On Saturday 7 December at 4 pm, within Più Libri Più Liberi, the Rome Book Fair, Specchi delle nostre brame will be presented, the new literary work by Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher, writer, playwright, actor, narrator, teacher and theatre director, author of about twenty books, including a dozen novels, anthologies, fairy tales for children and texts for schools, as well as narrative theatre shows, spoken word poetry videos and also podcasts of stories inspired by current events and short stories. Alessandro has been working in Rome for thirty years as a teacher and theatre animator in the therapeutic field, between drug addict communities and mental health centres, especially with adolescents. The plot of the book, with a preface by Emanuela Pulvirenti, draws inspiration from the mystery that still surrounds the controversial and famous painting of the Arnolfini Portrait, a work dating back to 1400 by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. Mirrors on the Wall tells the story of a family made up of a mother, a father and three children. The story takes place in a house in Lucca that belonged to the woman's parents. The woman's father, desperately searching for his true origins, had come across an imitation of a famous and controversial painting from the 1400s: the Arnolfini Portrait. His fixation with the painting, which in detail shows a mysterious lady next to the real-life merchant Giovanni Arnolfini, is so exaggerated that he convinces himself that he is a direct descendant of the latter and commissions a mirror identical to the one behind the two characters portrayed in the work; the object is placed in the bathroom of this house and, together with the other various mirrors in the house, tells the entire story of the family through scenes of everyday life. This is how we learn about what makes people love or hate each other, what unites and divides, excites and hurts the members of the protagonist family. The author was born in Naples in 1968 and lives in Rome. He graduated in computer science at Sapienza University in Rome and in the early 90s he committed himself to carrying out civil service as a therapeutic operator in a community for the recovery of drug addicts, offering himself as a theater animator. This experience ended up having a profound effect on him, leading him to divide his work and study path between the cold logic of numbers and his passion for social issues and theater. This further led him to later make a radical choice in favor of the latter. Since the beginning of his artistic journey, the author has always promoted his books by avoiding the classic literary presentation, transforming the latter into a show that includes theatrical narrations taken from the text of the work and live musical accompaniment with a band that features Ghebreigziabiher himself on vocals. The presentation tour of the novel “Specchi delle nostre brame” began on Saturday 9 November 2024 at the Eli bookshop in Rome and will be hosted on the following date within the next edition of the book fair in the capital Più Libri Più liberi. The show features the author, the theatre actress Cecilia Moreschi and the Band Carla senza di Noi (Roberto Moreschi on acoustic guitar, Orfeo Federici on bass and Vincenzo Coratella on percussion). The performance will also involve some participations in the various dates of the tour, including those of the company “Storie dal mille colori”, formed by Chiara De Nicolo, Carolina Massaccesi and Alessandro Boserman. Specchi delle nostre brame
Edizioni Bette 2024
Release: 10 October 2024
ISBN 9791280564351