“The places we inhabit, the people we meet, the words with which we recognize ourselves. And then the distances, the desires, the rights that make a free life possible”: these are the Human Geographies of the 2026 edition of the Pazza Idea festival, which from November 19 to 22 returns to Cagliari, at the Teatro Carmen Melis, for its 15th edition.
Organized by the cultural association Luna Scarlatta, with the artistic direction of Mattea Lissia, the festival chooses books and literature as the guiding thread of a journey through contemporary life, in dialogue with poetry, journalism, philosophy, science, photography, music and the arts.
Four days “to question the transformations of the present” through encounters, panels, interviews, authorial solos and interludes, musical readings, concerts, audiovisual performances, a photographic exhibition and four workshops.
Among the strands running through the programme, a tribute to Grazia Deledda on the centenary of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and to Joyce Lussu; a focus on poetry and feminisms; and a dialogue about the new generations, about school, about inequalities and about the technologies that transform the way we live.
“Human Geographies is plural: it grows from the desire to widen the gaze on people, their stories and the relationships that bind them together. We think of geographies as passages, as possibilities for encounter and transformation. In fifteen editions we have built a project in which books dialogue with the arts and with the most urgent questions of the present, seeking connections and letting ourselves be guided by curiosity and the capacity to feel astonishment. This year we want to compose a living atlas of the human condition, give voice to fragilities and recognize forms of resistance,” explains Mattea Lissia.
The encounters and performances of Pazza Idea are free to attend, with no reservations and until seats are exhausted; only participation in the workshops requires registration.
Across these themes, also renowned names in journalism: Giovanna Botteri, Tiziana Ferrario, Corrado Formigli, Riccardo Staglianò and Massimo Sideri, with Marco Varvello hosting the session with Botteri.
Top guests of the new edition include Chiara Alessi, Marco Amerighi, Silvia Bencivelli, Lavinia Bianchi, Giovanna Botteri, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Filomena Campus, Ester Cois, Daria Corrias, Pietro Del Soldà, Paolo Di Paolo, Jolanda Di Virgilio, Tiziana Ferrario, Florinda Fiamma, Marcello Fois, Corrado Formigli, Paolo Fresu, Ilaria Gaspari, Vera Gheno, Damir Ivic, Matteo Lancini, Steve Lodder, Pietro Lussu, Fabio Magnasciutti, Piero Martin, Tomaso Montanari, Giorgio Poi, Antonio Prudenzano, Isabella Ragonese, Christian Raimo, Veronica Raimo, Saffronkeira and Amir B. Ash, Vanni Santoni, Marcus du Sautoy, Yari Selvetella, Massimo Sideri, Riccardo Staglianò, Pierluigi Vaccaneo, Marco Varvello, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto and Francesco Zizola.
I workshop gratuiti di Pazza Idea 2026
Four free workshops on registration complete the programme and offer the audience the possibility to experiment with tools and languages: from shared reading to educational practices, from illustration to narrating books in the era of creators, podcasts and artificial intelligence. A journey between art, literature and digital culture that accompanies listening with direct participation.
Registrations, until all seats are taken, at the address [email protected].
I femminismi
The relationship between bodies, language and power runs through the festival and finds a central moment in Città e corpi: architetture femministe per un abitare plurale e sicuro, Saturday 21 November: Ester Cois, Vera Gheno and Chiara Alessi, in conversation with Lavinia Bianchi, interrogating the supposed neutrality of urban space. Safety, mobility, transport, workplaces and care become political questions: who can live in the city without fear, which needs are recognized, which people remain on the margins? The reflection dialogues with La sedia del sadico. Il design sul corpo delle donne by Alessi (Laterza, 2026) and with La lingua libera. Della forza sovversiva delle parole by Gheno (Effequ, 2026).
Also devoted to the power of words is the Gheno interlude, this time starting from Genere (Editori Laterza, 2026). The words that shape our boundaries, on the history of a category that has become a terrain of cultural and political confrontation.
Sunday, November 22, Ester Cois also presents Fuori luogo. La metrica della femminilità e le geografie della disuguaglianza, an interlude on the rules that determine who can occupy a space and under what conditions.
Freedom in relationships returns in the session with Veronica Raimo, Scrivere la propria storia, dedicated to Non scrivere di me (Einaudi, 2026): affectionate dependence, hidden violence and obsession are explored through a writing that exposes power relationships.
From another perspective, Giovanna Botteri is the protagonist of the session led by Marco Varvello, Le coordinate del coraggio: le donne che non si arrendono. Soffiando nel vento (Solferino, 2026) gives voice to women who, in different parts of the world, resist injustice and defend their dignity. Literature and journalistic testimony thus converge on a question that runs through the entire edition: how to recognize the lives and possibilities that power tends to render invisible?
Le nuove generazioni
To depart or to stay, to build a connection, to find in school a place of emancipation: Pazza Idea brings together three perspectives on the lives of girls and boys, with Tiziana Ferrario, Matteo Lancini and Christian Raimo. At the center are the material and emotional conditions of growth and the responsibility of adults, institutions and the educating community.
