Pavese Festival 2024
A drink with Pierluigi Vaccaneo, director of the Pavese Foundation and soul of the festival
The Pavese Festival is about to begin: for a week, from Monday 2 September to Monday 9 September, Santo Stefano Belbo will host talks, performances, readings, with the likes of Vera Gheno, Neri Marcoré, Stefano Nazzi, Pablo Trincia. We got to know the man behind the Pavese Festival, Pierluigi Vaccaneo, a couple of years ago, thanks to a mutual friend and that particular set of fortunate circumstances that are created in the provinces where, for better or worse, we all know each other by reputation and all it takes is to be in the same place and shake hands to seal the encounter. Since that day, there have been many chats, so why not put one of them in writing?
Pierluigi Vaccaneo’s connection with Cesare Pavese’s work dates back to 2001, when he graduated with a thesis on psychology and anthropology in the writer’s work and cultural activity; from then on, the two have never (metaphorically) left each other. Starting out as an all-rounder in the organisation of the Pavese Festival, he then worked in the Pavese Foundation, of which he is now Director, from its inception between 2004 and 2006. In 2016, with other partners, he founded Twitteratura, a start-up that is now a Social Reading app widespread throughout Italy. This is combined with teaching communication and event organisation at ITS and a collaboration with Treccani Academy where he always teaches how to build and organise a cultural event.
Where did the idea of the Pavese Festival come from and how has this idea evolved and developed over the years?
The Festival was born 24 years ago from the idea of dedicating a moment of art, entertainment and culture to Santo Stefano Belbo’s greatest author. At the time, the Pavese Foundation did not exist, and so the Festival set out to create events that could recount Cesare Pavese’s activity, breaking away from the more academic and specialised contexts. Today, the Festival has a very different identity from the beginning: the festival wants to be a way of translating Pavese’s message in a modern key, with means, arts and languages of the present time. Another important point is the increasing participation of citizenship: the Pavese Festival must not be for the citizens of Santo Stefano Belbo but of the citizens of Santo Stefano Belbo. Only in this way can the town really become a cultural destination and also a place where culture creates participatory union and community among citizens.
On the other hand, the importance of culture as a bridge of unity was clearly seen after the pandemic, when cultural events were the only way to be united together in a square. A cultural festival should not be an end in itself but an opportunity to reactivate the participation of citizenship, to express the identity of the place that hosts it, and above all to welcome, to create a space for exchange, dialogue and growth through culture. In this way, the festival leaves something both to the country that hosts it, and to those who encounter this country, discover it, and on returning home take with them an extra piece towards a path of growth.
Living without writing I do not live: a visceral, intense, dare I say almost desperate title that underlines an indissoluble bond with writing. In your opinion, what space does writing occupy in today’s and everyday life – and what space and role do writers have today?
This year’s theme is very strong: we want to emphasise with this title that Pavese was a writer at every moment of his life and not only when he wrote novels, short stories, poetry – he was a writer even when he wrote private letters, to the people he loved, where the writer almost dominated over the man. If we want, this is what Pavese paid for at the end of his life; his entire production revolves around this very knot to which he tries to give a solution, that is, how much the human being Pavese manages to emerge over the writer Pavese. Throughout his life, Pavese built his identity to be a writer and in order to achieve this, he sacrificed so much of the human part of his existential journey. In 1950, after winning the Premio Strega, Pavese wrote in his diary ‘therefore in my profession I am king’; and a few lines later he added ‘what is missing from this success? Blood, flesh, life’ – in other words, everything he sacrificed to become a writer.
We readers of Pavese, more than seventy years after his death, find this human component of his in his characters; the step we need to take today is to be able to detach ourselves from the filter of his suicide, which for too many years conditioned the way we read his works. Putting this tragic gesture aside and focusing on his words, we find Pavese’s humanity in his characters, adolescent boys in search of adult life and the initiatory passage to maturity. The point is not so much age but maturity, and Pavese’s characters make this transition: the great thing is to see how they construct their existential journey. His characters are an expression of life, whereas Pavese has always been presented to us with a shadow of death.
Pavese actually teaches us to love life, he who loved it so much and who unfortunately failed to grasp it fully. He teaches us this through writing, still today a fundamental vehicle in the search for ourselves.
