Naples, Italy. I was invited to deliver a keynote to a conference, People on the move--culture, rights and geopolitics--organized by Univ of Naples and sponsored by local Forum on Culture and city of Caserta. The hotel is right on the seaside promenade; across the bay is Vesuvius looking gorgeously purple at dusk. Directly opposite the hotel is a 14-c fortress, an old fishing village which now has restaurants and a marina.
The conference is a weeklong affair and I've already missed several days of "dialogue", cultural performance and poetry. The proceedings are held in Caserta, a town about 40 minutes outside of Naples, where the royal palace (mid-18c) is built. It is also
the place where the Camorra, the Naples mafia, was born and apparently still controls much around here. We are convening at the Belvedere di San Luecio, which the king built as a hunting lodge and then converted to into the royal silk manufactory.
Belvedere di S Leucio
This afternoon was a panel of writers speaking on exile-- Ahmed Farah Ali "Idaajaa" (Somali-Italy-Syria-Netherlands-Kenya); Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka-London); Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia-Netherlands); Eva Hoffman (Poland-Canada-NY-London). In the evening there was a reading held in the town theater, with authors reading (in English, Somali, Croatian) with Italian subtitles, with Neapolitan musical interludes. Idaajaa read from the poems he's been transcribing from oral interviews with Somali people (I believe he's collected 10,000). Hoffman read from a piece on her deep burial of her native Polish when she learned and sought to master English. It was rather cerebral yet it made me weep
No comments:
Post a Comment