In distribution since the 2015/2016 season.

“Generally speaking, my lectures always have the same goal: giving answers, which in turn generate more questions. This is how you construct the chain of knowledge: by always coming up with answers that contain questions”. This is how Alessandro Baricco describes his Lectures, a cycle which he has already staged with huge success in several Italian theatres.

The Lectures consist of four performances (possibly reduced to three), during which the writer from Piedmont deals with a different facet of knowledge every time: “On Taste” (The taste revolutions: the ‘break’ that joins Kate Moss and Maria Callas), “On Justice” (The Peloponnesian War told by Thucydides: the origin of the sense of justice), “On Time” (The flight of Luigi XVI, King of France and Tolstoy), “On Writing” (The writer’s job: Marcel Proust). It is possible to attend the whole cycle or just one performance, because each lecture contains a complete narration in itself.

The staging is simple: just Alessandro Baricco, sitting at a desk, giving his lecture with the support of video footage to outline and reveal his train of reasoning.

Essayist and narrator, Baricco’s first work is Il genio in fuga. Due saggi sul teatro musicale di Gioacchino Rossini [Genius on the Run. Two Essays on Gioacchino Rossini’s Musical Theatre]. He has written numerous novels, the most successful of which are Castles of Anger, Ocean Sea, the theatre monologue Novecento on which Giuseppe Tornatore has based his film ‘The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean’, and more recently The Young Bride. On television he has been the protagonist of cultural programmes such as ‟L’amore è un dardo” [Love is a Dart], about opera, and ‟Pickwick”, dedicated to books.

In 1994, he founded and created the Holden School in Turin.