The /contè.sto/ History Festival Returns to Empoli
In a few weeks the town of Empoli will once again host the /contè.sto/ festival, centered on contemporary history and now in its second edition. The lineup is packed with guests — international ones included — for the event running from September 18 to 20, 2026: 15 appointments that will turn the town into a stage spread across its streets, giving voice to historians, analysts, and experts in contemporary history, who will tackle some of the hottest topics of the moment in more than 48 hours of talks.
Among the many names on the bill, we should mention at least the essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra (who will be in conversation with Paolo Di Paolo about the world after Gaza) and Vincenzo Trione and Carmine Pinto, but also Valeria Galimi, Massimo Bucciantini, Mariano Tomatis, Pierluigi Bersani, and Ascanio Celestini (the star of the closing event).
To introduce readers to this valuable festival, we thought we’d put a few questions to Carlo Greppi, a well-known historian and writer from Turin, who this year has once again taken on the role of scientific director for /contè.sto/.
Last year’s edition of /contè.sto/ drew a surprising turnout: packed squares, standing room only, more than six hundred people at the main talks. A rare result for a festival like this, especially at its first outing. This year you’re back with a theme that’s almost a statement of method: “History in Profile.” Can you tell us something about the concept and what we’ll see as an audience?
The idea is to travel through contemporary history by way of the individuals and communities who took part in it, with a very close eye on history from below: so, on profiles and figures that are in some sense minor, or at least not always considered in the grand narrative of history. The goal is to crowd Empoli’s historic center with faces and stories that help us give three-dimensionality back to the contemporary age, in continuity with last year’s program.
The first edition was devoted to the big keywords, to the great themes of contemporary history — themes that are, to a very large extent, extremely current. This one, instead, aims to be more of a deep dive into the stories.
Clearly, each speaker will have their own approach, but there’s a fil rouge tying together the “brief” they’ve been given. We can sum it up in two points: first, to begin — as last year — with an audio track, which seems to have worked very well and helps the audience settle into the mood of the lecture; second, to bring in a plural set of figures who belong to very different times and places, but who somehow lend a diachronic depth to certain, let’s say, very specific types within history.
This year’s program clearly shows a desire to tell the stories of marginal or little-known figures too. In Italy we have a solid tradition of microhistory, from Carlo Ginzburg onward. What civic value does it have, today, to bring these minor lives back to the center? And what changes in our perception of the past when the gaze shifts from power to the biographies on the sidelines?
It’s a point I’ve been hammering on for a long time: for Laterza, I even wrote and published a pamphlet titled storie che non fanno la Storia (“stories that don’t make History”), in which I try to explain why, in my view, the history of power is important to know and investigate, but must always be counterbalanced as much as possible by the history of ordinary people, who often opposed power, or who literally endured History “with a capital H.”
Looking at the figures my colleagues are working on as they prepare their respective lectures, I’m realizing how naturally this interweaving happens: we’ll see instantly recognizable faces, figures who had a strong public dimension; there will be faces that to us are only an image, whose story we know nothing about; and we’ll discover completely unknown faces, entirely new stories, especially in the eyes of a general audience.
I think this is a great, very concrete lesson in how we try to do history: by tracing, in every biographical path, every trial, every event, those traits we can recognize as archetypal, which in some way mark an era, an experience, or a problem; and those that are instead more specific, but no less interesting for it.
In this, we always carry with us the model of microhistory, its experience that can never be defined once and for all. It’s with pleasure and emotion that we remember Carlo Ginzburg, who at Empoli also won the Pozzale Literary Prize: we’ve decided to dedicate this edition of the festival to him.
One of the most eagerly awaited events is surely the one with Pankaj Mishra on the world after Gaza. In such a complex context, what can the historian’s gaze offer? What is history’s specific contribution when we try to interpret the geopolitical and moral knots of the present?
One of history’s tasks, on the civic and ethical level, is to be able to recognize the rhymes when they appear (to borrow a maxim attributed to Mark Twain). Like so many colleagues, faced with the genocide in Gaza I was paralyzed and horrified by the inability, the non-reaction, that a considerable portion of the societies of our time showed in the face of this event. And, conversely, faced with the huge global demonstrations, with communities that instead proved how much empathy can exist in every place, in every time, and for every human group.
That’s why I’d say history’s other great task — in total continuity with our past lectures — is to decolonize our gaze and to learn to recognize, as in this case, an enormous tragedy, an enormous crime committed by other human beings, wherever it happens.
Last year we witnessed a stunning lecture by Uoldelul Chelati Dirar on colonialism; this year we’ll have several more that address exactly the theme, directly or in part, of the decolonization of our gaze. Starting, of course, with the first, the one with Pankaj Mishra, in which we’ll present his book — published in Italy by Guanda as Il mondo dopo Gaza — The World After Gaza: a fundamental volume — perhaps the most important to have come out in these years — precisely because it’s built as an X-ray of his own gaze.
