Barcolana Un Mare di Racconti returns for its eighth edition: six days of contemporary literature in Trieste from 5 to 10 October

Barcolana Un Mare di Racconti returns for its eighth edition. Once again this year, readers are invited to embark on a literary journey between land and sea over six days, from Monday 5 to Saturday 10 October, at the auditorium of Casa della Musica, Via dei Capitelli 3, Trieste.

Organised as part of the cultural events accompanying Barcolana58 presented by Generali, promoted by Mitja Gialuz, President of the Società Velica di Barcola e Grignano, conceived and directed by journalist and writer Alessandro Mezzena Lona, with the collaboration of Piero Zecchini and the entire Barcolana team, the festival’s eighth edition brings together around twenty of the most acclaimed and distinctive voices in contemporary fiction and publishing, with the support of Fondazione CRTrieste and the Municipality of Trieste.

Journeying through the boundless universe of literature, **Un Mare di Racconti** has sought over the years to build a bridge between Trieste and the world. Previous editions have brought to the city leading names in contemporary literature and culture including Mircea Cărtărescu, Maylis de Kerangal, Cristina Rivera Garza, Ian Brokken, Esther Kinsky, Stefano Mancuso, Björn Larsson, Stefania Auci, Frank Westerman, Dimitris Lyacos, Emanuele Trevi, Viola Ardone, Ben Pastor, Antonio Moresco, Marco Balzano, Romana Petri, Siri Jacobsen, Paolo Rumiz, Drago Jančar, Mauro Pagani, Anilda Ibrahimi, Carmine Abate and Catherine Poulain; acclaimed figures from the world of cinema such as Pupi Avati, Marco Risi and Andrea Pennacchi; and internationally renowned illustrators including Lorenzo Mattotti, Chiara Rapaccini and Olimpia Zagnoli.

The six days of the 2026 edition will feature an equally distinguished line-up, with a programme weaving together Italian and international fiction, the sea and adventure, history and memory, graphic novels, crime fiction and reflections on the present day.

MONDAY 5 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Andrea Vitali, “Il piede nella fossa” (Garzanti)

One of the most brilliant and prolific authors in Italian fiction, for many years a family doctor on Lake Como and often compared with one of the great masters of twentieth-century Italian literature, Piero Chiara, Vitali’s exuberant new novel tells of the turmoil unleashed at Bellano hospital by one patient’s startling request.

6.30 pm – Elena Varvello, “La vita sempre” (Guanda)

A finalist for the 2026 Premio Campiello and a lecturer at Turin’s Scuola Holden, the author of “La luce perfetta del giorno” and “Solo un ragazzo” follows the traces of her grandfather, a young man in love with life, indifferent to ideologies and driven by a kind of existential anarchy, who would ultimately be caught up in the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

7.15 pm – Claudia Durastanti, “Falsi amici” (La nave di Teseo)

A layering of stories ranging from Amy Winehouse to Cesare Pavese, from Lolita to Piero della Francesca, by the Italian writer who spends part of the year in America and has won over critics and readers with novels including “Un giorno verrò a lanciare sassi alla tua finestra”, “La straniera” and “Missitalia”. She is among the founders of London’s Italian Festival of Literature.

TUESDAY 6 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Fabio Pozzo and Francesca Clapcich, “Un’onda alla volta” (TEA)

The world of sailing as told by the only Italian woman to have won The Ocean Race, in 2023. Written together with *La Stampa* journalist Fabio Pozzo, this literary journey traces Francesca Clapcich’s path from her first encounters with the Adriatic in Trieste to challenging the still predominantly male world of yacht racing, while continuing to seek her own place in sport and in life. **Clapcich will join the event remotely from the United States.**

6.30 pm – Alex Bellini, “Pensa se non ci avessi provato” (Sonzogno)

A journey worth a lifetime: explorer Alex Bellini looks back on his extraordinary solo, unsupported Atlantic crossing by rowing boat, an adventure that came close to ending in shipwreck off Formentera.

7.15 pm – Fumettibrutti, “Cigni selvaggi” (Feltrinelli)

Hailed from the outset as one of Italy’s finest talents in graphic storytelling, Sicilian artist Josephine Yole Signorelli, known as Fumettibrutti, won both the Premio Micheluzzi and Lucca’s Gran Guinigi with her debut work “Romanzo esplicito”. She now turns to fiction to tell the story of a trans girl who leaves Sicily for northern Italy, moving away from the family she loves in order to pursue her dreams.

WEDNESDAY 7 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Mirt Komel, “Detective Dante. Indagine a Nova Gorica” (Qudulibri), and Tadej Golob, “Avevo le mie ragioni” (Ronzani)

Two compelling voices in Slovenian-language fiction. Mirt Komel, a philosopher and writer born in Nova Gorica and a lecturer at the University of Ljubljana, follows “Il giglio spezzato” with a prequel devoted to his character, the brilliant detective Dante D. Tadej Golob, a writer, journalist and mountaineer from Maribor and winner of the prestigious Kresnik Award, also brings back Taras Birsa, the inspector who previously appeared in “Dove nuotano i pesci gatto”.

