The Frankfurt Book Fair, which closed on 14 October 2007, saw a veritable explosion of new developments in the Monaldi & Sorti saga:

-Film: Kees Kasander, the producer of all the films by famed director Peter Greenaway, announced officially that he intends to make a film of every one of the 7 novels in the Atto Melani cycle. In three years, a film of IMPRIMATUR is due. And the others will follow at eighteen-month intervals. We’ll be seeing Ben Kingsley in the role of Atto Melani and Tim Roth in that of the Narrator. There’ll be a different director for every film: besides Greenaway, the candidates include Stephen Frears for SECRETVM, Brian Singer for VERITAS, and then Alain Corneau and Milos Forman. 

-A British publishing house has acquired the rights to all the novels in the Atto Melani cycle. Not only that, but each novel will be the leading title of the season. A real revolution in world publishing, in which the British and Americans are dominant, leaving only 2% of their internal market for translated literature. In other words, the exiles Monaldi & Sorti are becoming leaders where it counts while our famous Strega and Campiello prize-winning authors have never made it beyond Calais. The boss of the publishing house said that he had come across IMPRIMATUR quite by chance and been very taken with it; he’d read History at Oxford where his Tutor happened to be the great expert on the siege of Vienna in 1683 (central event in IMPRIMATUR). The ways of the Lord are infinite… For obvious reasons, the authors haven’t yet given us permission to divulge the publisher’s name, but the embargo won’t last long!  -The Italian expert on banned and “disappeared” books, Simone Berni, is writing a book on the IMPRIMATUR Case. It will be presented in Turin at the most important Italian Book Fair on 8 May 2008 at 16pm, by the EDIZIONI SIMPLE, a small (but most courageous) publisher based in Macerata (Marche). The book’s title will be “Il caso IMPRIMATUR: nessuno deve leggere questo libro!” (The IMPRIMATUR Case: No One must read this Book!). All this was announced in Frankfurt on 10 October, on the opening day of the Book Fair, where Monaldi & Sorti were exceptionally granted a privilege normally reserved for the most important German writers: to inaugurate with the presentation of the German edition of VERITAS (Kindler/Rowohlt) the season of the historic Lesezelt, the exhibition building made of mirrors and wooden panelling dating back to the Belle Époque which is set up every year in the middle of the Fair and is home to the cream of the German literary world. Monaldi & Sorti are the first non-German writers to inaugurate the Lesezelt. Immediately after the presentation of VERITAS, the event continued at the Forum, where the Dutch publisher De Bijzige Bij announced the world ante-Première in Amsterdam (as usual, sigh!) of Monaldi & Sorti’s new novel I DUBBI DI SALAÌ (The Doubts of Salaì), the first title in a new series which will run parallel with the Atto Melani cycle. This was followed by the projection – another ante-Première – of an amusing documentary on the writers and their work on this new book. It is in Italian with English subtitles. You can see the trailer at the following site: http://www.dopplmeister.com/, while to see the whole documentary you have to clic on “shortdocs”, then on “literature” and finally on “Monaldi & Sorti”.