MELANIE FRANCESCA SHORTLY
Melanie Francesca is an Italian-Swiss artist and writer, author of 19 books (the latest Il Sussurro di un Dio) also published with Mondadori and Cairo RCS. Former model, radio and television commentator on the national RAI and Mediaset networks, as well as weekly columnist on popular Italian magazines.
On television she worked in the regular cast of Piero Chiambretti (Markette 2005, Matrix, La Repubblica delle donne in 17-18 on Mediaset) and in the first two seasons of Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown on RAI 3 in 2024.
Since 2022 she has spoken weekly on the national radio RTL102.5 news and RTL102.5 La suite
As a journalist she wrote regularly for the Alto Adige newspaper from 2015 to 2022, Eva Tremila from 2022, the weekly VERO from March 2024 and a column on Tgcom from autumn 2024.
She has repeatedly participated as a guest in numerous Mediaset and Rai TV talk shows including Costanzo, Marzullo, La Vita in diretta and others. All the material, videos, articles, books, etc. it can be found on the website www.melaniefrancesca.com and on YouTube.
She is also a renowned artist who has exhibited her works throughout Europe and the Middle East. After her classical high school diploma and the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she began to exhibit in Europe, we remember the solo exhibition at the Cortina gallery in Milan in 2005 and the collective exhibition with the Figuration Critique group, Grand Palais, in Paris and Moscow. Under the patronage of the Minister of Culture of the United Arab Emirates, Nahayan bin Mubarack al Nahayan arrived in the Middle East in Dubai in 2005. Also under his patronage, in 2015 the personal exhibition THE BOX took place in the Pro-art gallery, Dubai, which was followed by participation in Art Dubai in 2016 with a public installation in DIFC, the financial center of the metropolis home to prestigious Emirati galleries, and the solo exhibition at the Cap Contemporary Art Platform gallery in Kuwait in 2017.
A LITERARY PATH SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF IMPORTANT CRITICS AND WRITERS
She has published 19 books ranging from novels to mystical and self-help poetry with the main Italian publishing houses such as Cairo Rizzoli RCS and Oscar Mondadori.
LITERARY BEGINNINGS
Her first two books published by small publishers had an exceptional literary godmother: Nanda Pivano, who for ‘Luna di carne’ Tranchida editore, wrote: “This beautiful book with an American taste based as it is on the action in the themes and on the dialogues in style, breathes an air of youth due to the problems that are addressed and cannot fail to interest young people…”
For the second book, Days of Sand, Nanda Pivano wrote: “Melanie is beautiful, even more than when she fled her wealthy family for love. Moon of Flesh, her first novel, gave her notoriety and esteem; in Days of Sand she continues his autobiography with very harsh adventures, immersed in the ferocious absurdities of war, but also in the hopes and dreams that always end up making youth triumph. In an interview she said, and I think she’s right: If you believe in something you can do it. And you make it when you no longer count the mistakes you’ve made… Melanie made it..”
The journalist and writer Barbara Alberti wrote the preface of ‘Caccia d’Amore’ published by Gremese editore and commented on her subsequent books in various newspapers: “It is difficult to take Melanie seriously” she writes, “a writer cannot be like that Pretty. There will always be a smile of disbelief in front of her books, for those who know her image… Her depth, her preparation thrilled me. Intelligent, very informed… I must recognize a commendable sobriety, elegance, ability to construct, sense of plot and twist. Purity of style.” Barbara has always been a point of reference for the author with the photographer Oliviero Toscani in 2005.
Oliviero Toscani declared about her in the then well-known MAX magazine: “I met Melanie on television. I remember the effect she had on me: Melanie struck me immediately with her personality. She was so free, so different from all the other girls of her generation. The others think about fashion, they only pay attention to brands, they don’t think with their own heads. They are looking for approuvation. Melanie no! She is independent, proud, curious, original. A free spirit who doesn’t let herself be caged, someone who stands out from the crowd. She has her own approach to life. It’s very interesting to talk to her, it’s nice to listen to her: she helps you see the world from other angles, she reads the world differently. And then she’s such an attractive girl, so pretty…”
Melanie lives between literature, art and television until in 2006 she moves to Dubai where she marries a well-known Emirati businessman with whom she has two children. And she absents herself from the public scenes of television and culture to dedicate herself entirely to her family for ten years.
