"Innesti: Primo Levi e i libri altrui", book launch in London
Book launch: Innesti: Primo Levi e i libri altrui, edited by Gianluca Cinelli and Robert S.C. Gordon, published by Peter Lang
On Webex
Presented by: Istituto Italiano di Cultura Londra; Association for the Study of Modern Italy (ASMI)
With: Gianluca Cinelli, Robert Gordon, Ian Thomson, Anna Baldini
Introduced by: Katia Pizzi (IIC London) and Philip Cooke (Asmi)
Primo Levi was an avid reader: extraordinarily curious, he explored several genres and fields of knowledge, from literature to science to history etcetera, consulting specialist journals and books alike, in order to research a subject or simply to enjoy reading about it, often approaching foreign cultures in their original language, always eager to learn and to understand more.
Levi himself gave an account of his vast collection of books in his anthology La ricerca delle radici (1981), however there is still so much more to find out about it. Gianluca Cinelli and Robert Gordon have tackled this task by looking at the innesti , the connections between Levi's writings and the work of twenty-one other authors, including classics such as Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire and Carroll, modern ones like Kafka, Mann and Calvino and scientists Galileo, Darwin, Heisenberg and Lorenz.