With A volte ti amo. La rivoluzione dei rapporti nel mondo fragile delle nuove generazioni (Einaudi, 2026), the psychologist and psychotherapist Matteo Lancini explores the changes in affectionate relationships and the role of digital technology in young people’s lives. An invitation to parents and teachers to understand before judging, giving up control to build trust and spaces for listening: a child’s freedom requires emotional responsibility and adult presence.
Another generational geography is that of Tiziana Ferrario, who on Saturday 21 November, in conversation with Yari Selvetella, presents La voglia di andarsene. I figli all’estero, il grande male dell’Italia (Fuoriscena, 2026). Personal experience intertwines with the stories of young Italians who left and parents who stayed at home: an investigation into opportunities denied and the conditions that should allow one to choose freely whether to depart or stay.
La scuola (è) di tutti is Sunday’s appointment with Christian Raimo, starting from Racconti di scuola (Einaudi, 2026), edited by him. The classrooms told through literature become the point from which to observe generational conflicts, inequalities and social transformations. The writer and teacher’s voice brings the discourse into the present: the value of teaching, critical thinking and school as a stronghold of democracy and freedom of expression.
La letteratura
The festival pays tribute to Marcello Fois, just awarded the Campiello Prize 2026. In the session Atlante del Tempo e della Terra, in conversation with Florinda Fiamma, the festival celebrates his writing and his path: the relationship between memory and identity, family stories and the places through which one tells the human condition. At the center is also L’immensa distrazione (Einaudi), the awarded novel, set in a mythical yet concrete Emilia, where the saga of a dynasty becomes a tale of time, desires and the fractures that cross lives.
Maria Grazia Calandrone returns with La luce del sistema. Storia di Ivie e delle sue bambine (Solferino, 2026): the story of a woman who arrived from Nigeria as a victim of trafficking and swept away by the very system that should have protected her, told with civil passion and literary rigor.
Marco Amerighi (Quanto splende questo nero, Bollati Boringhieri, 2026) and Vanni Santoni (Il detective sonnambulo, Mondadori, 2025), interviewed by Jolanda Di Virgilio, discuss the shadowy sides of identity and literature as a compass in the chaos of the present; Santoni also signs a solo piece dedicated to his trilogy of youth countercultures, an epic of the margins between rave, role-playing and street art.
Paolo Di Paolo proposes two performances outside the norm, going beyond the usual book presentation. With the new novel Tremare (La nave di Teseo, 2026), the author invites readers to experience two different ways of meeting literature: Lo scrittore è presente, three hours at a table to meet readers one by one, in a performance echoing Marina Abramović, and Tremare DJ set, a story from the console through a playlist spanning Beethoven to Bowie, from Mina to Achille Lauro. You listen, you talk and you can even dance: the book becomes an occasion for relationship and participation.
Around the books and the questions they open, the Philosophical Dialogue on the territories of existence with Pietro Del Soldà and Ilaria Gaspari takes shape. An encounter in the spirit of Zarathustra from Rai Radio 3, entrusted to two philosophically minded friends, capable of weaving thought and conversation together. Desires, emotions and relationships become tools to question our way of being in the world, starting from Amore e libertà. Per una filosofia del desiderio (Feltrinelli, 2025) and Vita segreta delle emozioni (Einaudi, 2021).
Due grandi donne, due percorsi di libertà
The geographies of Grazia Deledda and Joyce Lussu traverse places, belonging and the borders imposed on people, especially women. On the centenary of the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature, Pazza Idea dedicates to Deledda Siamo canne, e la sorte è il vento, Saturday 21 November, with readings by Francesca Saba and music by Ivana Busu. In her pages the Sardinian landscape is part of the characters’ lives: it guards ties, imposes rules, accompanies the conflict between belonging and the desire for freedom. A geography in which to recognize the weight of conventions, inequalities and the possibility of choosing one’s own destiny.
Friday 20 November, Isabella Ragonese and Pietro Lussu bring to the stage Frontiere d’amore e di lotta: un viaggio tra parole e musica, dedicated to Joyce Lussu. The stories of women subjected to patriarchal dominance meet the love poems, exile and resistance (her own, but also those of Nazim Hikmet, translated by her). Here geographies become crossings of borders, encounters between languages and peoples, solidarity with those who struggle for dignity.
Two tributes that raise a central question of the festival: how much do the place of birth, the inherited rules and the borders we know how to cross affect our freedom?
The dialogue with the classics continues with Un paese ci vuole, the interlude by Pierluigi Vaccaneo, director of the Fondazione Cesare Pavese: the landscapes, departures and returns of Pavese become a reflection on belonging, memory and the need for community.
