Catalogue of the exhibition Palermo Mon Amour curated by Valentina Greco for the Fondazione Merz in collaboration with the Centro internazionale di fotografia Letizia Battaglia and the Enzo Sellerio archive. The book tells the story of Palermo from the 1950s to 1992 in images. A story that has the rhythm similar to a visual walk through the research and intuitions of five photographers, five gazes, who have investigated the poetic imagery of Palermo with different feelings, recounting a city in continuous deflagration, and not always recomposed in its complexity. The subject of a gentle, playful, cultured, anti-rhetorical vision, which is also an acute testimony to the social scene of the 1950s and 1960s, dense with stratified situations of misery and degradation but awaiting a possible civil and economic rebirth, Palermo underwent the further assault of the 1970s, of daily events of ferocious chronicle, until 1992, the year in which it seemed, once again, that everything could change. Through the photographs of Enzo Sellerio, Letizia Battaglia, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino we understand a new visual code, the sequences of their photographs amplify our feelings and add notions to those we have acquired of what it is necessary to see in order to position oneself in the world.

In addition to the curatorial text by Valentina Greco, the book is enriched by biographical contributions by Olivia and Antonio Sellerio for the Enzo Sellerio Archive, Marta Sollima for the Letizia Battaglia Archive, Franco Zecchin, Fabio Sgroi and Lia Pasqualino, as well as a moving story by Giorgio Vasta.

In the monologue "Clic", by the unforgettable author of "Code", the scene is hinted at as a hospital. He exists, evoked by a mere name, which makes him a very powerful character, a certain Dr. Dickmans. The monologue speaker apparently freewheels about various themes and issues, produces his own reflections on himself, the world, the situation he is experiencing. But we follow this voice with growing disquiet, as it becomes clearer and clearer to us at every step that the narration itself is the story, not what the voice says. Indeed, the voice is often interrupted by a sign/sound, i.e. a 'click', which breaks its course just as it simultaneously breaks our mental reconstruction of the scene.
The continuous fractures are thus as much of the monologue-giver as of the reader/listener. This simple but ingenious 'click' binds us to the monologue more than any other empathic, or narrative, or visual, or experiential gimmick.

Mario Giorgi was born in Bologna in 1956. He has written texts for radio, theatre, TV. He has published "Codice" (Bollati Boringhieri 1994), "Biancaneve" (Bollati Boringhieri 1995), "Sulla torre antica" (Portofranco 1998), "23 : 59" (Rai Eri 1999), "Torpore" (Portofranco 2001), "Alter E" (Un fagiano) (:duepunti 2010), "Società del Programma Spaziale" (CS_libri 2016), "Configurazione Alieno" (CS_libri 2019), "Fiori" (Tiemme 2019).

Belma Goralija left suddenly. I didn't have time to meet her in her house or at the café, as I had thought. Nor did I have time to return to Sarajevo, where she lived. Accessory was the pandemic that cancelled the plane ticket I had bought two years ago. Now I regret this lost time and I am shocked at the voracious time of human nature in which our days flow. We will not be able to meet, talk, listen. I will no longer be able to write what I should have written. Then I and anyone else may ask: what to do with the time that remains? Just that time, our time that we have left to live. Before it was the time to run, to write, every day. Of telling others what life daily life disclosed. Today it seems to me the time to grasp the memories of those we have met, because they have something or perhaps a lot to teach. This verb seems beautiful. "The time that remains" pass through their faces, their stories, by what they have taught us. The index of the book will be the letters of their names.

Filippo Landi was born in Rome in 1954. He graduated in Political Science at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1978 he participated in the founding of the weekly "Il Sabato". He joined RAI in 1987. Correspondent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the First Gulf War, then in former Yugoslavia and Sarajevo, during the years of the siege, in Kosovo and Albania. In 2001 he returned to the Middle East, as RAI correspondent in Cairo and from 2003 in Jerusalem, where he remained until 2014. On his experience in Kosovo he wrote Un treno per Blace (La Meridiana, 1999).

Since her recent literary debut, this author's stylistic maturity and ability to structure the narrative in time has attracted literary attention. Francesca Zupin constructs a limpid tale in perfect balance between pain and grace. Recomposing in a kaleidoscopic sequence a forty-year period of lives, Zupin draws up a story of undercurrent loves, almost friendships, silent deaths, disenchanted relationships. However, the enchantment is actually all profound and it is made up of powerful feelings and disillusions which move beneath the characters' lives like distant, invincible magnets. The fulcrum lies in the character of Nina, a figure who will remain in the considerations she causes in readers and in their hearts. Zupin elegantly sketches the places that host these small and intimately grand affairs, the seaside town, its gentle and poignant meeting places, two balconies, a pastry shop, certain steps. With equal finesse she conjures up distant places - the United States, Germany - with departures, returns, a sailing ship, arriving letters. The confident tone of this writer's voice, a singular blend of sumptuousness and sobriety, is a new and beautiful presence in our Italian literature.

Francesca Zupin was born in Trieste. She graduated from Milan's Bocconi University and completed a master's degree at the Holden School. She works in an international scientific university in the Middle East. Her first novel Salvamento (Bollati Boringhieri Editore) was published in 2022.

Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg. Bodo and Mom work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing very much. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves Mom. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border, Bodo's love takes over.

Franco Stelzer's mastery gives us a marvellous character, a presence that is not to be forgotten. The text, with Central European veins, is inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to her delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. His empathy towards the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.

Franco Stelzer was born in 1956 in Trento, where he returned to live in 2002, after long stays in Bologna and Germany. He worked for many years as a teacher of Literature at a linguistic high scool. He was a translator from German (Perutz, Ungar, Tumler, Gruenbein), he writed the volumes of short stories Ano di volpi argentate (2000), Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei (2003), published by Einaudi, and the novel Matematici nel sole (2009), published by Edizioni Il Maestrale. In 2018, Einuadi published his last novel Cosa diremo agli angeli.

Namir, a young Iraqi scholar with a PhD from Harvard, is hired by filmmakers to document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On an excursion to Baghdad, Namir ventures into al-Mutanabbi Street, famous for its bookshops, where he meets Wadud, an eccentric librarian who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by the war: from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna to human beings. Namir becomes obsessed with Wadud's archive and, looking back on his life in New York, discovers how deeply intertwined it is with fragments of his land's past and present. Almost a stylistically ambitious "landscape exercise" between the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

Sinan Antoon, born and raised in Baghdad, is a poet, novelist, translator and academic. He received a doctorate in Arabic Literature in the United States in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in several journals, in English and Arabic. His published novels include 2010's Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman ("Only the Pomegranate"), winner of the Best Arab Book Award in 2014. He is currently an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya magazine.