Malta – Meeting with Pupi Avati
The Italian Cultural Institute in Valletta has organized a Zoom meeting with Pupi Avati on Tuesday 2 February, at 06:30 p.m.
The director will talk about his new novel L’archivio del diavolo (2020, Solferino Libri publishing house), in conversation with Fabrizio Foni, senior lecturer in the Department of Italian and member of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies at the University of Malta, whose research interests are Gothic, Horror and Fantastic Literature.
The protagonist of L’archivio del diavolo is Fulvio Momentè, the official intolerant of his work at the Ministry of Justice we met in Avati's previous novel, Il Signor Diavolo. Romanzo del gotico maggiore (2018), from which the director took the film of the same name (2019).
As in his own words, Avati loves to tell «the haunted stories that in the old days were the protagonists of the tales narrated at night by the fireside in the country houses».
Going on in the thriller-horror strain, with atmospheres even more gothic than in the previous book, the whirling plot carries the reader in the Italian rural Northeast of the 1950s, an ancient world full of mystery.
Meanwhile, Avati’s new movie Lei mi parla ancora is going to be released (world premiere on Sky Cinema on February 8).
Freely based upon the eponymous novel by Giuseppe Sgarbi, the father of Elisabetta and Vittorio, the film received the support of the Emilia-Romagna Film Commission audio-visual Fund.
Shot between Rome and Ferrara, it is set in the places where the Sgarbi family has lived, «that portion of Emilia so special, which has been able to maintain beside modernity the great fascination of its past», and which Avati wanted to tell.