poesiafestival 13.Lezione magistrale Umberto Piersanti photo © Serena Campanini-Elisabetta Baracchi

poesiafestival 13.Lezione magistrale Umberto Piersanti
photo © Serena Campanini-Elisabetta Baracchi

It will be a story told by many voices that the 8th Festival will offer for autism, bringing together different experiences and lifelong stories. Autism is part of the human pervasive developmental disorders and leads, often so severe, the qualitative impairment in social interaction and communication, as well as patterns of behavior, interests and activities restricted, repetitive and stereotyped. These disorders are not part of a easily recognizable disability and may be then defined as the “invisible disabilities”, although they affect about 40 – 50 people on 10,000. Despite the high incidence of these disorders on the population, the difficulties that people with autism and their families face every day are still largely unknown in our society. Not surprisingly, the Festival intends to talk about these diseases not only through experimentation to the medical-scientific, but also through the power of cinema and poetry, because it is a problem that must be tackled from the awareness of the people.

Cinemautismo Logo

Cinemautismo Logo

Vittorio Sclaverani, President of the National Museum of Cinema that for seven years  proposed in Turin CinemAutism, film review to bring the public closer to the subject thanks to the immediacy and the emotional involvement of the film, will witness this new moment of the Festival. Some animated films and the story of the experience will serve Turin, Naples associations working in the field, to seek synergies with other groups of study and research. Neuropsychiatrist Luisa Russo, who was involved in the testing of new techniques in some places of the City of Naples, will try to put together the Turin experience and new scientific approaches with the value of the precious rhymes by Umberto Piersanti. Piersanti, one of the greatest Italian poets, constantly recalls in his lyrics his son Jacopo, who suffers from these disorders, describing the difficulty of getting in touch with its distant world, but also explaining in different words the daily discomfort of family members. The meeting of these three different sensitivity and different approaches each of which is a carrier, accompanied by the attention of institutions and local action groups, will perhaps return a bit of solidarity with those who have waged the struggle against a dark evil that symbolically expresses the discomfort of our time.

Projections and testimonies about autism will be hosted by the Festival on Tuesday November 10th at 4.30 p.m. at the Palace of Arts in Naples (PAN) in Via dei Mille 40, with the participation of Vittorio Sclaverani (Ass. Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin), the poet Umberto Piersanti and Dr. Luisa Russo and also associations, support teachers, experts and competent institutions.