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'Nairobi, the visible city', Freddie del Curatolo's book now in English

Digital and hard copy book awarded at the Turin Book Fair

05-03-2024 by redazione

We did not expect that a book in Italian about Nairobi in the third millennium would be so well received 'by the public and the critics' as they used to say in show business circles.
Freddie del Curatolo's book with pictures by his wife Leni Frau, halfway between an alternative guidebook and an offbeat look at one of Africa's iconic developing metropolises, was also awarded the 'Volterrani - Narrare il mondo' literary prize at the Turin Book Fair, dedicated to the writer, art director and translator of international authors (among others, Moroccan Nobel Prize winner Tahar Ben Jalloun) Egisto Volterrani.


Now the OgZero publishing house, which has included 'Nairobi' in the 'Le città visibili' series created by the unforgettable journalist and writer Angelo Ferrari, has decided to publish a book from the series in English for the first time. Currently, the digital copy can be found on all international platforms, starting with Amazon, while as of today the paper version is also available in Kenya.
"Nairobi, the visible city" will be presented in the capital in the next few weeks, but if you want it now, you can order it by writing to info@malindikenya.net, just as those who have not yet read the Italian version can do the same, to have it sent to every corner of Kenya (no shipping costs will be added for sending it to Nairobi city).

This is what OgZero writes about the volume:
A Virgilian guide leads the reader through post-colonial neighbourhoods and slums of Nairobi, where skyscrapers and savannah coexist with traffic. Environmental protection defies the limits of survival, as it also happens to the city's inhabitants: the waste recycling projects coincide with the recovery of the human condition of the waste pickers themselves, a recovery of dignity that can be likened to the attempt to restore a healthy ferinity to the now urbanised animals.
Through a journey through urban spaces, the authors unhinge the commonplaces of the western imagination thanks to visions of images and words that leave no room for do-goodism and compose a precise socio-anthropological portrait. The witnesses of this humanity are immersed in the smells, tastes, colours and materials that build the city. Thanks to this materiality, one does not feel the need for far-fetched analysis, but everything is there for all to see: it is enough to read the tales of anecdotes and events behind the birth of a commercial hub that draws development from the melting pot of heterogeneous communities, which make it that 'beautiful mess that will never change'.
The authors go beyond the exotic fascination that may have attracted them at the beginning of their African adventure and invite us to overcome the 'city safari' stereotypes typical of the Western gaze.

This is the back cover:
"You cannot claim to have understood Nairobi without feeling it with your gut and listening to it with your mind.
You cannot judge it without investigating it thoroughly, without talking to a thousand, or more, of its inhabitants.
Of all ages, races, social classes, and religions.
Nairobi belongs to those who take it.
It has always been like that".


 

TAGS: nairobicittà visibilileni frauogzeroeditriceTorino

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