The Italian Embassy in Tehran held today, at the residence of Ambassador Giuseppe Perrone, a reading event with the Italian magazine “Internazionale” and the Iranian “Na Dastan”. The event featured short stories of Iranian contemporary literature published in the latest issue of Internazionale magazine.

The event, held in hybrid format, was attended by Mohammad Tolouei, Iranian journalist and writer, director of “Na Dastan”, Francesca Gnetti, editor of the Middle East section of “Internazionale”, as well as translator Giacomo Longhi, writers Ali Khodai, Mahsa Mohebali, Bita Malakuti, Alieh Atai, Arash Sadeghbeigi, photographer Mozhde Nourmohammadi, and cartoonists Maysam Barza and Rambod Khanlari.

“The stories published by Internazionale are very different from one another” Ambassador Perrone said in his introductory remarks, “but they all have a common thread in their focus on the daily life of Iranian ordinary people. The individual experiences of each of the writers and their main characters appear intertwined in their narrations, poems, and photographs through time and space, so as to bring the reader closer to contemporary Iran,” Ambassador Perrone concluded.

The reading event is part of a series of initiatives by the Italian Embassy in Tehran on Italian and Iranian literature, aimed at highlighting the historical literary ties between the two countries.

This year the rich program of activities by the Italian Embassy in Tehran, as far as literature is concerned, will include the celebration of Italy's revered writer and intellectual Pierpaolo Pasolini, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, as well as many other workshops, translation competitions, screenings and readings on various authors both Iranian and Italian.

by Siavash Sufinejad