The Italian Library #36
4 November, 6.30pm
Ornella Tarantola presents Silvio Perrella in conversation with Gilda Russell
Giùnapoli is a door that opens. A journey through the city of Naples via places, encounters and memories.
For Silvio, a young man from Palermo, 1973 is a difficult arrival. A grey, sad city, very far from the stories and promises of his father. But then come the music, the literature, the sounds. Because Naples is like its sea: the water changes colour, and so do the feelings for these places. A love letter to a city written by someone who, like Silvio Perrella, is not Neapolitan yet could no longer live anywhere else.
Silvio Perrella in conversation with Gilda Russell takes us inside a universe. Because this is Naples.
In Italian
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Silvio Perrella was born in Palermo and lives between Naples and Rome. From Calvino to Io ho paura, passing among others through Giùnapoli, Doppio scatto, Insperati incontri and Ore incerte, his written work has mixed literary criticism, reportage, autobiography, stories of feelings, fables and investigations into the form of cities. His oral work, instead, takes shape on the radio – especially through the frequencies of RaiRadioTre and Rete Due of the Swiss Italian Radio. A first collection of his verses is titled Metronomi sotto i tavoli. For the theatre he has written, among other things, Il purgatorio dei viventi, which will return to the stage in the new season of the Teatro Mercadante, directed by Ettore Nigro and performed by Anna and Clara Bocchino. He has edited for Mondadori the Meridiano dedicated to the works of Raffaele La Capria and edits for Adelphi the books of Goffredo Parise. The new edition of Giùnapoli, with a preface by Antonio Franchini, is published in 2026 by Neri Pozza.
Gilda Russell, after graduating in Foreign Languages and Literatures, was a researcher at the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Naples, during which time she conducted English language exercises, seminars on the poetry of T.S. Eliot and on narrative writing and women’s writing in the second half of the English eighteenth century. She was a visiting scholar at St Edmund’s College in Cambridge. In the 1990s she taught English language exercises for six years in the Department of Italian at UCL under the direction of Professor Anna Laura Momigliano Lepschy.
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