La poesia al festival cagliaritano
Poetry is a constant and central presence in the history of Pazza Idea, in the choice of voices and in the search for forms of shared listening. This year the poetic word crosses the body, identity, memory and resistance to violence. On Sunday, November 22, from 11:30, La parola è umana, curated by Yari Selvetella, brings poetry to piazza Giovanni XXIII, via Sant’Alenixedda and the spaces of Teatro Carmen Melis: a walk inviting the audience to listen and participate, through verses by Bertolt Brecht, Mahmoud Darwish, Forough Farrokhzad, Heba Abu Nada, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli and other authors. The morning ends in the theatre with the tribute to Sandro Penna, with readings by Michela Atzeni, Lia Careddu, Maria Loi, Carlo Angioni, Giacomo Casti and Francesco Civile, with music by Emanuele Contis and Luigi Frassetto and the live painting by Fabio Magnasciutti.
In the Sunday afternoon, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto meets with Yari Selvetella starting from Ogni corpo ritorna (Crocetti, 2026). Her poetry explores transition, care and the rebuilding of the self: a personal experience that opens shared questions about the body, belonging and the freedom to recognize oneself.
La scienza
The rigor of research meets curiosity and the capacity to feel astonishment in the encounter with Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford University mathematician, on Thursday, November 19, in conversation with Silvia Bencivelli and with the consecutive translation by Rosella Zoccheddu. The Mathematics of Creativity. How numbers shape the world (Bollati Boringhieri, 2026) links prime numbers, Fibonacci and fractals with music, architecture and the narrative structures of Italo Calvino and David Foster Wallace.
Bencivelli also signs the solo Geografie Umane: Maps of an Imperfect Humanity, a tour through the history of medicine, insights and missteps of research. On Friday the physicist Piero Martin presents Journey to the Center of Physics, based on Questo è quanto. La fisica quantistica in cinque idee (Laterza, 2025): discontinuity, identity, future, indeterminacy and relation become coordinates to explore matter and our questions about the world.
The dialogue between literature and the present continues with Massimo Sideri and his solo Armatures of Algorithms: How Calvino’s Lesson Helps Us Live the Future. The Knight-errant meets artificial intelligence: through books written with Andrea Prencipe, Sideri questions what, though immaterial, transforms work, decisions and our perception of reality. A reflection on the humanistic and critical tools needed to navigate the world of algorithms.
Arte e cittadinanza
Tomaso Montanari brings two appointments to the festival on the relationship between cultural heritage, freedom and civil responsibility. On Friday, November 20, with the solo L’arte come mappa dell’essere, he explores works as forms of knowledge and emancipation, capable of interrogating power and restoring dignity to people. On Saturday, November 21, in the interlude Esercizi di cittadinanza, Montanari addresses current events, antifascist memory and the responsibilities of democracy. Beginning with La continuità del male (Feltrinelli, 2026), the discussion touches on inequalities, social rights and participation, bringing the Constitution to the center as a concrete tool to read and transform collective life.
The right to inhabit the world also brings together Chiara Alessi, Pietro Del Soldà and Christian Raimo, in conversation with Florinda Fiamma: a discussion on the home as a common good, on inequalities and on the possibilities of returning cities to the community. Economic inequalities are also at the heart of Riccardo Staglianò’s solo, who with Tassare i milionari. Prendere ai ricchi per dare ai poveri (Einaudi, 2026) addresses the possibilities of a fairer taxation system.
Corrado Formigli brings his perspective to international affairs: conflicts, migrations and disinformation question the role of journalism and in-depth television reporting in democratic life.
La fotografia e la memoria del festival
The festival opens on Thursday, November 19 with the inauguration of the exhibition Siamo moltitudini. Fourteen years of Pazza Idea: fourteen frames, fourteen suspended moments, one for each edition from 2012 to 2025, created by Francesca Sara Cauli, Sara Deidda, Roberto Salgo and Eugenio Schirru. A map of faces and relationships that returns the history of a community, its curiosity, astonishment and civil commitment, from rights to feminisms. Immediately after, Francesco Zizola engages in dialogue with Daria Corrias in Hybris. Le geografie dell’uomo e della natura. From Sardinian tuna fisheries, also recounted in Mare Omnis and Aguanta, the gaze widens to the relationship between human beings and the environment: the desire for domination, the difficulty of acknowledging our limits and the responsibility toward the planet. A photographic inquiry that questions our way of inhabiting the world.
La musica e le arti
The intimate and collective geographies also take shape in sound and in the meeting of languages. Giorgio Poi, in conversation with Damir Ivic, on Thursday, November 19, tells of his inner landscape and of how places and relationships become songs. On Friday, November 20, The Geographies of Sound: Paolo Fresu and the maps of the soul revisits, with Damir Ivic, the poetics of a musician who continues to explore the territories of encounter and dialogue. From Berchidda’s band to international collaborations, from Sardinian roots to Mediterranean and world cultures, Fresu’s music links territorial and human geographies. On Saturday evening, NÒDOS (Nodi). Digital textures for a imaginary mountain by Saffronkeira and Amir B. Ash, born within Insulae Lab, translates Maria Lai’s poetics and her “binding to the mountain” into electronic language. Sunday’s closing is entrusted to HERSTORIES, the concert by Filomena Campus and Steve Lodder dedicated to real or legendary women artists, from Franca Rame to Maria Carta, from Cathy Berberian to the Janas of Sardinian tradition.
