Where and when
Who
Sergio Risaliti
Elisabetta Rizzuto
Alessia Merciai
At the Museo Novecento classical culture, a bridge between past and present, is told through an experiment in contemporary literature
On Friday 21 June at 6 pm at the Museo Novecento the book The good and the best. The rediscovered correspondence by Mallio Duilio Galerio will be presented (Pentalinea editions, with the support of the Pericles Cultural Association). Time, eternity and oblivion will be some of the themes of reflection treated, during the presentation of the volume, by Sergio Risaliti, artistic director of the Museo Novecento, Elisabetta Rizzuto, editor of the edition and Alessia Merciai, teacher of Latin and Greek, who will introduce the presentation of the book.
Galerius’ words will find voice and body in the extraordinary interpretation of the actor Piero Baracchi, who will read some letters against the background of the visual suggestions created by the photographer Mauchi. Niccolò Storai will also present a preview of the first table of the illustrated project of the Galerian correspondence, in which the grotesque and surreal imagery of the well-known designer will meet the reflections, thoughts and emotions of the mysterious classical author.
The correspondence is inspired by the lessons of Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges and brings together philological research and poetry, fiction and truth. An experimental literary project, unique of its kind, which gave life to the character-pseudonym of Galerius, a third century author. A.D. restless, precarious, orphan of the world and its values, a man of crisis. Galerius in fact lives at the end of the Empire, in a period of institutional, economic and cultural crisis, which appears as a mirror of the present day, which have so much in common with those distant centuries.
Written in Latin with a facing translation, the correspondence is not an intellectual game or a pastime as a classicist bent over dictionaries, but is the most natural expression of the sentiments of Galerius, an author who speaks from the crisis of the third century, like that of today, to us and to our unfathomable depths of soul. Mallio Duilio Galerio with his epistles does not quote the past with academic nostalgia, but is a contemporary testimony of a classical Latin world that belongs to us and that continues to live in our present. If snatching from oblivion is still an invention, Galerius with his “rediscovered” correspondence is a literary attempt to restore the experience of classicism to the present.