Scampia Literary Café

A literary café in the heart of Scampia

The Scampia Literary Café is not a festival compressed into a few days; it is a recurring series that accompanies the cultural life of Naples' most talked-about—and often most misunderstood—neighborhood all year round. Meetings are held at the Centro Alberto Hurtado, located at Viale della Resistenza 27, and are open to everyone: students, teachers, local families, and readers visiting from other parts of the city.

The concept is simple yet persistent: place a book at the center of an afternoon and let reading aloud build a sense of community. Over thirteen years of activity, the series has hosted more than 140 meetings, with as many books read and discussed with the public. There is no stage or ticket office: just a room, an author, some pages, and a discussion that almost always runs past the scheduled time.

The Centro Alberto Hurtado, home of the series

The Centro Alberto Hurtado is a cultural and vocational training hub established in Scampia and named after the Chilean Jesuit Alberto Hurtado, canonized in 2005. It houses a neighborhood library, workshops, after-school programs, family activities, and musical projects promoted by the AQuaS association (Animazione Quartiere Scampia). The Literary Café is one of its longest-running and most recognizable initiatives, organized in partnership with the Pangea-Scampia project and the Musica libera tutti music project.

Readings take place in the Sant'Ignazio di Loyola hall or other areas of the center, with free admission and no booking required.

How a meeting unfolds

• Musical opening: many sessions begin with the center's youth orchestra, "MUSICA libera TUTTI".
• Book presentation, including a biographical profile of the author.
• Reading aloud of selected passages, often performed by local residents.
• Open debate with the audience, whenever possible in the presence of the author.
• Social gathering at the end over a cup of coffee, from which the series takes its name.

Books and themes

The selection of titles weaves together fiction, non-fiction, history, and civic engagement. Alongside classics of European literature, the program features local investigations, popular theology texts, memoirs of resistance against the mafia, and voices from the new Neapolitan publishing scene. The common thread is not the genre, but the question the book poses to the community: how do we live together, how do we care for one another, and how do we build citizenship in a neighborhood that has experienced marginalization?

Memory and civic engagement

Every year, the January meeting is dedicated to Memory, in continuity with the work carried out in Scampia by schools, parishes, and associations like Libera. There is also ongoing collaboration with local healthcare services—the Open Point of the ASL Napoli 1 Centro health district has hosted meetings on the theme of "caring"—and with local schools, whose students provide the musical interludes.

Scampia, Naples, and Campania

The series takes place within the Municipality VIII of the City of Naples (Chiaiano, Piscinola, Marianella, Scampia), in the Metropolitan City of Naples, in Campania. Events are regularly published in the official event agenda of the City of Naples, a sign of institutional recognition that extends beyond the neighborhood level.

For those visiting Naples, the Literary Café offers a different way to experience the city: not the postcard-perfect Naples of the waterfront, but the one of the Vele and the new university spaces on Viale della Resistenza, where the Metro Line 1 reaches its terminus at Piscinola-Scampia.

A loyal audience

What strikes first-time visitors most is the loyalty of the audience: a core group of readers who haven't missed a meeting in years and who welcome guests with prepared questions. It is the most concrete proof of the series' stated goal: to develop the social value of reading as an element of personal, cultural, and civic growth for individuals and communities.