"Poet, designer and theatrical actor, the young Davide Cortese puts great passion in describing the depth and richness of his former universe. His poems and drawings fire up the imagination, illuminating, arousing emotions and evoking distant, beautiful worlds, letting us sense the intimate sweetness of man, his sacred nature as a living being. Davide Cortese, as his works show, is a melancholic yet sunny, fragile yet powerful, a dreaming visionary and clever explorer of life: a truly contradictory artist who expresses himself, by crying out load and keeping quiet, pointing with a finger to his loneliness."
Oreste Vaddice -  writer

Armando Riitano - whom Giuseppe Pontiggia described as a poet with a "restless, mobile, intolerant, yet generous character" - has published two volumes of poetry : "Nero" ("Black", Jopollo Editore - Milan, 1994), marking his debut dealing with existentialism and a lost "unconscious happiness", and "Referti Anormali" ("Abnormal Reports", interArt - Carrara, 2002), where the fine lucidity of thought turns into in an inextricable tangle of positivist philosophy and curses, culminating in a description of the death of the poem itself. Disillusioned by recent models and directions taken in poetry, technically speaking Riitano often loves to re-invent himself - as he says - "to play" with traditional metre. Riitano’s latest book (Anùtili e Ammàtula) has been a particular success. This author writes in the ancient Aeolian dialect, which is of special ethnographical interest as well as literary interest.

Giuseppe La Greca is a good example of those amazing people who manage to have two vocations in life. La Greca, an economist, is also a historian.  His special “forma mentis”, his strict and geometric way of thinking, has led him to delve into history, though with a special feeling for what he calls instances of overlooked “minor history”. He came across one such situation on the Aeolian Islands and has dealt with this in his book “History of Pumice on Lipari- from the Early Days to State Monopoly Licences”. One hundred and sixty-seven pages that make fascinating reading, from how cavemen used pumice and its “sister” oxidian to the industrialisation of mining and production in the 1800s.  Faultless documentation and direct testimony from visitors add to this work: a wealth of personal memories of the hard life of the miner and the resulting wealth, major trade and many moments of conflict between the local church and the town as they fought over possession of the white mountains for years upon years..(The book is now on sale at all bookshops/newsagents on the Aeolian Islands. It can also be bought directly from the author:  Dr. Giuseppe La Greca, Vicolo Montebello n°18/20, Tel.+39.090/9811807 Mobile +39.338/4497450). 

Sale online of books guides and dvd on the Aeolian islands