals”. Presiding over the event is Maurizio de Giovanni, who was the beginning of the story and is carrying it forward by making his city the capital of the crime novel: “The detective novel – explains De Giovanni – has a very broad history which it has in Naples a capital, just think of “The Priest’s Hat” by Emilio De Marchi, which is conventionally seen as the first purely crime novel written in Italy, and which is set in Naples. And it couldn’t be otherwise. Because Naples is a topographically yellow city, urbanistically yellow, a narrow, overlapping, sedimentary city, which has another underground one, but it is also a city that provides for constant contact between the different social classes, which does not exist in any other city. This generates passions. So this is a festival that celebrates passions that are not, as we unfortunately know, pink. There are many passions that overwhelm and transport people to an elsewhere that we want to narrate. What we will therefore talk about is the dark territory in which we end up when we inevitably give in to a certain type of passion, with dark turns.”
The Crime Festival wrote its pages in a thousand days of non-stop activity. The Crime Tours with councilor Teresa Armato; the Paper Crimes Club with magistrates and journalists (to reconstruct unsolved cases and introduce the True Crime section to the Festival); the Irregulars of the Festival with the Neapolitan and provincial schools. We train kids in journalism, in the creation of major events, in cultural enterprise. Today they are the flagship of the work of the exhibition built with dozens of under 25s. And then: an even stronger bookshop, Iocisto del Vomero with Claudia Migliore and Alberto Della Sala, a publishing house that courageously faces a difficult and exciting project , led by Anita Curci, but also a small mystery museum in a mix of ideas and projects, of inclusion and sharing. On a journey that doesn’t stop and which now leads among the people, in an attentive and participatory neighborhood. Vomero where the Crime Festival seeks roots and integration, identity and memory in the neighborhood where everything was born, with Attilio Veraldi first and with Maurizio de Giovanni today. A splendid journey as underlined by Ilenia Gradante, official responsible for the Villa Floridiana: «The Floridiana – she explains – is a source of inspiration with its atmospheres, its architecture, it is a natural setting for the Crime Film Festival, in a Naples that has been described in several moments as a place that thrives on chiaroscuro, moments of light and shadow and which will be told in an extraordinary way. We work for a Floridiana that is frequented in everyday life but we are very keen that both the Museum and the Park are a place open to all, for those looking for a space of their own to gather and we are also working on places dedicated precisely to reading, to books -crossing, in valorization projects that we already have in place, but also for large events, for an increasingly diversified and ever larger audience.” Today, therefore, in the heart of the Villa Floridiana park, there is room for novelties and surprises. Also for the great Exhibition of Author Posters, curated by Mario Punzo’s Italian School of Comix and dedicated to the eleven iconic events of this event. It starts on Thursday 23 May at 12 sharp. A few hours and Naples will return to being the capital of crime fiction in Italy.
Among the new features not yet announced
DRAWING THE CRIME
Eleven designer posters for eleven unforgettable events
At Villa Floridiana – Vomero, Naples
DUCA DI MARTINA CERAMICS MUSEUM
Section Oriental art – basement
Hours 10am/5pm
Entrance with daytime Festival ticket
Curators
Mario Punzo and Alessandra Vitelli
Italian School of Comix
Illustrators
Stefano D’Oriano, Nadia Fedele, Michela Di Cecio, Ivan Ferrara, Maria Teresa Palladino, Flavia Morra, Riccardo Labella, Desirèe Milillo, Ester Finelli Arianna Pennacchio, Alessandra Vitelli
Project presentation: Saturday 25 May, 10pm Literary Café Area
Finally, the space is open to True Crime with Pietro Orlandi who recounts the last hours of his sister, little Emanuela, who disappeared on 22 June 1984 in Rome and with Elvira Grimaldi who recounts the murder of her mother Anna Parlato Grimaldi. It was March 31, 1981. “But there is still time – says Elvira – to remember” and she sends an email to [email protected] so as not to stop searching for the truth about that terrible night.
SEE FULL PROGRAM IN BROCHURE
To purchase tickets
Daytime: online or at the Iocisto bookshop and in Floridiana during the Festival
Evenings: online only > https://boxx.it/giallonapoli/associazione.asp
After Festival: at the Floridiana BAR
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