The digital series of the Municipality of Modena confronts the places where stories, lives, roots, memory and future intertwine
With a total of over 150,000 downloads since its debut, the Modena City Council's publishing house Il Dondolo confirms itself as a laboratory of contemporary writing capable of giving voice to cultural projects in dialogue with the city and the transformations of our time. To date there are 91 publications in the series, with 8 releases in 2024 and 7 in the first six months of 2025, all of which can be downloaded free of charge from the website www.ildondolo.it.
Among the latest releases are the three Dondoli dedicated to the project 'La città dei vivi, la città dei morti' (The city of the living, the city of the dead), promoted by the Culture Department of the Municipality of Modena to restore voice and memory to the people buried in the San Cataldo cemetery, a place that has always reflected the history and transformations of the city. A project that weaves architecture, history, music and technology into a sound guide available online (https://cimiteromonumentale.comune.modena.it/guida), where the audio tracks move between the 19th-century cemetery designed by Cesare Costa, the Jewish cemetery and Aldo Rossi's iconic unfinished cemetery, an architectural metaphor for the fragility of memory and the passing of time.
In Il Dondolo's publishing project, these voices become stories. Beppe Cottafavi, director of the publishing house, inaugurated the series with the short story 'Epitaffio', also published in the newsstand issue of Finzioni, the cultural monthly of the daily newspaper Domani. This was followed by Elena Bosi, who last year published her first and irresistible novel 'Mio padre è nato per i piedi' (My father was born for the feet) for Neri Pozza, and then came 'Il Dondolo' with a series of short unpublished stories giving voice to minimal and marginal figures, resurfacing from oblivion. Finally, the third ebook, 'The city of the living, the city of the dead' collects the narratives that accompany the sound guide, stories of ordinary people who, precisely in their ordinariness, reflect the moral and collective fabric of the city. A perfect echo of Rossi's unfinished project: a city of the dead that speaks to that of the living.
Alongside these paths dedicated to memory, Il Dondolo also publishes the anthology "Noi e gli alberi" ("Us and Trees"), created as part of the Rotary Modena L.A. Muratori 2025 Prize, which this year has been renewed with new sections dedicated to the relationship between literature and the environment, in collaboration with Alberi Festival. The anthology brings together the competition's winning and finalist short stories and ideally joins the "Lay Missal" already published by Il Dondolo, which reflects on the philosophical and cultural roots of the Modena festival inspired by the visionary work of architect Cesare Leonardi, author of the famous "L'architettura degli alberi".
The award involved a prestigious jury chaired by Beppe Cottafavi and comprising, among others, Isabella C. Blum, Sandro Campani, Matteo De Giuli, Ludovica Lugli, Giovanna Zoboli and Andrea Zanni, among others. In the fiction section, the award went to the short story 'Il rifugio delle fate' by Elena Tartaglia, a delicate tale of winter and trees, while the non-fiction section rewarded 'Itinerari arborei' by Pietro Cacciatore, an invitation to discover botanical and literary routes in the city of Padua, a useful model for future applications in other cities. Finally, a special mention went to Renata Pieroni with 'La lunga vita dell'albero' (The Long Life of the Tree), a poetic first-person account of a fir tree witnessing the life of a Bolognese garden from 1957 to 2017.
A further piece in the publishing map of these months is the new Dondolo signed by Elena Bellei, Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di madri, an unusual text on motherhood born from a series of interviews with young mothers, interwoven with contemporary reflections and chronicles. A publication that is part of the project "Mater. La forza inquieta del materno" (Mater. The restless force of the maternal), curated by the feminist association Blu Bramante and the midwives' collective PartiAmo, whose founding moments included the meeting with philosopher Adriana Cavarero and the screening at the Sala Truffaut of the film "Olmo and the Seagull" by Brazilian director Petra Costa. Bellei's work is in dialogue with this choral reflection, going beyond the social dimension to restore voice and body to the maternal experience, with all its lights and shadows.
Lastly, as is tradition, comes the summer advice of director Beppe Cottafavi, who suggests three emblematic readings from the Dondolo: Elena Bosi's new Dondolo "Una notte sono morta e altre voci del cimitero San Cataldo di Modena" (One Night I Died and Other Voices from the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena) with small stories set in the Modena lowlands, and the short story "La sconosciuta" (The Unknown Woman) by mystery and thriller writer Barbara Baraldi, also this week third in the list of best-selling books in Italy with her latest novel "Gli omicidi dei tarocchi" and the timeless "Casa d'altri" by Silvio D'Arzo, the best short story of the Italian twentieth century, as most critics have expressed it, and always among the best loved by the public.
