An 'other' look at America. Low budgets, little-known actors or stars who put themselves on the line, original stories, far from clichés and stereotypes, able to excite and make us reflect. At Giunti Odeon three cult films of American independent cinema made in recent years.

A much-loved guest returns to GO: Gianrico Carofiglio, presenting his latest book Viaggio in Italia (Touring Club Italiano) in conversation with Francesca Santolini.

The Book:

In a country that has been extensively narrated, spectacularized, and at times trivialized, there is still room for surprise. At the edges of maps, in details and hidden corners, there exists a restless dimension that only a clear yet visionary gaze can bring into view. The visible cities of a great storyteller—from Bari to Venice, from Palermo to Turin—are woven into a narrative marked by a joyful sense of disorientation, moving in many directions without a fixed destination.

A cartographer of the invisible, Carofiglio guides us with the pace of a flâneur, inviting us to discover light within shadow, hidden beauty in details and small stories. He reminds us that it is detours and chance encounters that reveal unexpected and surprising horizons.

The Author:

Gianrico Carofiglio is an Italian writer, former magistrate, and former politician. Appointed to the judiciary in 1986, he served as a pretore in Prato, a Public Prosecutor in Foggia, and later as a Deputy Prosecutor at the Anti-Mafia District Directorate in Bari. In 2008, he was elected to the Italian Senate for the Democratic Party.

His first novel, Testimone inconsapevole (Sellerio, 2002), inaugurated the Italian legal thriller and introduced the character of lawyer Guido Guerrieri. The novel received several debut awards, including the Premio del Giovedì “Marisa Rusconi,” Premio Rhegium Iulii, Premio Città di Cuneo, and Premio Città di Chiavari. Further novels featuring Guerrieri followed with Sellerio: Ad occhi chiusi (2003)—winner of the Premio Lido di Camaiore, Premio delle Biblioteche di Roma, and named “best international noir of the year” in Germany in 2007 by a jury of booksellers and journalists—and Ragionevoli dubbi (2006), which won the Premio Fregene and Premio Viadana in 2007 and the Premio Tropea in 2008.

Among his many books are Il passato è una terra straniera (Rizzoli, 2004), winner of the Premio Bancarella 2005 and adapted into a film produced by Fandango in 2008; the graphic novel Cacciatori nelle tenebre (with his brother Francesco, Rizzoli, 2007), winner of the Premio Martoglio; L’arte del dubbio (Sellerio, 2007); Né qui né altrove(Laterza, 2008); Il paradosso del poliziotto (Nottetempo, 2009); Le perfezioni provvisorie (Sellerio, 2010); Il silenzio dell’onda (Rizzoli, 2011); Il bordo vertiginoso delle cose (Rizzoli, 2013); and La casa nel bosco (written with Francesco Carofiglio, 2014).

More recent publications with Einaudi include Una mutevole verità (2014), La regola dell’equilibrio, Passeggeri notturni, L’estate fredda (2016), Alle tre del mattino (2017), La misura del tempo (2019), and Non esiste saggezza. Edizione definitiva (2020). Other works include Della gentilezza e del coraggio. Breviario di politica e altre cose(Feltrinelli, 2020), La disciplina di Penelope (Mondadori, 2021), La nuova manomissione delle parole (Feltrinelli, 2021), Rancore (Einaudi, 2022), L’ora del caffè. Manuale di conversazione per generazioni incompatibili (Einaudi, 2022), L’orizzonte della notte (Einaudi, 2024), and Elogio dell’ignoranza e dell’errore (Einaudi, 2024).

Giunti Odeon celebrates female cinema, proposing three cult films with women as the absolute protagonists. Tenacious and passionate, torn between difficult choices and passionate loves, those told in these two films are the women who stop at nothing and who are not afraid to face the pitfalls of life, without giving up their own identity.

At Giunti Odeon a selection of American classics from the 1980s! Colourful, crazy, experimental, joyful and dark at the same time: the films of that decade are the kaleidoscope of a renewed and euphoric society, but not without its shadows. Here then are the films of masters such as Robert Zemeckis, David Cronenberg, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese and many other cult films to see and see again!

At Giunti Odeon the traditional Sunday appointment with the great Disney and Pixar classics! To see and see again the great animated films that over many years have enchanted generations of viewers, young and old!

In collaboration with Oxfam, Riccardo Luna presents Qualcosa è andato storto (Solferino) at Giunti Odeon, together with Tomaso Montanari (Rector of the Università per Stranieri di Siena) and Roberto Barbieri (Director of Oxfam Italia). The event is moderated by Martina Pennisi (journalist at Corriere della Sera).

The Book:

For a long time, the internet and the web seemed like humanity’s most powerful tools for progress since the invention of the printing press or electricity. They were supposed to “break down walls and build bridges,” giving rise to the idea of “tech democracy”—a new era of democracy enhanced by the internet, open to direct citizen participation and oversight. It was the new promised land, where everyone would finally be happy.

Yet, as it has become clear, the web has instead become one of the most insidious tools undermining democracies. Over twenty years of social media, we have lost a shared vision of the future—a better world we could reach together. When, exactly, did this change occur? When did children stop dreaming of becoming astronauts and start wanting to be influencers and content creators? And why? Were we deluded, or was the deck of cards we were playing with rigged from the start?

Riccardo Luna poses these and other questions about the identity of today’s web, tracing its history back to its origins—before it was corrupted by the narcissism fueled by the digital economy, before algorithms amplified fake news simply because it drove traffic. The book takes readers on a journey through the epic of Silicon Valley: from the early days when tech entrepreneurs seemed benevolent, to the Big Tech pact with Donald Trump’s White House, and to the tragic events in Gaza, where grassroots use of social media helped bypass censorship and spark a global mobilization. A sign, perhaps, that nothing is entirely lost, and that there is still time to change the future.

