From Francesca Mannocchi to Melania Mazzucco, Sarzana lights up with debates on conflicts, climate and human evolution in the 2026 edition
There are festivals that choose a location, and then there are places that ask to establish a festival. The Festival of the Mind, the first European event entirely dedicated to creativity and the birth of ideas, was born from this intuition. Twenty-two years ago it could not have been imagined that a series of shows, meetings, readings and moments of in-depth analysis could bring into dialogue the changes, energies and hopes of contemporary society, speaking with a language accessible to all and, above all, intergenerational, the true soul of the festival. The idea started from the site, which preserves a thousand-year memory and which produces in the visitor a profound emotion when faced with the beauty of that medieval and Renaissance city heritage, which must also be contemplated with the right listening. For this reason, the heart of the festival continues to beat in the Firmafede Fortress, or Citadel: a territory where the medieval structure, the Renaissance one and that of the Republic of Genoa, coexist in the same landscape, among centuries-old plants and river scenery. Here history is not a scenographic backdrop: it is a living presence, and every event dialogues with the stones, with silence, with light and with time. It is a natural village that changes the way of making and experiencing art. From this belief grew a festival which today is much more than simple programming. It is a cultural ecosystem that looks to the Mediterranean as a space of encounter and not of border, of bonds and not of separation. The 2026 edition is dedicated to Fire, the sacred element par excellence, bearer of life and death, symbol of purification and destruction. A theme that will be declined in its many meanings and that we feel is particularly necessary in the current historical time, because the art of dialogue, through the voices of the speakers, can change our gaze and the way in which we know the world, restoring depth to words too often consumed by current events: dialogue, community, belonging and future. A festival today cannot therefore limit itself to organizing posters, but must assume a civil responsibility, such as that of talking about fire understood as the explosion of too many wars still underway and as an image of the fires caused by climate change, but also as the concept of the domestic hearth, where the heat cooks food, or as a flame that has marked human evolution, transforming into light and energy and encouraging the first forms of sociality and choral storytelling. The 2026 edition is centered on these themes, which become a program capable of crossing new literary productions and world premieres: from the journalist Francesca Mannocchi, who dialogues with the Ukrainian writer Artem Chapeye on the contradictions of war, to the American writer, winner of the National Book Award, Tiya Miles, who, together with Tiziana Lo Porto, investigates the legacy of slavery through the centuries. The union of desire with love instead animates the debate between André Aciman and Rosa Polacco, supported by the novelistic perspectives of the Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger, in dialogue with Alessandro Zaccuri, and by Sophie Elmhirst’s journey into narrative journalism with Gaia Manzini. Alongside them, great Italian names such as Melania Mazzucco, Valeria Parrella and the 2026 Strega Prize finalist Matteo Nucci, together with great intellectuals and academics such as Paola Bonfante, Adolfo Ceretti, Beatrice Del Bo, Vittorio Lingiardi and Enza Elena Spinapolice, offer profound reflections on literature, art and myth. It is precisely through these voices that the Fire takes on different forms, becoming a metaphor for our time. Adolfo Ceretti invites us to recognize the possibility of a relationship in the limit, because “recognizing a limit means giving ourselves the possibility of co-inhabiting otherness”: a principle that gives dialogue back a political and civil force. Beatrice Del Bo instead brings it back to history and its rituals of power, when the flame becomes a measure of prestige and memory, to the point of remembering that “the number of flames that shine is directly proportional to the importance of the deceased person”. Enza Elena Spinapolice follows its path even further back in time, when fire went from being a feared force to becoming a garrison of collective life and the hearth «began to be synonymous with comfort, with security». Finally, Paola Bonfante broadens her gaze to nature and the invisible relationship between the elements, recalling that the luminous energy of the Sun can be imagined “as an energetic Fire” which plants transform into chemical energy, giving rise to one of the fundamental processes of life. Four different perspectives that give back to Fire its original nature: destruction and rebirth, fear and protection, conflict and relationship, but above all energy capable of transforming the world. Ultimately, this is the challenge that the Festival of the Mind continues to take up: to demonstrate that culture is a concrete form of development, a tool for cohesion and a possibility to imagine the future without losing memory. If today the Mediterranean can once again become a space of civilization and dialogue, an exhibition can also contribute to drawing a map and participating in a renewed humanism.
