Thursday 11 June, 6.30pm
Once upon a time in Italy… the 80’s: Separate rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli
Claudia Durastanti in conversation with Jeremy Atherton Lin
Chair: Jennifer Burns
Reading by Chiara Goldsmith
The eighties in Italy were a decade of surfaces: glossy, loud, deliberately amnesiac. Beneath them, other stories were being lived in silence. In Camere Separate, published in 1989, Pier Vittorio Tondelli gave voice to one of those stories only two years before his own death: the result is a novel of grief, desire and solitude that captured something his era preferred not to name, and did so with a tenderness and formal precision that marked it immediately as a classic. At once an intimate love story and a portrait of a generation navigating pleasure, loss and the first devastating shadow of AIDS, Camere Separate remains one of the most quietly radical novels in modern Italian literature.
Once Upon a Time in Italy: a new series curated by Olga Campofreda.
From the turbulent seventies – years of political violence, social fracture and ideological passion – through the glossy contradictions of the eighties, the disorienting transitions of the nineties, and into the fragile new landscape of the early two thousands, Italy’s recent history is rich with ruptures and reinventions. Its literature has met each of these turns with singular force, capturing the texture of everyday life, the weight of upheaval, the shifting tides of identity, memory and belonging. This series of conversations travels back through four decades of Italian history, culture and society by returning to those novels that did not simply reflect their time, but helped shape the way an entire country understood itself. Once Upon a Time in Italy is a literary time machine, a collection of postcards from a past that is asking now to join a conversation with the present.
Book your place HERE
Olga Campofreda is a writer, curator and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. She is the author of the novel Ragazze perbene (NN Editore, 2023) and Camerette (Quanti Einaudi 2023). Her latest work is Vorrei trascorrere una domenica da uomo (Oscar Mondadori 2026), an edited volume of letters and articles on women’s emancipation issues written by Alba de Céspedes in the Italian post-war years. Alongside her writing, she builds spaces where books and people meet, most notably as curator of the Miu Miu Literary Club, founded and directed by Miuccia Prada. She is a contributor for Harper’s Bazaar Italia, d la Repubblica and Domani Editoriale/Finzioni, among others.
Jeremy Atherton Lin is an American-born writer based primarily in East Sussex, England. He is the author of the bestseller Deep House and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gay Bar. His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, and the Yale Review. Longer bio here https://jeremyathertonlin.com/about/ Instagram: @jeremyathertonlin
Claudia Durastanti is an Italian writer, translator, and cultural critic. Strangers I Know was shortlisted for the Strega Prize and translated into 21 languages. Her forthcoming novel Missitalia will be published by Summit in the Us and Fitzcarraldo in the Uk in 2027. Her work has appeared in Granta, Apartamento, the Paris Review and elsewhere. Her first collection of essays Falsi amici will be released in the fall. She’s the curator of the feminist imprint La tartaruga and a music columnist for Internazionale.
Chiara Goldsmith is a bilingual British and Italian actress. Working in voiceover, comedy, tv, radio and theatre in the UK and Spain over the last two decades. One half of cult comedy duo Róisín & Chiara, recently seen on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown on Channel 4 they have written, directed and performed five hit Edinburgh Festival shows and 3 sold out runs at Soho Theatre, London. Chiara’s voice can often be heard on BBC radio 4, Audible, Channel 4, national advertising campaigns and various hit video games including Elden Ring and Final Fantasy Tactics.