Our idea of book festival

The high number of book festivals in our country, especially when taking reading statistics into account, is constantly being debated in the literary field: do they actually help increase the number of readers? Or are they attended only by those who already love reading? Do they employ resources that would be better allocated to organisations that list the promotion of reading among their aims (such as schools and libraries), and whose funds are progressively decreasing? These are all legitimate questions, to which we have no answer.

What we do have, though, is a proposal: a permanent festival spread throughout the whole territory. Because a Book Festival, exactly like International Women's Day, Valentine's Day, Remembrance Day should be every day or not at all.

Involving even the smaller towns, far from the main cities and seaside locations - those towns where "nothing ever happens", where some youngsters only wish to leave, since real life seems to be elsewhere. Making each of these municipalities the protagonist for one day, attracting an audience of readers who come from nearby towns or cities to listen to their favourite author, as well as the locals who might not be readers yet, but want to take part in an event within their community. This is how writers and books magically enter the lives of those mysterious "non-readers" who, even though they do not know that yet, really are just “readers-to-be”. These are the reasons why Lìberos exists.

This is how in Neoneli (around 650 inhabitants) dozens of people met to talk about matriarchy with an Argentine reporter who experienced it in China.

In Mara (700 inhabitants) the King of fantasy Terry Brooks ate the typical roasted suckling pig with his hands in an ancient pilgrimage site unknown to Michelin guides and mobile phone services.

In Fordongianus, formerly known as Forum Traiani, which once marked the border between the Roman Empire and the Barbarian world, Angolan writer Dulce Maria Cardoso recounted the life of retornados from Portugal....

Is a festival that brings together dozens of writers, libraries, bookshops, associations and schools in a single brochure in competition with or in support of the daily activities of cultural operators in the area? We believe that all these activities are important and more effective when carried out together: not a Festival instead of libraries, but a Festival organised with libraries.

Éntula is the visible moment of invisible relationships, cooperation and combination; it’s the culmination of months spent finding common ground and ways forward together with public and private organisations.

We like to think that the action from which Éntula takes its name, entulare (to winnow), is precisely this first step: separating the wheat from the chaff, making a choice of value, harvesting that wheat which then becomes bread and making culture into daily bread, which tastes just like a special occasion kind of bread.