È tempo di librarsi. What does it mean?

“We might say that throughout the centuries two opposing tendencies have competed: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.”  

The second edition of Campania Libri Festival, which will be held from the 5th to the 8th of October 2023, is dedicated to writer Italo Calvino – on the centenary of his birth – and his concept of Lightness.  

“Lightness of thoughtfulness”, as the author defined it in his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium: the lightness of Guido Cavalcanti hovering lightly over the grave in a Boccaccio novel, while dodging the empty frivulence of the times in support of a different idea of levity, full of meaning; the lightness of Perseus who deflects – but does not avoid – Medusa’s gaze, finding a way to deal with it without being overwhelmed by it, and finally lays the monster’s head on a bed of watery herbs to quench his thirst, to then realise that same gaze of death has turned the vegetation on which it rests into magnificent coral. Everything, read in the right light, is fertile ground for poetry, exchange, confrontation: every ‘weight’ conceals within itself the germ of elevation. 

Exercising one’s right to lightness is the only antidote to the ‘slow stoning’ of the world; a means to understand the present. Therefore, it’s time to “raise oneself above the weight of the world”; or better yet, ‘librarsi’.