Mishra has come to realize — and helps those of us who read him realize — that empathy and the ability to understand the great historical processes are things that have to be trained, and that only study and intellectual honesty can help us stay human. I’m thrilled that Mishra is coming; I’m just as glad he’ll be interviewed by the writer Paolo Di Paolo, who was shamefully swept up in various controversies for keeping his back straight.
I’m also very happy that we’ll close with Ascanio Celestini, whom I’ll interview myself about Pier Paolo Pasolini, on whom he has just written a book — published by Laterza — titled Pasolini. Una vita, anzi due (“Pasolini. One Life, or Rather Two”). In this book, Celestini brings the historical Pasolini back to his concreteness, rescuing him from the ideological abuses heaped on him from the day after his death to today — that is, over the last half-century and more.
Your work spans several registers: research, essays, fact-checking, school textbooks, books for young readers. How do these forms of writing speak to one another? And above all: why is it important to write history, not just study it?
It’s hard to answer, especially the second question. I think everyone has to find their own original path. A theme dear to me is always the narratological one: you have to be aware that, whatever you write, you are writing it. It may sound like a tautology, yet that awareness isn’t always internalized. Every book (or documentary, or podcast, or… interview) is conceived with a structure, an edit: then comes a very long job of fine-tuning that takes days and nights, and concerns the structure, the substance, and the form, which must rest, I believe, on a great capacity for self-discipline.
This holds in every profession, obviously, but there’s a widespread common sense that history writes itself: that once you’ve done the research, you simply lay out the results in writing or in other forms. My attempt, in these years, has instead been to try — with the right measure, hoping I’ve found the right measures in my various projects — to also tell how I know what I know, and what kind of narrative operation I’m carrying out.
It’s a meta-historical exercise, so to speak, and I think it should always be handled without overdoing it, because otherwise the reader risks getting lost, and so do you. You have to be very careful with the fictional devices even inside works of non-fiction — always legitimate, of course, as long as they’re declared.
I think whoever writes must be worthy of the intelligence of whoever reads. The reader has to be able to handle your sources, your conclusions, and your narratives built on the traces. So if you yourself provide the tools to find your way through what you write, that already helps a great deal. This isn’t always done.
The festival also involves students from Empoli’s schools. You’ve worked with young people for years: what can teenagers find in the study of history? And which narrative or teaching approaches make history truly understandable and meaningful for them?
Yes, this year too the schools are involved, both as active participants and as audience, and that of course makes me enormously happy. I think initiatives like this — all the more so if they’re led by someone who, like me, isn’t from the area — should be carried out in synergy with all the groups already working locally on these themes. We’ve done it from the start and we’ll keep doing it: Empoli’s Culture Office is truly extraordinary, there’s a really nice synergy in general, and with the school world too. This year we’ll start as early as Friday morning, with a large preview event at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, just for the schools.
Personally, as the author of a varied textual “ecosystem” that ranges from the lecture to the textbook, from YA (Young Adult) books to essays, I’d say that — even though I’ve never been a teacher and so don’t have the experience of daily teaching — passion is what counts most. If the person addressing young people is passionate, engaged, and has strong content to convey, their drive is passed on spontaneously and naturally. Regardless of the form, which can be a podcast, a newspaper article, a TV show, or even an essay.
Benedetto Croce wrote that all history is contemporary history; Marc Bloch, in his The Historian’s Craft, reminded us that every historian looks at the past from their own present. Starting from these two ideas, what does “contemporary history” mean to you? And what is its real working boundary?
A very hard question, because history always concerns us, but I’d say that contemporary history concerns us a little more. Very simply because it’s closer to us and because we feel its echoes, its effects. And, indeed, Croce’s maxim that all history is contemporary is clearly the one so many of us grew up on. And it’s true that whatever era you look at, in the end you look at it with our own eyes, with our own questions. That’s undeniable.
It’s equally clear that there are periods, themes, and biographical trajectories that have either only recently run their course, or whose effects are still felt very, very strongly. For these and other reasons, I have the sense of contemporary history as something pulsing, alive, that almost speaks to us. And it’s up to us to make it speak.
The /contè.sto/ festival is a rare opportunity: keeping a rigorous approach while at the same time involving the community and the schools, it makes history a real subject, one that speaks to everyone. The coming late-September days will surely offer interesting food for thought for anyone, regardless of age or prior knowledge.
So we encourage you to check out the festival’s rich program and to turn out in force, to support a sincere, passionate initiative of unquestionable ethical and civic value.
The full program on the festival’s website.
Cover photo: Ascanio Celestini ©Pasqualini-MUSA
