I never had the chance to take part in the Literary Contest In 3 Words when I was a young student, it didn’t exist yet, and I never got to try and win one of those really exciting prizes. However, I did have the opportunity to accompany Laura and Nicola to the 2026 edition of the Mantua Literature Festival.

It is one of the most important cultural festivals nationwide, and the chance to attend it is the grand prize reserved for the contest winners.
If I had to choose three words to sum up my festival weekend, I would choose “Brioche”, “Lights”, and “Alleys”.
On Saturday morning, as soon as we arrived in Mantua, we rushed to a cafe for breakfast. Looking up after taking a bite of my apple pastry, I was astonished: sitting at the table right next to ours, just a meter away, was the famous French writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Some of the most renowned names in the cultural world attend Festivaletteratura: Niccolò Ammaniti, Alessandro Barbero, Irvine Welsh, and Daniel Pennac, just to name a few. And the wonderful thing is that readers and writers draw so close together that they merge along the city streets. Authors can be spotted enjoying a gelato as they stroll, or sitting at a cafe table.
Besides fiction, there is also room for poetry and music. On Saturday afternoon, I found myself attending a talk by the rapper Dutch Nazari who, while discussing slang, tortelli, and dissing, cited Annie Ernaux’s book Look at the Lights, My Love. But that evening, the lights were illuminating not supermarket shelves—as in Ernaux’s book—but the hotel balcony that served as the stage for the rapper’s performance.
The festival venues are all incredibly charming: from the Bibiena Theatre to Palazzo Te, passing through Piazza Sordello and the Ducal Palace. There is a lot of walking involved as you move from one location to another to follow the events, and during these strolls, you can lose yourself—more or less intentionally—in truly fascinating alleys.
Festivaletteratura in Mantua is the perfect place for flâneurs and flâneuses of imagination and reality, for those who love to get lost in the pages of a book as well as in the streets of the city in search of the next story to write.
Who knows which authors the winners of the next edition will get to meet… while waiting to find out, best of luck to all participants!