Time.news – Naples celebrates a very popular literary genre in Italy, the yellow. And it will be the French institute Grenoble to hold the first edition of the Festival del Giallo Citta ‘di Napoli Mystery, from 9 to 12 June next. Not by chance. The detective story was imposed in the Belpaese in 1851, thanks to the Neapolitan writer Francesco Mastriani and his novel ‘Il Mio Cadavere’, commonly considered the first Italian crime fiction.
Before then, to sign a story that could, in its own right, be considered the initiator of investigative literature, there was only Edgar Allan Poe with ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’, dated 1841 and set in Paris. Only in 1868 appears ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins, the first detective novel, and then in 1887 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. In 1907 again a Neapolitan writer, Matilde Serao, laid the first stone of the mass phenomenon with ‘Il Delitto di via Chiatamone’. Today, thanks above all to the success of Maurizio De Giovanni, Naples finally has a thriller school with authors published by the major Italian publishing houses.
France, for its part, is the country where it all began. Because the detective genre is the son of the feuilleton and popular literature of the mid-nineteenth century that was established above all in France, and then in England, and because the first ‘detective story’ is set in a street in Paris, which does not exist: the Rue Mourgue.
Gialli.it (a newspaper and a publishing house with an important domain, and an equally important history), La Libreria Iocisto (the first Italian bookshop created by the people to respond to the crisis in the sector in Naples, with seven years of experience, and hundreds of members who provide voluntary service to keep a great dream alive), the French Institute (prestigious headquarters, cultural promotion center, reference point for the entire city), CortoNero, a reality now recognized at national in the world of Short Film Noir, and finally, La Scuola Italiana di Comix have set up the first festival of the Italian thriller, dedicated to Naples, with an international exhibition dedicated to Sherlock Holmes and organized by the largest Holmes collector in Europe; the first national congress of mystery writers; The first gathering of crime writers born in Campania; the review of short films dedicated to Noir.
The artistic direction of the festival is entrusted to Ciro Sabatino (director of Gialli.it), the honorary presidency assigned to Maurizio De Giovanni, who will also be the president of the MissterY City of Naples Award for the published novel.