6.30 pm – Elena Stancanelli, “La gioia di ieri” (Einaudi)

Elena Stancanelli, who won the Premio Berto with her striking debut novel “Benzina”, contributes to *la Repubblica*, *il manifesto* and *La Stampa*. At the heart of “La gioia di ieri” is Anna, a woman surrounded by friends, lovers and people she cannot live without, who pursues happiness without ever hiding from the complexities of life.

7.15 pm – Clara Sánchez, “La stanza delle verità” (Garzanti)

Winner of three of Spain’s most important literary awards – Alfaguara, Nadal and Planeta – and the author of the million-selling “Il profumo delle foglie di limone”, Clara Sánchez is much loved by Italian readers. In “La stanza delle verità”, she tells how Nuria’s sheltered world, distant from reality, is overturned by the arrival of Nina, the new girlfriend of her son Cris.

THURSDAY 8 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Elena Commessatti, “Il tempo delle viole” (Newton Compton), and Matteo Mantoani, “Lo speziale di Steinbrueck” (Fazi Editore)

Journalist and popular writer Elena Commessatti reconstructs the lives of three women in a Friuli looking towards the future yet still deeply bound to its past, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his debut novel, Matteo Mantoani follows merchant Gottlob Kramer as he returns to his home village, Orgnasso, a cluster of houses among the Friulian mountains, to discover who killed Maddalena, a beautiful, free-spirited woman.

6.30 pm – Giovanni Montanaro, “Il fuoco di Venezia” (Feltrinelli)

Lawyer and writer Giovanni Montanaro places Venice at the heart of a love story in what is perhaps his finest novel to date. Through this story, he transforms a unique city seemingly frozen in time into a place filled with hopes for the future.

7.15 pm – Ben Pastor, “Lo specchio del pellegrino” (Sellerio)

Following the Manzoni-inspired novel “La fossa dei lupi”, one of crime fiction’s best-loved detectives returns. Created by Ben Pastor in 1999 in “Lumen”, the first instalment of a long-running series, Martin Bora is a Wehrmacht officer constantly torn between obedience to his uniform and revulsion at the horrors of Nazism.

FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Elena Rui, “Vedove di Camus” (L’Orma)

In a passionate investigation that becomes an intimate and balanced narrative, 2026 Premio Strega finalist Elena Rui reconstructs the lives of the four women who shaped the brief life of the great French writer Albert Camus, born and raised in Algeria, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and killed in a car accident three years later.

6.30 pm – Anna Kańtoch, “L’estate dei perduti” (Voland)

The second instalment of a four-part series that has already earned Anna Kańtoch Poland’s Nagroda Wielkiego Kalibru for best crime novel – alongside five Janusz A. Zajdel Awards for her other books – features Katowice police commissioner Krystyna Lesinska as she deals with family problems, the shadows of a painful past and ever more complex crimes.

7.15 pm – Viola Ardone, “Tanta ancora vita” (Einaudi)

Following the enormous success of “Il treno dei bambini”, which became an international publishing sensation at the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair, Viola Ardone’s “Tanta ancora vita” tells of the unexpected emotional whirlwind that sweeps through Vita’s life when, one morning, she opens her door to find Kostya curled up on the doorstep. A child she was not expecting, who does not speak her language, but who will ultimately bring her into step “with the rhythm of love”.

SATURDAY 10 OCTOBER

5.45 pm – Tullio Avoledo, “Ultimo valzer di una ragazza perbene” (Neri Pozza), and Giuliano Pasini, “Il silenzio che resta” (Piemme)

Pordenone writer Tullio Avoledo brings back lawyer Vittorio Contrada after “Come si uccide un gentiluomo”, forcing him to confront both his past and the stalker targeting the daughter of a former school friend. Pasini, a writer with the Apennines close to his heart, builds the powerful thriller “Il silenzio che resta” around the disappearance of a child and a talented journalist who increasingly seeks refuge in the numbness of medication.

6.30 pm – Emanuele Trevi, “Philip K. Dick. Opere scelte” (Meridiani Mondadori)

Winner of the 2021 Premio Strega with “Due vite”, as well as the Napoli, Viareggio, Boccaccio and Marco Polo Venise awards, Emanuele Trevi returns to Un Mare di Racconti for the third time to explore the literary and human world of Philip K. Dick, one of the most visionary and original American writers of the twentieth century, to whom he has dedicated the two-volume “Opere scelte” for Meridiani Mondadori.

7.15 pm – Bruno Arpaia, “Il mondo senza inverno” (Guanda)

Winner of the 2001 Premio Campiello with “L’angelo della storia” and editor of the Meridiani volumes dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Bruno Arpaia imagines, in the diptych comprising “Qualcosa là fuori” and “Un mondo senza inverno”, mass migration from Italy towards northern Europe as a result of climate upheaval, in an explosive combination of scientific projections and pure adventure.

Admission to all events is free, subject to availability.