Alessandro Marzo Magno Presents
On Saturday 19 December at 16.30, live on Facebook, the writer and journalist Alessandro Marzo Magno, in the run-up to Christmas, invites us to read and presents some of his titles available at Bottega Cini.
Alessandro Marzo Magno (Venice, September 1962) is an Italian journalist and writer. After graduating in Venetian history from the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, he began working as an editor for the weekly Diario, as head of the foreign desk. As a journalist he experienced the war in the Balkans and came to understand that “nationalism is the worst plague to have afflicted Europe from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day”.
He subsequently worked with Linkiesta, with Focus Storia and with the “Food” section of Il Sole 24 ORE. He currently contributes to the cultural pages of Il Gazzettino and is the director of the biannual Ligabue Magazine.
The author of 16 books, he has also edited other volumes of essays. He began writing as a historical essayist, drawing on his long experience as a war correspondent during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, for “Il Giornale” and later “La Voce”, under the direction of Indro Montanelli. His book “L’alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo” (“The Dawn of Books. When Venice Made the World Read”) has been translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish; the following one, “L’invenzione dei soldi. Quando la finanza parlava italiano” (“The Invention of Money. When Finance Spoke Italian”), into Korean and Turkish.
In 2014 and 2015 he taught at the Università Statale di Milano, running a biannual workshop on the history of food. He took part in the television programme Unomattina Estate, where he hosted the “Grand Tour” segment. He also took part in Unomattina, with a segment alongside Antonia Varini, and in Geo & Geo, where he contributed on the theme of the history of food.
In 2015 he reached the final of the Premio Bancarella della Cucina with the book “Il genio del gusto. Come il mangiare italiano ha conquistato il mondo” (“The Genius of Taste. How Italian Food Conquered the World”), published by Garzanti, finishing in second place. In 2019 he won the “La cucina della memoria” (“The Cuisine of Memory”) section of the “Iolanda” prize with the book “Il ricettario di casa Svevo” (“The Svevo Family Recipe Book”), published by La nave di Teseo, with an introduction by Susanna Tamaro.