BRILLIANT LITERARY GROWTH: 2017-2022
In 2015 she decided to return to public life and began publishing articles on South Tyrol as a journalist. Ironic and lucid articles on life in Dubai, which beyond being the “Las Vegas of the Arab world”, is also a country full of contradictions. In the meantime she returns to painting and exhibits her work THE BOX at Art Dubai in 2016 and Cap gallery in Kuwait in 2017.
In 2017 she published ‘L’Occidentale‘ for Cairo, the back cover of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who wrote: “A book full of fun, it is a story of a fall into the obligation of perspectives. The habits & customs of the most eccentric geographies, worn out by clichés, are short-circuited. Prejudices are overturned in the continuous surprise of finding ourselves, reader and protagonist, inside the most unusual novel…”
While Barbara Alberti describes the novel as follows: “A ruthless satire of the West. It is Houellebecque’s Soumission for women in a comic way, without taking anything away from the tragedies of our world. With refined and shameless humor, irresistible. A very successful satire, but also a melancholic book on the impossibility of love.”
The Western is presented by Piero Chiambretti, Vittorio Feltri and Melania Rizzoli at the Mondadori Duomo in central Milan. During the presentation, Chiambretti defined her as “a character that came directly from the pen of Walt Disney, which is why I called her straight away in my broadcast. A genius in art.“
In 2018 she published ‘The perfect woman’, again with Cairo editore RCS, back cover by Barbara Alberti presentation of Vittorio Feltri, Melania Rizzoli and Pinketts at the Feltrinelli at the Feltrinelli of the Vittorio Emanuele gallery in Milan. By the way, Barbara writes in the last lines of a long article: “There is the fabric of life in this book, with all its tears. A boundless innocence shines through the beauty of the writing.”
Even CORRIERE DELLA SERA writes about it on the third culture page with Carlo Baroni: “fake places are never fake. they have foundations based on raw truths, they play with their cards exposed and don’t leave you the chance to raise. they test you, they shape your soul. From nothing you have to bring everything out, it’s like dueling with shadows, describing the sound of silence. Anna lives in a non-place, Dubai. An artificial world: palace objects even beaches. Only real pain, and it envelops her from afar.
In 2019, again with Cairo-Rizzoli, L’angelo, introduction by Barbara Alberti, was published, then translated into English in 2023 by Europa Books with the title The Angel. «This time the author gave me a big surprise. I was used to his bitter, intelligent, hilarious satire on the blonde woman who fights a solitary and impossible feminist struggle in the Emirates, in The Westerner or The Perfect Woman, and I found myself faced with beautiful writing, delicate and profound.»
A new cultural baptism follows on 15 December 2019 on L’Angelo CORRIERE DELLA SERA: “(…) “L’Angelo is an intimate story that does not debase itself with saccharine sentiments and a glamorous cover. In today’s Paris which is forever a timeless capital, with an angel who seems to have remained in a pre-enlightenment world, designed with legend and dreams… Of life and depth of souls that open wide to the breath of the world.”
In 2022 she published Il Maestro, again with Cairo RCS, back cover by Barbara Alberti which introduces the reading as follows: “The author spares no one, starting from herself… Sometimes she surprises you with the grayest pain, other times she overwhelms you with tenderness, and it brings out from you that soft cry full of yearning that has been waiting to be released for too long, like a subtle concert. But who is the author? A prism in perpetual motion, which overturns the view with dizzying ideas of fresh literary power. Its glory is to surprise you, always. And carry you like a whirlwind, and suddenly – the minuet.”
On 13 April 2022 in the CORRIERE DELLA SERA the third page notes: “…Spiritual research is no longer the choice to leave the field and let others play because we no longer share the rules. But staying in the present, to establish roots and find sources that we feel can give us the necessary nourishment. Melanie’s journey is with open eyes, where horizons are not selfies taken on a sunny day.”
