“Night. Not a single star in the sky…" In the darkness and silence of a city of tall, blackened buildings, Evelina dreams of opening a thousand-star hotel, the most luxurious and brightest ever built. And in her dream, Evelina imagines colourful and wonderful rooms. The meeting of Dario Voltolini’s words with Nicola De Maria’s pictorial language gives birth to a marvellous dream that exhorts to life so that “... we know that anger is also needed to give a beautiful colour to a world that otherwise dies”.

Thanks to the synergy between the art of writing and the art of images, La favola dell’arte offers children a fabulous way to enter the world of contemporary art, a useful means of entertainment and knowledge at the same time.

Nicola De Maria was born in Foglianise in 1954. “Since the mid-1970s the artist has been experimenting with an original language in which abstraction is charged with poetic figurative allusions, archetypal expressions of nature, joy and passion. His painting thrives on simple forms and pure colours”. (Achille Bonito Oliva)

Dario Voltolini was born in Turin in 1959. He has published Una intuizione metropolitana (Bollati Boringhieri, 1990), Rincorse (Einaudi, 1994), Forme d’onda (Feltrinelli, 1996), 10 (Feltrinelli, 2000), Primaverile (Feltrinelli, 2001), I confini di Torino (Quiritta, 2003) and Il tempo della luce (Effigie, 2005). With Giulio Mozzi he has published Sotto i cieli d’Italia (Sironi, 2004) and with Antonio Moresco he edited the collective volume Scrivere sul fronte occidentale (Feltrinelli, 2002). He also works as a librettist with composer Nicola Campogrande.