VENAFRO – In a crowded little square of Annunziata, the seventh edition of ‘The Night of Poetry’ with Franco Arminio conquers the city.
A portentous edition that took place last night in the Piazzetta dell’Annunziata, grateful to have rediscovered for a few hours the vitality and energy that accompanied it in times gone by, when the historic center was a crossroads of lives, of voices, of stories.
The Venus Verticordia Association was able to organize an event of considerable importance which saw the participation of the poet and landscape expert Franco Arminio who, in addition to sharing his poetic compositions through the presentation of his latest book – ‘Songs of gratitude’ – and the choice to reveal some of his unpublished works to the enthusiastic audience, he also showed himself to be an extraordinary communicator having involved the public not only through the reading of his poems but by making everyone a participant in the ‘magical’ moment – to paraphrase Professor Maria Assunta Prezioso who in her speech underlined how an evening like the one spent is the most appropriate tool to dissolve old spells and bring back the life lived that has crossed for years those alleys that have now become silent and empty – inviting the audience to intervene with songs, with personal impressions, with the translation in their own dialect of poetic compositions.
The musical incursions of Livio and Manfredi Arminio have given unique moments of hilarity in a panegyric of funny songs also focused on the value to be attributed to one’s country; the young Arminio are the expression of an eclectic and unusual songwriting that embraces the interest for their Land narrated through their songs in a funny and serious way, following an innovative and original dualism that captures the listener making him enter their world. In short, a combination marked by an apparent artistic antithesis but that has been able to hit the mark, promoting a winning formula capable of enthralling the audience that has exalted its value and peculiarities, showing such a strong interest that it has not abandoned the square until the end of the show.
In his final speech, Franco Arminio, with the ardor and vision that derive from his love for paesologia – a neologism he invented which leads to the exaltation of the absolute necessity of restoring breathing space to the countries now victims of depopulation – invited everyone to distance ourselves from that sad figure who is the ‘militant discourager’, or rather from the one who “has failed in his life and causes that of others to fail”, the one who replies to those who ask what is beautiful in his country “nothing, here there’s nothing to see.” Arminio invites us to live in the villages with conviction and enthusiasm, to look better and to find that everything that surrounds us is beautiful and as one of his poems says “don’t think about what is missing, welcome what remains”.
There are saving spaces that one must know how to trace, such as one’s own country which deserves opportunities for revenge to recognize its essence as the philosopher Francesco Giampietri was able to do, that enthusiast of thought who in his sensational diary wrote “through the popular market. I have headphones, but I don’t give up the voices of the city. I indulge senses and references, recognizing a colorful texture in which confidences and slander intertwine and become plots of life and death. The city told, perhaps the only possible story”.
Federica Passarelli
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