The second meeting of the Autorə in Vantina literary event will take place on Friday 28 June 2024, at 9.30 pm, organized by the Municipality of Capoliveri and the MardiLibri bookshop of Portoferraio, in collaboration with the Pro Loco of Capoliveri.
In the amphitheater of Piazza La Vantina he will present himself “A book of gold and silver. Around Gianni Rodari’s Grammar of Fantasy” (Sellerio, 2024), second work on the signed writer Vanessa Roghi, historian and author of television programs, who returns as a guest of the event after presenting his “Heroina. Ten stories of yesterday and today”.
This time, the pedagogist Carla Pibia will accompany her.
Roghi’s book is a book that talks about another book. Of a book where Rodari “put his game cards on the table” and made “years of work and reflections on creativity precipitate”. It is therefore a book that talks about a book that (also) talks about how books can be made.
In tracing the history of “Grammar of fantasy”, Vanessa Roghi explores the echoes of “ancient and recent readings” that link Rodari to other authors and other books (from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Antonio Gramsci, from the surrealists to the Soviet pedagogy of Anton Semënovič Makarenco ), as well as the masters of his time, or the inventiveness of mathematics and natural sciences (“poetry and science go together under the sign of imagination”).
In fact, this is not just a book, in reality; but of something that is also reflected in books, and often takes shape in them; and which is not limited to printed paper or written text, although acting within a refined and experimental literary form.
Rather, it is a new discipline, a “new branch of philosophy” that Rodari imagined possible through the reading of a fragment of Novalis: Fantastica, or the art of writing stories, of “imagining things that do not yet exist ”; discipline that would like to account for the place from which these originate, just as Logic tries to do with thought.
“Grammatica della fantasia” was published in 1973 by Einaudi. The result of a very long gestation (the idea dates back to 1938), it took definitive shape following a series of meetings held in primary and nursery schools in Reggio Emilia. The result was “a popular essay […] a book that can be used”, a book that “long before it came out, or rather, long before it was written, was already considered a classic”; a “gold and silver” book, as Vanessa Roghi defines it in this work of hers which has the form and development of a critical and participatory counterpoint.
Like “Grammar of fantasy”, in fact, although moving on a different linguistic register, the text that will be presented on Friday is a reflection on the “generative value of the word”, on the “poetry of grammar” and on the “grammar of poetry”, but above all on the linguistic education of human life captured in that moment in which all roads are still open: the “Holy Childhood”, as Rodari wrote to Andrea Zanzotto.
Angelo Airò Farulla