The Author:

RICCARDO LUNA is one of Italy’s most authoritative journalists on innovation, technology, and sustainability. He was the first editor of Wired, served as the government’s Digital Champion at the EU, and has curated many successful events such as Stazione Futuro, the Maker Faire, Italian Tech Week, and the Venice Climate Week. A long-time contributor to la Repubblica, since 2025 he has been a columnist for Corriere della Sera.

Silvia Bencini and Luca Bravi will present Auschwitz: Percorsi di memoria attiva (FrancoAngeli), together with Ugo Caffaz (Tuscany Region), Giovanni Gozzini (University of Siena), and Stefano Oliviero (University of Florence). The discussion will be moderated by Nura Abdel Mohsen (Fondazione Museo della Deportazione di Prato).

The Book
The volume explores educational pathways of memory, starting from the idea of “crossing through Auschwitz”—not merely visiting it, but transforming it from a crystallized monument into a tool for learning. It outlines a training model that—through places and objects serving as bridges between past and present—can be applied to any site of memory.

In this regenerative process of learning to know, recognize, and narrate multiple stories, the account of death always aims to reconnect with the possibility of life: to learn the “lesson” of Auschwitz, of Rwanda, of Srebrenica, up to the conflicts of today, and to the shores of Cutro and Lampedusa. The aim is not to declare everything identical to Auschwitz, but to search for a pedagogy of memories—a driving force for educational dialogue and democracy in the present.

The Authors

Silvia Bencini is a research fellow at the Department of Education, Languages, Intercultural Studies, Literature, and Psychology at the University of Florence. Her work focuses on the social history of education in relation to European memory policies and on historical-educational processes aimed at inclusion and minority participation.

Luca Bravi is a researcher at the same department of the University of Florence, where he teaches History of Communication and Educational Processes. His research focuses on the social history of education in relation to European inclusion policies, the history of media and their impact on educational contexts, and historical processes of inclusion through the enhancement of European memory. He has collaborated with the National Office Against Racial Discrimination of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and with the Tuscany Region on memory policies addressed to schools.

1945-1975: this was the golden age of Italian cinema, full of masterpieces that left their mark on the entire history of film. From the ruins of war arose Neorealism, the “movement” that, with Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica-Zavattini, changed the way cinema was made and conceived forever. From the early 1950s, the revolutionary charge of Neorealism faded, becoming contaminated with popular genres such as comedy and other forms of popular cinema, passing through the golden 1960s with the affirmation of great auteur cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc.), “Italian-style comedy” and other genres (such as spaghetti westerns), until the anxieties, experiments and new sensibilities of the early 1970s. A long history in which Italian cinema reflects and reworks the enormous political, social, economic and cultural changes experienced by the country during those crucial three decades.

1945-1975: this was the golden age of Italian cinema, full of masterpieces that left their mark on the entire history of film. From the ruins of war arose Neorealism, the “movement” that, with Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica-Zavattini, changed the way cinema was made and conceived forever. From the early 1950s, the revolutionary charge of Neorealism faded, becoming contaminated with popular genres such as comedy and other forms of popular cinema, passing through the golden 1960s with the affirmation of great auteur cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc.), “Italian-style comedy” and other genres (such as spaghetti westerns), until the anxieties, experiments and new sensibilities of the early 1970s. A long history in which Italian cinema reflects and reworks the enormous political, social, economic and cultural changes experienced by the country during those crucial three decades.

1945-1975: this was the golden age of Italian cinema, full of masterpieces that left their mark on the entire history of film. From the ruins of war arose Neorealism, the “movement” that, with Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica-Zavattini, changed the way cinema was made and conceived forever. From the early 1950s, the revolutionary charge of Neorealism faded, becoming contaminated with popular genres such as comedy and other forms of popular cinema, passing through the golden 1960s with the affirmation of great auteur cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc.), “Italian-style comedy” and other genres (such as spaghetti westerns), until the anxieties, experiments and new sensibilities of the early 1970s. A long history in which Italian cinema reflects and reworks the enormous political, social, economic and cultural changes experienced by the country during those crucial three decades.

1945-1975: this was the golden age of Italian cinema, full of masterpieces that left their mark on the entire history of film. From the ruins of war arose Neorealism, the “movement” that, with Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica-Zavattini, changed the way cinema was made and conceived forever. From the early 1950s, the revolutionary charge of Neorealism faded, becoming contaminated with popular genres such as comedy and other forms of popular cinema, passing through the golden 1960s with the affirmation of great auteur cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc.), “Italian-style comedy” and other genres (such as spaghetti westerns), until the anxieties, experiments and new sensibilities of the early 1970s. A long history in which Italian cinema reflects and reworks the enormous political, social, economic and cultural changes experienced by the country during those crucial three decades.

1945-1975: this was the golden age of Italian cinema, full of masterpieces that left their mark on the entire history of film. From the ruins of war arose Neorealism, the “movement” that, with Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica-Zavattini, changed the way cinema was made and conceived forever. From the early 1950s, the revolutionary charge of Neorealism faded, becoming contaminated with popular genres such as comedy and other forms of popular cinema, passing through the golden 1960s with the affirmation of great auteur cinema (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini, etc.), “Italian-style comedy” and other genres (such as spaghetti westerns), until the anxieties, experiments and new sensibilities of the early 1970s. A long history in which Italian cinema reflects and reworks the enormous political, social, economic and cultural changes experienced by the country during those crucial three decades.