Simone Salomoni was born in Bologna in 1979.
Graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature, he writes commercials, videos and immersive virtual reality experiences. One of his installations will be screened in the courtyard of Palazzo Foscari on the occasion of the Venice Art Night 2021.
He teaches storytelling and storytelling techniques in the course for Expert Mixed Reality of FITSTIC (ITS Tecnologie Industrie Creative Foundation) and is a teacher at the Storytelling Workshop directed by Giulio Mozzi.
Publisher: AlterEgo editions, September 2023
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
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The narrating self of operaprima by Simone Salomoni, published by Alter Ego, is a painter in his late forties. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist receives an unexpected visit from Marie Bertrand, the woman who has rented the house next to his in the mountains near Monghidoro. Marie reveals herself interested in his art and also in him; but the man focuses his attention on her son, Simone, who is eighteen years old, beautiful, and in great pain. A great confidence develops between the two, a relationship between master and pupil: they talk about art and life. Simone lets the painter read her stories, poses for a portrait, goes with him to the river: their relationship is both chaste and full of sensuality, but it will lead to unforeseen outcomes.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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Stefano Massini on Robinson:
http://simosalomoni.com/massini_robinson/
Nicola H. Cosentino on Reading:
http://simosalomoni.com/cosentino_la_lettura/
Nadeesha Uyangoda on Internazionale:
http://simosalomoni.com/uyangoda_internazionale/
Alberto Trentin on Minima et moralea:
https://www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/libri/cronache-da-nordest-3-operaprima-di-simone-salomoni/
" Art exists only if what we do is known and recognized by others. Without others we remain alone, without any armor, we remain alone with the certainty that everything could collapse, would collapse even in the face of the prodigy of a new work destined to defy time."
When you begin to read Operaprima you can already perceive a ruthless rhythm and gradually the sound that makes it outlines: it is like the sound of the blades of a helicopter that rises and flies and if the blades stop everything falls . But here the rhythm never gives up, it advances with strokes of sex, inventions, meditations, anger and desperation and fun. In the heliport where we finally manage to touch the ground after this powerful and courageous flight, we can smell a nocturnal scent of water and fire. And we remain dazed for a while, in the new silence that has been made.
Dario Voltolini-author of The Orange Garden
" The great armor is a hymn to Art, to the centrality of courage and authenticity in artistic creation. With a musical and razor-sharp prose, Simone Salomoni gives life to a high-tension novel where love and cruelty blend and confuse: impossible stop reading; impossible to forget the power of this novel after finishing it. "
Giorgia Tribuiani
Reading "The Great Armor" has something inexorable. A few lines are enough to find yourself immobilized by a narrative voice that does not breathe and that imposes on you - reader, similar and brother of the writer - the uncomfortable role of judge. More than on a specific character or a specific human type, we are called to take a position on the very fact of being human and on all that life entails: love, sex, ambition, failure, desire, physical and moral pain, guilt. And then art, of course. Especially art. Few writers have the courage to expose themselves in defining with such honesty and ruthlessness what art is. In doing so, Simone Salomoni does not allow himself a single step backwards, a minimum retreat from responsibility and risk, with a text that is a chain of mirror-stories governed by a very dense but never tiring writing, a language where intensity and control reach an author's equilibrium in its full maturity. "Corpi cavernosi" can be read in one breath and, once the book is closed, the file is put away, it continues to recur in the minds of those who have ventured there, not as a reflection or summary or maxim of life (let alone a flare-up rhetoric per épater les bourgeois), but as a bundle of unresolved questions; and that is what every great work should be able to do.
Valentina Durante
Title: The Carnal Spectacle
Publisher: Giulio Perrone Editore, January 2026
Agent: r.vivian literary agency
Simone Salomoni's "Lo spettacolo carnale" (The Carnal Spectacle) is a novel-installation that brings to light the spiritual restlessness typical of contemporary art. It's an exploration of identity, love, and the need to mirror oneself in someone else in order to become oneself.
Alessandro Zaccuri
Anyone who has embraced art knows it: they've made a pact with the devil. And the devil grants your wishes for a while, but in the end he claims your soul. There's no love more sick, no lover more passionate yet sadistic. Those who work with imagination, with words, know the psychic toll they exact on the artist and those around them. Few novels have fully captured its cost like this one.
Gianluca Morozzi
Province and metropolis bound by the invisible and powerful flow of art and money. A marriage that hides weaknesses and will shatter, despite faith, despite self-denial, because we always fall, because sin defines us more than good. A constant game of masks in which art is the great metaphor for illusion, for the elusiveness of life. "The Carnal Spectacle" is a descent of the ego to the bare minimum of what defines us in our relationships with others.
Alessandra Sarchi
This is a spectacular and carnal novel, yes, and ferocious, but above all mature, ambitious in structure and supported by a prose that is a delight to read with the ears, not just with the eyes.
It's a novel about work—about how things are done, about what it means to have your life consumed by work; it's about contemporary art, marriage, abjection; about virtual reality, jealousy and betrayal, violence. About how love is cruel, because it implies power; about how a man can become his own self-destructive demon.
It is ultimately a story of extreme love, written with extreme love for the language.
Sandro Campani
Synopsis
September 11, 2021. A few hours after presenting As I Day Dead, his latest immersive virtual reality work, at the New Museum in New York, Vanes Percassi, one of the most famous crypto artists in the world, finds himself naked and immobile in an apartment.
Ten years earlier, after a long, unconsummated engagement, the man—an aspiring writer—had married a doctoral student in African-American literature in a religious ceremony: Lei. The marriage, fraught with expectation, founders after 635 days due to his artistic ambitions and Lei's betrayal. Or so it seems. The reality of the situation, reconstructed by a narrator who addresses the ex-husband directly, is far more complex than it appears and poses questions to the reader that seem to interrogate the profound nature of every romantic relationship. While the man tries to rebuild by taking refuge in the imagination and possibilities of artistic creation—and seems to succeed when he ingratiates himself with Lucrezia Valentini, an art curator and producer of adult content—the woman realizes that she can restore order and save her faith only by obtaining an annulment of the marriage. When the Sacred Rota rejects her request for annulment, the situation between the former spouses spirals into a spiral of accusations, revenge, and violence—real or imagined. She accuses the man of having sacrificed her to answer a call, that of Scripture, to which he had not been called; the man, following a heated argument, fantasizes about killing the woman and, frightened by his own imagination, searches for a way to reconcile himself, a dissolute trinity.
To achieve this, she decides to embrace the BDSM scene and accept the interracial submission practices offered by Lucrezia's production company for 635 days. The opening scene is thus the final act of redemption, an atypical salvation.