This month’s Magic Box talk taking place today in Valletta focuses on contemporary Italian author Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012).

A writer and academic, Tabucchi was also a lecturer of Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena and a connoisseur, critic and translator of Fernando Pessoa.

He is considered to be the most significant Italian novelist after Italo Calvino.

In Autobiografie altrui (The Autobiographies of Others), Tabucchi compares life to a musical score. He writes that the score itself is unknown to the participant and only discovered once it has been played. As such, Gioia Pace, president of the Syracuse branch of the Dante Alighieri Society, has chosen to develop this theme in her presentation on Tabucchi today.

She will present two of her essays, both published by Carlo Morrone, Tabucchi dopo Tabucchi (Tabucchi after Tabucchi – 2015) and La ricerca di una logica nel postmoderno. Tabucchi e la categoria della memoria (Looking for Logic in Postmodernity. Tabucchi and Memory – 2014).

She was awarded the Capit-Roma Special Prize for non-fiction for the latter paper.

Pace will be joined by Karl Chircop, a lecturer of Italian at the University of Malta’s Junior College and author of a PhD thesis entitled Contatti e Affinità in Luigi Pirandello e James Joyce (Points of Encounter and Affinity Between Pirandello and Joyce).

■ The talk is taking place this evening at the Italian Cultural Institute in Valletta at 6.30pm. Wine and treats will be served.