Orta San Giulio – The Mondadori Foundation celebrates on Wednesday 19 June Mario Soldati, director and writer who passed away 25 years ago, on Lake Orta, where he wrote his first works in the years of his most important artistic choices: at 6.30 pm an exhibition at the medieval Palazzotto of Orta, a guided tour and at 9pm a special evening with screening and testimonies are promoted with the Municipality, the Asilo Bianco Association and the Novarese Center for Literary Studies. Speakers at the evening will include Paolo Verri, director of the Mondadori Foundation, Enrica Borghi from Asilo Bianco, Roberto Cicala from the Novarese Center for Literary Studies and, on video, Carlo Petrini and Wolgango Soldati, the writer’s son.
Mario Soldati (1906-1999), from Turin, a very young protagonist of Italian cultural life since the 1930s, one of the first literature professors who were invited to cross the ocean and bring European culture to New York, after the experience recounted in America’s first love he resides for two years on Lake Orta to make decisions on his decision to dedicate himself to literature. In Corconio he is with his friend Mario Bonfantini from Novara, with whom he had lived the experience of the magazine “La Libra”. Together they will develop poetics and political and social ideas; they will each fight the fascist regime in their own way, becoming points of reference for the new generations at the dawn of the Republic.
Soldati will be at the center of the birth of the great Italian cinema, of television, of national identity, taking care of the regional pavilions on the occasion of the Centenary of the Unification of Italy in 1961. A character as well as a writer, he dedicates himself exclusively to writing thanks to a ten-year contract with Mondadori which will lead him to write his masterpieces, including The actor with which he won the Campiello prize in 1971. These are the years in which, together with his family and in particular his son Wolfango, he travels around Italy to talk about its strengths and weaknesses, but above all developing a decisive taxonomy not only from a narrative point of view but also sociological. His two television journeys (1957: In search of genuine foods – Journey along the Po valley; 1960: Who reads? Journey along the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea) are linked to the Zavattini tradition and surpass it in density but also in “colour”. Among his famous titles: Letters from Capri (Strega award in 1954), The holidaymakers’ massset on Lake Maggiore, The Marshal’s Tales And Trip to Lourdes.
The seventies suit him less: the climate of civil conflict depresses him, even if he never stops talking about the rights and wrongs of individual and collective identity. The eighties, with the chronicles of the Spanish Mundial, brought him back to the fore and he gradually became a cult author: Cesare Garboli and Aldo Grasso placed him in the literary and mass media empyrean, Carlo Petrini took him as the founding measure of the ideals of Slow Food and of the University of Taste of Pollenzo. But nothing would have happened without the bond with Orta on the one hand and with Mondadori on the other.
Mario Soldati is celebrated on Wednesday 19 June in two moments: at 6.30 pm, at the Palazzotto di Orta San Giulio (Piazza Motta) the exhibition “Not just cover. Precisely all Mario’s books”, curated by Roberto Cicala and the Novarese Center for Literary Studies, open until June 23rd. The exhibition displays all the first editions of Mario Soldati’s works, from Salmacis (Edizioni della Libra, Novara 1926) to the complete work edited by Cesare Garboli (Rizzoli, 1994), accompanied by photographs found in Orta, preserved by the many friends the author had on the lake, and by documents from the files dedicated to Soldati from the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore historical archive, preserved in the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation. Afterwards, there will be a toast, some readings and a short walk around the soldiers’ places. At 9pm the documentary will be presented and screened outdoors in Piazza Motta My Orta by Mario Soldati.
Speakers at the evening will include: Enrica Borghi (Asilo Bianco), Roberto Cicala (Centro Novarese di Studi Literari), Paolo Verri (Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori) and, in video, Carlo Petrini and Wolgango Soldati, son of the writer and director who passed away 25 years ago .
A quote: «I only began to feel alive at 29, when for the first time I met a woman with whom I liked being together. Then two years of Lake Orta did what America had not done. You see: there are tender, affectionate, true things that one can either find just a stone’s throw from her house or not find at the end of the world” (Mario Soldati interviewed by Guido Gerosa, in “Epoca” 30 October 1966).
In the last season of Soldati many works were published by Interlinea, including Un sorso di Gattinara and other stories; Christmas and Satan and other stories; Orta mia and other scattered Novara pages; as well as the new edition of A trip to Lourdes. Then remember the volume Mario Soldati between places and memory. Unpublished works, testimonies, studies and images, monographic issue of “Microprovincia”.
In 2006 the Novarese celebrated the centenary of the author’s birth by the Novarese Center for Literary Studies with the patronage of the Piedmont Region, the Ministry of Culture, Turin World Book Capital, Teche Rai, the University of Eastern Piedmont and the Catholic University of Milan, with an exhibition at the Broletto in Novara, a conference in Orta and various activities in many locations involving schools. A guide had also been published The wine routes by Mario Soldati.
The event on 19 June begins a cycle designed for the next three years, with meetings and opportunities for valorisation dedicated to writers, men and women, thinkers who have established relationships with Mondadori and the area of Lake Orta under the teaches “A/Orta Authors of the heart”.
Since 2024, the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation has intensified its action in the Milanese, Lombardy and beyond areas. Thanks to the new synergy established with Asilo Bianco APS and the newly created Enrica Borghi Foundation, the “A/Orta Authors of the Heart” project was born. Initiatives, meetings and exhibitions dedicated to writers and artists who have established working and personal relationships with the Milan publishing house and the local area. For three years (2024, 2025, 2026) research and experimentation on contemporary artistic languages will be carried out, investigating some of the most relevant personalities of the twentieth century literary panorama such as Mario Soldati, Alba de Céspedes, Fruttero&Lucentini.
Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation (FAAM) was founded at the end of the seventies with the aim of preserving and enhancing the memory of the Italian publishing work of the twentieth century and its protagonists, starting from the personal and professional stories of the two publishers and the publishing houses from founded by them, Mondadori and Il Saggiatore. In over forty years FAAM has progressively expanded its areas of activity. Starting from the fundamental role in the conservation and valorization of the heritage, constantly acquired over the years, an intense editorial production capable of telling the culture and history of the book professions is promoted. This is accompanied by training and dissemination initiatives such as the Master in Publishing, organized in collaboration with the University of Milan and the Italian Publishers Association, projects for schools and participation in the BookCity Milan Association, of which FAAM is one the founding members, moreover, since 2024, FAAM has strengthened the collaboration agreement with Mimaster Illustration. FAAM continues its commitment through the promotion of meetings, events and exhibitions, also dedicating itself to the diffusion of Italian culture throughout the world thanks to integrated projects such as Copy in Italy and Milan, a place to read, which have given rise not only to traveling exhibitions and conferences, but also to concrete results such as the nomination of Milan as a UNESCO Creative City for Literature. In addition to the main headquarters in the Villapizzone district of Milan, since 2015 the Mondadori Foundation has also operated through the Formentini Laboratory for publishing, its headquarters in the heart of the Brera district, where courses, conferences, readings and events are organized in connection with the network of the UNESCO Creative City for Literature.
