Pietro Scarnera: „Viaggio in Italia“ – Drawing Italy today – Presentation of the graphic novel

Accompanying programme for the exhibition Italy in Lines. Master Drawings by Christoph Heinrich Kniep

Comic artist Pietro Scarnera presents his graphic novel Viaggio in Italia (Italian Journey), Coconino Press 2024, in conversation with art critic Carlotta Vacchelli. The dialogue spans the medium of drawing from Goethe’s time to the present day.

The volume:

Goethe, Stendhal, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley… countless artists have travelled to Italy, fascinated by the beauty of the landscape, the wild nature and the traces of a long-idealised mythical past, or deeply shaken by the widespread misery and radical differences in Italian lifestyles.

Pietro Scarmera weaves their stories together with those of many others, blending past and present to question the deeper meaning of cultural and emotional belonging and bring together different perspectives in a wonderful journey through Italy.

Event in Italian language

Pietro Scarmera, born in 1979, grew up between Turin and Bologna and undertook long journeys to Puglia. In 2009, he won the Komikazen competition for young comic artists with his book project ‘Diario di un addio’ (Diary of a Farewell), a testimony to the five years he spent at the side of his father, who was in a persistent vegetative state, and which was published by Comma 22 in 2010.

In 2014, he published Una stella tranquilla. Ritratto sentimentale di Primo Levi (A Quiet Star: A Sentimental Portrait of Primo Levi), which won the Prix Révélation at the Angoulême Festival in 2016 and was reissued by Coconino Press in 2022.

As a freelance journalist, he worked as a correspondent for the Redattore Sociale press agency and on other social journalism projects. Between 2015 and 2018, he was one of the founders and editors of the comic book information project Graphic News.
Since 2020, he has been teaching storytelling at the International School of Comics in Milan.

Carlotta Vacchelli © Jack Sesenna

Carlotta Vacchelli holds a PhD from Indiana University and is a researcher and lecturer in the field of comics studies. She has received several postdoctoral fellowships in Italy and the United States (Max Planck Institute – Bibliotheca Hertziana Rome; CIMA New York, Ragusa Foundation New York). She currently teaches art history and comic book history at the American University of Rome and NABA Roma.

She writes about comics for daily newspapers (Domani) and specialist magazines (Frankenstein, Keiko, Quasi) and has published academic essays in anthologies. She collaborates with some of Italy’s most important comic festivals, including Lucca Comics & Games and Crack! Fumetti Dirompenti, and is a board member of various comic associations, such as the Centro Fumetto ‘Andrea Pazienza’ and the Clap! Museum Pescara.