The beauty of the Orrido – SEPTEMBER/NOVEMBER 2026

THE BEAUTY OF THE ORRIDO – SEPTEMBER/NOVEMBER 2026

‘Il bello dell’Orrido’ (The beauty of the Orrido), a series curated by Armando Besio featuring conversations with leading figures in contemporary culture, continues with its autumn programme. As part of the BAC Bellano Art and Culture project, the new season brings to the stage of Bellano Movie Theater (free admission, 6.00 pm) a series of talks with Andrea Vitali, Ben Pastor and Bruno Giussani: open-ended discussions in which the guests’ personal narratives intertwine with collective themes – poetry and everyday life, a passion for thrillers and noir stories, technological innovations and digital resistance – in a continuous interplay between words, poetry and critical thought.

Continuing in the vein of last year, Andrea Vitali returns to the stage on Saturday 26 September for the event “The Best Poems of Our Lives”: the discussion between Vitali – a true ‘regular’ – and Besio shifts from the novel (the theme explored last year) to poetry. The choice of poems is guided by introspection, alternating between feelings of pain and loss and desires and hopes for consolation. An event that has now become a cherished literary tradition, underpinned by the long-standing friendship between the two participants.

Born in Bellano in 1956, Andrea Vitali studied medicine at the University of Milan and worked as a general practitioner in Bellano until 2008. Since then, he has devoted himself entirely to writing, returning to medical practice only exceptionally in 2020 during the pandemic. He made his debut as a writer in 1989 with *Il procuratore*, which won the Montblanc Prize, and has since published numerous novels without interruption, mainly with Garzanti and Rizzoli. Prolific and consistent, through his writing he has constructed a veritable ‘human comedy’, almost always set in Bellano, where irony and melancholy intertwine: major historical events remain in the background, whilst the village, with its contradictions, its peculiarities and its personal and emotional relationships, becomes the beating heart of his stories. Alongside his novels, Vitali has also experimented with other forms of writing: for the publisher Cinquesensi, he has authored nineteen books, illustrated by Giancarlo Vitali, a painter and friend of his (no relation). Very soon, RAI will broadcast the highly anticipated new TV series, inspired by his novels and the character of the young Carabinieri marshal Ernesto Maccadò.

The programme continues on Saturday 24 October with an evening dedicated to Ben Pastor, an internationally renowned crime writer and lecturer in social sciences at American universities: “The Lady in Yellow” is the title of the event, which will conclude with a crime-themed risotto dinner in the company of the author and the audience. This literary event marks the arrival in bookshops of *Lo specchio del pellegrino* (Sellerio, 2026), the latest novel featuring Martin Bora, one of the most beloved characters in the historical crime novels published by Sellerio. The protagonist is, in fact, an officer in the German Wehrmacht and a collaborator with the secret services, torn between obedience to his uniform and his aversion to the horrors of Nazism. Ben Pastor, born in Rome but a naturalised American citizen, is regarded as one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary historical crime fiction and a leading figure in so-called Postmodernism, as attested by the acclaim and scholarly work of the leading US literary critic, Fredric Jameson of Duke University.

The final event, entitled “A Handbook of Digital Resistance”, will take place on Saturday 28 November with Bruno Giussani, a journalist, podcaster and, for twenty years, European director and global curator of the TED Foundation – the organisation behind the famous TED Talks. The starting point for the discussion with Besio is *The Mind Under Siege: How Not to Be Manipulated in the Age of Artificial Intelligence* (Edizioni Casagrande), an essay that explores our complex relationship with artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies, which are now capable of collecting our data, analysing our emotions and even falsifying reality through deceptive texts, sounds and images. Giussani prompts us to reflect on these ongoing changes and proposes a personal and collective stance of ‘digital resistance’, so that we may learn to decipher these mechanisms and use new technologies without being used by them. This event offers a valuable opportunity to broaden our perspective on technological development and to analyse its potential applications.