In 2023 SHE PUBLISHED THE BOOKS OF THE SECRET WITH GIORGIO MONDADORI, a poem that found strong positive feedback from Italian critics. Further details below.
Numerous reviews, for the complete articles on the third page of Corriere della Sera click here (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
Per la PRESS RELEASE dei libri clikka sui rispettivi nomi
Numerous television appearances to which we refer on YouTube
In spring 2024 Melanie is part of the permanent cast of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown with Piero Chiambretti
At the same time she continues his collaboration with RTL 102.5, with eva 3000 and begins to work for Vero Weekly and Tgcom.
LITERARY MATURITY:
In October 2024 she published a new book Il sussurro di un dio with Castelvecchi editore. Presented at the Mondadori Duomo bookshop in Milan with the speech Stefano Zecchi, and Maria Rita Parsi, and subsequently at the Mondadori in via Cola di Rienzo in Rome with Enrica Bonaccorti and the literary critic and essayist Filippo La Porta, the new aereal generations well described in Melanie Francesca’s new book The Whisper of a God, take the form of a true current of thought. To transform your life into a miracle, according to the author, you just need to become self-aware and remain firm in your permanent center of gravity, bringing order to the chaos of perceptions. Melanie Francesca belongs to the aereal generation, a group of people who have existed for millennia and who have experienced a notable intensification from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present day, to the point that today there are numerous airplanes. He also explained it in the TV lounge of Piero Chiambretti Rai 3, where he is a regular guest and commentator in the format “Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown”.
Filippo La Porta, literary critic, journalist and essayist, appreciated her in this way during the presentation in Rome: “Melanie presents herself as a figure who is not only airy but alien in the publishing world for how she presents herself and how she dresses, she reminds me of Andy Warhol, is her very presence: she may not speak but she already conveys a message. And this is precisely why she intrigued me because she is different from everything else. When I read her book I was won over for two reasons: the first is the great, certainly candid and disarmed simplicity, the second is that there is not one thing in the book that is not based on something that you personally experienced. And on the one hand Melanie connects to the most ancient wisdom traditions and on the other hand she quotes Batman, and I like this very much: in her books there is a short circuit between high culture and mass culture. So here is the stoic wisdom of Seneca who says that the game is played within you, but Melanie positions herself as a pop-Andywharolian writer who brings Seneca to the general public and translates it into a kind of comic.”
Even Professor Stefano Zecchi, a philologist extraordinarily attentive to the quality of the text and used to careful and precise formal analysis, exalts the stylistic details based on simplicity which becomes the true beauty of the text. In particular he explains: “Melanie knows how to write well and I’ll explain why: Books that claim to be introspective and psychological are very difficult because very often others aren’t interested in our personal facts which seem great only to our eyes. So to avoid falling into the trap you have to like Melanie: get to the creative finesse of the details. We are invaded by books that should not be published. In Melanie’s case, however, we are faced with a person who knows how to write. Melanie was very good at describing, for example, the relationship with her mother using surprising metaphorical elements. She doesn’t aim high, in what could be a mother’s extraordinary epic, but it’s the simplicity that strikes you. And you can see that there is irony in the metaphorical simplicity.”
According to the critic Franco Manzoni of IL CORRIERE DELLA SERA “Now the multifaceted writer, also a visual artist and TV personality on the main talkshows, presents herself as a master capable of transmitting a method to protect young people. With an easy exercise: self-observation to subsequently move beyond the flesh to materiality, gaining the awareness of being a soul. Crushed in that gigantic video game that is life, we must react without fear and without feeling like anyone’s slave. The author confides that she imagines herself now as in her youth equal to the intrepid Sandokan. Adding the reading of De Imitatio Christi and the famous phrase “forgive them because they do not know what they do”: it is not a question of fragility, but of an extraordinary victory over human atrocities. Only the soul is autonomous, while the ego that feeds on power, wealth, individual success must be erased with the body. Melanie Francesca is happy and free to be different, an aerial figure in search of eternity and light, a woman who stands out from the crowd who doesn’t wear designer clothes and doesn’t name brands, because studying alone emancipates female intelligence. For her, existing means breathing in God, an intense, magical, luminous presence of peace and intimate serenity in the energetic frequency of angelic love.”
