The grammar of fantasy

This article is published in issue 49 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 5 December 2023. To celebrate our #20changes with us, read here

The singer Sangiovanni wears a wool hat that hides his hair and frames his eyes making them even bluer. Around him there are two philosophers, Andrea Colamedici and Maura Gancitano. We are on the stage of Vanity Fair Stories, the festival of this newspaper which represented the third act of the celebrations of the weekly’s twenty years and which took place on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th November. The three are talking about the thousands of women who filled the streets of Italy in the afternoon, about the emotional fragility of people and how we can detoxify ourselves from the society of performance, or how it is necessary to detach ourselves from the need to always be beautiful, right and performing.

At a certain point in the speech, Colamedici quotes a beautiful book by Gianni Rodari, The grammar of fantasy. Written in 1973, the essay is an analysis of the mechanisms that regulate the creative processes and imagination of mankind. In the pages of the issue of Vanity Fair from today on newsstands, you will find many images and some stories of our recent festival, a very successful event now in its sixth edition, another proof of what we try to do every week in this newspaper and every minute on our digital channels: train the grammar of your imagination.

In addition to reading the newspaper you have in your hands, for once also try to go further and dedicate a few minutes to one of the many talks by Vanity Fair Stories that we have registered and that you can find on our site vanityfair.it. Make yourself comfortable, choose at random (there will be no shortage of surprises) and listen directly from artists, singers, directors, creatives and intellectuals to that ngrammatic of imagination that is capable not only of telling stories but of changing history.

The festival of Vanity always performs the same magic: giving life to a newspaper by bringing to the stage not only the characters you usually read about in these pages, but by representing their dreams, their hopes, their projects live.

In a world polluted by hatred, haters, social media chatter and viral brawls, you turn down the volume on the chaos and tune in to these stories, dreams and inspirations: what we listen to often becomes who we are. And what we are is the basis of what we will become.

Finally, allow me some thanks. Thanks to Chiara Oltolini, the journalist who keeps the threads of Vanity Fair Stories. Thanks to the editorial staff of Vanity Fair, a group of talents that very often you will not see either on stage or even in the signatures of these pages but which always allows this newspaper and its network to live and be so influential. And finally thanks to the entire Condé Nast team, a group of professionals who push us every day not only to dream, but to do it ever bigger.

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