About
Fondazione Cesare Pavese is located in Santo Stefano Belbo (CN), hometown of the great Italian writer Cesare Pavese. Our mission is to disseminate and promote his human and professional legacy. Every year we organize the Pavese Festival, inviting prominent guests of the Italian music and literary scene to explore Cesare Pavese’s themes and works. Since 2019 we have revamped the Pavese Prize, turning it into a tribute to Pavese’s multifaceted activity: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, publishing and translation.
The foundation houses the recently renovated Pavese Museum and the local Public Library. We also manage Cesare Pavese’s birthplace and the workshop of Pinolo Scaglione, alias Nuto in the novel The Moon And The Bonfires. Finally, we are in charge of the entire cultural offer of the Municipality of Santo Stefano Belbo, promoting a vision of culture as a driver for the socio-economic development of local communities.
Our premises
Fondazione Cesare Pavese is located in the historic centre of Santo Stefano Belbo in Piazza Ciriotti, 1 (formerly Piazza Confraternita).
Besides the Pavese Museum and the local Public Library, it also includes the adjacent Church of Saints James and Christopher, turned into a 100-seat auditorium, a 60-seat conference room and a guesthouse for students and scholars.
The Church permanently hosts a series of five large canvas (200cm x 300 cm) by Milanese artist Ernesto Treccani (1920-2009). The paintings are dedicated to The Moon and the Bonfires and were donated by the artist to the Municipality of Santo Stefano Belbo. The preliminary sketches are displayed in the conference room: one of them still bears the marks of the 1994 flood as an everlasting memory of that tragic event. Outside the Church, visitors can admire the sculpture “La vigna dei libri” (the vineyard of books) donated to Fondazione Cesare Pavese by Piedmontese artist Tino Aime on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pavese’s birth.
The same room also holds several volumes by Pavese’s critics, newspaper articles, dissertations, essays and translations from all over the world