Today, on the one hand, we write too much, often for the sole purpose of editorial opportunity – even self-publishing gives us the illusion of ‘being a bit of a writer’ when writing is an almost sacred activity. On the other hand, in most cases, we stop writing after school and limit ourselves to writing, so to speak technically, when writing actually helps us to think. It is a continuous training: by thinking better we are better readers and by reading better we are better writers. Without wishing to compare everyday writing to that of the great authors, which is built with a daily work of blood, soul, even great pain, in general when I see a badly written text it gives me a bad feeling; a badly written text makes me think that the person who wrote it is thinking badly, so in my opinion a correct exercise in writing is fundamental for us and our thinking.
Not only writing, but also podcasts: this year the Pavese Festival hosts talks by some of the heavyweights of the Italian podcast scene – Stefano Nazzi and Pablo Trincia – and the Pavese Foundation also presents the second season of Era Sempre Festa, your podcast produced with ChoraMedia. How did you approach the world of podcasts – and what do you think of this tool?
In this year we dedicated a lot of space to the podcast, not least because of the success of the first season of the podcast Era Sempre Festa, which was very well received, especially by a group that is always a little hostile to us, namely 25-40 year olds. The first season focused on five works – La Luna e i Falò, Paesi Tuoi and the La Bella Estate trilogy – looking at Pavese’s work through his characters and in the company of various guests who told us about their relationship with those novels. Two things will happen during the festival: the first is that we will present the second season of Era Sempre Festa, dedicated this year to Il Carcere, La Casa in Collina, Fuoco Grande, La Spiaggia e il Compagno, with great guests who will tell us about their relationship with these volumes, and with the narrating voice of Malika Ayane – Neri Marcorè, narrating voice of the last edition, here will tell about his relationship with Corrado de la Casa in Collina.
The second will be, from 9 to 11 September, the Academy with Chora Media. We have selected ten students from all over Italy who will take part in the Academy to develop an idea for a podcast dedicated to Dialoghi con Leucò. The best project will become the eleventh episode, which will conclude this journey on Pavese. The Pavese Foundation has always experimented with new languages, since the advent of the Internet and social media we have created a Social Reading project, called Twitteratura, where we read Pavese on social networks and today the hottest channel for cultural dissemination is the podcast. The podcast will find great space in the Festival, not only because of Era Sempre Festa but also because of the presence of Nazzi and Trincia, two important names in national podcasting, two authors who do a daily job of popularising different topics for whose talks we expect great resonance and attendance.
Let’s talk about the Pavese Prize, which will be awarded on 8 September: the parterre of prize-winners is highly respectable, with some real heavyweights in the individual areas. What is the common thread that unites them?
The Pavese Prize has been under the management of the Foundation since 2019. In recent years, we have experimented with various formulas to ensure that it could reach an ever larger number of enthusiasts and interested parties. This year we have great names, from publishing, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation. The idea is precisely to identify people who have distinguished themselves in the fields in which Pavese has worked – Pavese was not only a great writer but also a great poet, a great essayist, a great publisher. Let us remember what he did with the publishing house Einaudi, importing a lot of literature from abroad, both American fiction and non-fiction – the texts of Freud and Jung for example. We therefore bring to light all the different souls that characterised the figure of Pavese, selecting every year by a jury of absolute prominence in the relevant fields.
Future perspectives: how will the Pavesian adventure continue?
The activity never ends and we are already at work for the next edition; we have a great new formula that will be announced at the end of this year’s festival, so no spoilers for now! Moreover, this year the festival has had several spin-offs, one of the next will be on 16 September at the Gabinetto Viesseux where we will present some of Pavia’s papers that are connected to the exhibition that we will present in Santo Stefano during the Festival. Other activities will focus on welcoming visitors to Pavia’s venues, with numbers that are well exceeding the attendance figures of 2023, the meetings of the Tra le Righe cycle, where we bring great authors to present their books at the Santo Stefano Belbo civic library, and the second edition of the Academy with Chora Media, supported by CRC Innova and focused on innovative projects dedicated to young targets.
At this point, we leave Pierluigi to do the final touches before the start of the Festival: appointment in Santo Stefano Belbo, from 2 September to 9 September!