On Saturday 25 May, at 4 pm, the third meeting of the “Meetings with Authors” event organized by the Institute of Ligurian Studies for the months of May and June will be held in the garden of the Bicknell Museum in Bordighera, which also this year adheres to the national ministerial campaign to promote reading “Il Maggio dei Libri” promoted by the Center for Books and Reading.
For the occasion, the young researcher Alessio Bellini will present his book Once upon a time Sanremo – Evolution of the anthropic geography of the City of Flowers read through the works of Italo Calvino published in 2022 by the Antea publishing house, in dialogue with the author Carmen Ramò, a middle and high school teacher, passionate about Italian literature and writing, is the co-author of several novels and short stories born from her ten-year participation in the Collective Writing Laboratory of the Teatro del Banchero association in Arma di Taggia.
The book
How does an anthropologist reconstruct the change in the appearance of a city? He can hear it from voices, read it in newspaper articles, observe it from photographs; or, he can analyze the descriptions present in the novels and stories set in that city. This is what happens in this book: on a journey through time that goes from the Baron in the Trees to Building Speculation, the author reviews Calvino’s work to reconstruct step by step the various ways in which Sanremo was supposed to appear. From a rural village, to a holiday resort for the Russian elite, to the undisputed venue of the Italian Song Festival: with a cut and sew of the most famous works of the Sanremo writer, the author provides us with a photograph of the Sanremo of the last three centuries, of the its landscapes, its inhabitants and its culture.
The author
Alessio Bellini was born in Sanremo in 1998. A cultural anthropologist, although he works mainly in the healthcare sector, he is equally interested in the history and culture of the Ligurian people. He has published essays and novels for the Antea and Lo Studiolo publishing houses of the Accademia della Pigna of Sanremo.
