International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us of the moral imperative, well before the legal duty, to honour the victims of the Holocaust and to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. For this occasion Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto is proud to present
BOOK PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION
“Villa del seminario”
by Sacha Naspini
Monday, 27 January 2025 | 2:00 pm (EST)
FREE EVENT | ONLINE
Link for the event will be posted here at a later date
On the occasion of ‘Giorno della Memoria’ (International Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto will host an online conversation with Sacha Naspini, one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Italian literature. The event will center on his novel Villa del Seminario (2023, Edizioni E/O), recently translated into English by Clarissa Botsford. Inspired by true events, the novel is set in Italy during WWII and highlights the historically overlooked fact that between 1943 and ’44 a Jewish internment camp was established in the villa of the local Bishop in Grosseto (Tuscany). Naspini will be joined by Gianmarco Bocchi, teacher at the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto and PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. The conversation will conclude with a Q&A session.
About the author:
Sacha Naspini was born in Grosseto (Tuscany) in 1976. Naspini is an award-winning writer who has written a number of novels and short stories, among them L’ingrato (2006), I sassi (2007), I Cariolanti (2009 and reprinted in 2020 by E/O), Il gran diavolo (2014), Le case del malcontento (2018), Ossigeno (2019), Nives (2020), La voce di Robert Wright (2021) and Le nostre assenze (2022). He also writes for film and his novels have been translated in more than a dozen languages. Naspini also collaborates as editor and art director for a number of magazines and publishers.