Cultivating love for Reading and Books: Lectures by Renzo Chiesa and Max Manfredi

The Educare alla Lettura, Per una Ingegneria del Racconto Italian  project, coordinated by Scuola di Robotica and realised with funding from the Italian Centro per il libro e la lettura (Centre for Books and Reading), is dedicated in particular to Italian secondary school teachers but is open to all as the lessons are published on an accessible and free platform.

On 16 December 2022 Renzo Chiesa gave his lecture, in Italian, which was recorded and is accessible here

On 22 December 2022 at 4pm Max Manfredi will deliver his lecture (in Italian).

To register and access, here

Roberto Vecchioni said of Max Manfredi: ‘A man who has dabbled with the novel, with poetry, with dialect, with song and without, he is a witty, a capable one, one whom I cannot even limit with the term songwriter: he is an intellectual’. In short, in this lesson we will talk precisely about this non-definition of Max Manfredi, about his varied activity that has led him to range between different narrative codes and musical genres.

Max has won the Tenco Prize twice, all the other times as a finalist, including with his latest extraordinary album, ‘Il grido della fata’, a title suggested to him by the poet Nerval. We will talk about what poetry is, its path, and what distinguishes it (if there is a distinction) from song. We will discuss reading, or rather reading aloud or to oneself, theatre, the paradox of the Stanislavsky method, and much more.

Max Manfredi, on the stage for thirty years, is a singer-songwriter, writer, and man of the theatre. Fabrizio De André, who wanted to sing one of his songs in the Max album, said of him: ‘he is the best of them all’.

Max has published six records and four books and won numerous awards and plaques (including a Tenco plaque for the best record of the year, ‘Luna persa’, in 2008), but more than all this, it is his songs that present him. The undisputed originality of his poetic and musical language has made him the subject of studies and university theses. He performs in Italy and abroad. He lives in Genoa, the city where he was born.

The lesson of Renzo Chiesa

Renzo Chiesa is a famous photographer, famous for his portraits of singers, writers and men and women ‘of the street’. He recounts: ‘Initially it was certainly not my intention to make a profession out of it, in reality I just wanted to have a memory of moments that were considered unrepeatable, but these were repeated a thousand and one times”.

Reading and narrating are inherent activities in us humans: we can narrate with various formats and read the world from various formats. Renzo Chiesa explained his reading and storytelling technique, as portraying a person is equivalent to, it was said during the lecture, inventing Madame Bovary, as Flaubert did.