Tuesday 28 February, 6pm
Venice: past, present, future
A talk with Luca Cosentino, Claire Judde de Larivière e Maddalena Vatti
Italo Calvino once said that if we only consider Venice’s historical and artistic appeal we will only ever grasp this one aspect of the city, important but limited, and that “Venice captures our imagination with the power of a living archetype, almost utopian”. He saw Venice as an urban and social model. Today, when the future that Calvino referred to is the present, Venice is still a city that cannot be understood without blending its millennial history with the new environmental challenges it faces and with the social fabric which make it a melting-pot of historical, political and planning issues, which seem to anticipate or amplify what is happening everywhere else in the world.
All of this will be discussed in depth by the three speakers who will explore what Venice has been in the past and what it is in the present day, and will consider the increasingly urgent choices that are needed in the immediate future.
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Luca Cosentino is a Venetian and a geologist. After decades working in the energy sector and living and travelling around the world, he eventually settled in Venice in 2021 and started a new life dedicating his time to his life-long passion for books. He is co-founder and president of the Venetian publishing house wetlands, a no-profit enterprise founded by a number of active citizens and expression of a civic movement. which publishes mainly non-fiction books related to Venice, where the city is seen as a metaphor of the global issues related to climate change, environmental crisis, hypertourism, urban degradation. Wetlands engages with high-profile, mainly international writers and authors.
Claire Judde de Larivière is professor of history at the University of Toulouse (France). She studies the history of Venice at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, exploring the social and political practices of the common people. She has published La rivolta delle palle di neve (Wetlands, 2022) (traduzione inglese The Revolt of Snowballs. Murano confronts Venice, 1511, Routledge, 2018).
Maddalena Vatti works as a literary scout. She also writes, translates, and produces cultural events. She’s co-editor and founder of Quaranzine Magazine and co-writer of the podcast Fifth Siren dedicated to the challenges posed by the many global crises we are faced with, environmental, cultural, social and technological. She lives in London, where she curates and organises FILL Festival.