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.
Title: Operaprima
Publisher: AlterEgo editions, September 2023
Rights: r.vivian literary agency
​
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)
​
Art exists only if what we do is known and recognized by others, without others we remain alone, no armor, we remain alone with the certainty that everything could collapse, would collapse even in front of the prodigy of a new work destined to overcome 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