Turin Spirituality: 10,000 people queuing for the story of the deep surface of reality

10 thousand people queuing to listen and reflect on the complexity of the world, starting from the depth of the common surface, the skin. The eighteenth edition of Turin Spiritualitya festival promoted and organized by the Circle of Readers Foundation, was a great success of participation and audiences that highlights all the need for a return to normality and to build community around culture.

Between Thursday 29 September and today’s final day, 44 meetings with 85 Italian and international guests, men and women of worship, philosophers and scholars, scholars and academics, writers and thinkers, 6 experiential workshops, 6 spiritual walks between Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont, about 50 volunteers for 13 locations in the heart of the city, between the Readers’ Club and the National Museum of the Italian Risorgimento, the new Gallerie d’Italia and the Aula magna of the Cavallerizza Reale, the Church of San Filippo Neri, the largest in Turin, which welcomed the inauguration with Lilian Thuram and Father Alex Zanotelli and the meeting-event with the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk this afternoon. All meetings were sold out, certifying a sold out 18th edition.

Skin is the first space where life meets us. And of life, in these four days of Turin Spirituality, we have encountered so much: in the generosity of the guests who attended, in the availability of the volunteers, in the passionate attention of the public and of the city. We are happy with this affection towards the festival and very grateful. The desire to start working immediately for the next edition comes!” he comments Armando Buonaiutocurator of Turin Spirituality.

A great party, full of all the colors of the world just like the skin – the protagonist of this XVIIIth edition of Torino Spiritualità. Skin as a cipher of identity, skin as a boundary of the self, skin as a space for communication, skin as so much else. How much happiness, how many discoveries, how many words have been exchanged in these days: a kind of magic that will help us from tomorrow on to face the present, so complex and threatening at times, but also so capable of surprising us at times” he declares Elena Loewenthaldirector of the Circle of Readers Foundation.

To think about the theme of skin, Orhan Pamuk arrived in Turin to talk about his new novel The Nights of the Plague in the library for Einaudi, Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize 2022 for The Netanyahu (Code editions), the actor Fabrizio Gifuni, Luciana Littizzetto, who spoke about children and parents the singer-songwriter Niccolò Agliardi, the writer Sabrina Efionayi, the journalist Elena Goretti, Matteo Caccia host of Storie di Rinascita on Radio24 and the dancer and performer Lidia Carew. The neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso spoke with a lesson on the vegetable epidermis: the skin of the earth, the writer Paolo Nori with a lesson on his two deaths. Senza Pelle is the dialogue between Vito Mancuso and the artist and theater actor Alessandro Bergonzoni; Nicola Lagioia and Valeria Parrella discussed leather in literature, starting from Curzio Malaparte’s La Pelle and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, while psychoanalyst and essayist Massimo Recalcati reasoned on the subtlety of leather.

Dutch writer Jan Brokken and historian Carlo Greppi debated The Righteous. Saving the skin of others, while the philosopher Maura Gancitano reasoned about beauty and aesthetic canons. The monk Enzo Bianchi discussed the 18 years of festival and the links between body and spirituality with the founder of Turin Spiritualità Antonella Parigi, together with the Hindu nun Svamini Hamsananda Giri and the Zen nun Elena Seishin Viviani. The linguist Federico Faloppa also reasoned on stereotypes and social imagery, in the lesson Whitening an Ethiopian, and the writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, discussing our colonial memory with the historian Francesco Filippi. Vittorio Sgarbi spoke about how the epidermis has been represented in the history of painting in a lectio magistralis, while Oliviero Toscani, a photographer who changed advertising imagery forever, presented his idea of ​​a photographic atlas of the human race, together to Luca Beatrice.

The theologian and priest Luigi Maria Epicoco spoke on the relationship between skin and interiority in the lesson The skin of the soul, while in the speech Una carezza sul mondo the ethologist Roberto Marchesini explored the dimension of care by comparing humans and animals . Cecilia Strada spoke about lives spent taking care of the skin of others and the experience of the ResQ People rescue ship, together with the former magistrate and essayist Gherardo Colombo, in collaboration with the Migration Festival. What it means to get into the skin of others to tell it was the object of the reflection of the Dutch writer and reporter Frank Westerman, in dialogue with the anthropologist Marco Aime. Neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara, on the other hand, answered the question Why can’t we tickle ourselves? in the lesson dedicated to investigating the boundaries of the self, while the writers Vincenzo Latronico and Irene Graziosi, the content creator Petunia Ollister and the essayist Elisa Cuter spoke about social networks and their effects on the perception of our bodies.

Turin Spirituality returns with the 19th edition, in autumn 2023.

Turin Spirituality: 10,000 people queuing for the story of the deep surface of reality