ART
SHORTLY:
Melanie Francesca is a renowned artist who has exhibited her works throughout Europe and the Middle East. After his classical high school diploma and the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she began to exhibit in Europe – we remember the solo show at the Cortina gallery in Milan in 2005 and the collective show with the Figuration Critique group, Grand Palais, in Paris and Moscow – and in Middle East, under the patronage of the Minister of Culture of the United Arab Emirates, Nahayan bin Mubarack al Nahayan in 2005.
Also under his patronage, in 2015 the personal exhibition THE BOX took place in the Pro-art gallery, Dubai, which was followed by participation in Art Dubai in 2016 with a public installation in DIFC, the financial center of the metropolis home to prestigious Emirati galleries, and the solo exhibition at the Cap Contemporary Art Platform gallery in Kuwait in 2017.
In 2021 she exhibited in Milan with a solo show at the Milan art gallery with the criticism of Professor and sociologist Francesco Alberoni: “Melanie Francesca In her artistic activity she marries with notable talent the stylistic features of drawing and engraving, reminiscent of the Nordic Masters such as Dürer, to power of modernity, represented by lightboxes and “experiential” art. It reminds us that chiaroscuro and contradictions are part of the life of each of us, that beauty shines further by emerging from the darkness and that in all this lies the strength and power of the human race.
Minister of Tolerance H.H. Nahayan Bin Mubarak Al Nahayan (at the time minister of culture) remembers Melanie as “an artist who skillfully unites her form of prayer with the universe and the omnipotence of nature, as well as with the greatness of the human being. In a technological age like ours, it is a message of freedom, hope and undeniable modernity.”
“The Box” intertwines classical mythology with contemporary understanding. This lightbox-like structure, made of fabric and metal, weighs 400 kilos and measures three by three meters, with a height of 2.5 meters. By inviting visitors inside, it offers an intimate journey through the history of humanity.
An installation created to restore philosophical dignity to a figurative art “now trampled upon, reduced to craftsmanship, to be reevaluated”.
In 2022 the box will be presented exclusively at Villa Ormond during the San Remo festival, see the video.
2023 tra ARTE E POESIA, I LIBRI DEL SEGRETO
MAGGIO 23 alla GALLERIA IL PRIMATICCIO DANTE ALIGHIERI
In spring 2023 Melanie comes out with a new book of poetry mixed with drawings from THE BOX which the great psychologist MARIA RITA PARSI describes as follows: There are books that often describe an identity and others that are “A provocation to make people reflect and bring back the human being to its origins”. “Melanie Francesca’s poetry is a surprise, above all and above all, for its surprising ability, melodiously and dreamily expressed, to constitute emotional scenarios that are rooted in every myth and in every time. A feminine James Joyce to sip to open the doors to the heights beyond our unconscious.”
For the famous art historian and Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Culture professor VITTORIO SGARBI: “The Books of the Secret” is: «To nothing else more relevant could one compare this ambitious and burdensome summa in three parts, Adam and Eve, Eden and Apocalypse, if not to a text of a sacred nature, accompanied by illustrations in tone (Melanie draws well), with which an original version of the Word is proposed, the revealed word regarding the origin and purpose of everything, introducing a universe which, to use the author’s words, “is governed by duality”. Melanie’s poetic language follows the line of the sacred texts, the prophets, the Divine Comedy and the great symbolist poetry such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire which inaugurates modern lyric poetry. If not everything is understood, it can still be enough to be perceived; the important thing is that the solemn and the cryptic leave a clear and profound mark on the listener.”
“The PROF. STEFANO ZECCHI gives it an intense and structured, visual and historically talented reading: “It is a very eccentric and ambitious original book, it seeks a writing that is as old as the Western tradition and not only that, that of the aphorism, which it updates through also linguistic puns. It is a very beautiful book from the point of view of literary fascination and it is clear that Melanie manages to manage the word and linguistic structure very well. Books like this can only be found by going back to the time of the great pre-Socratic philosophers, where philosophical communication took place through aphorisms. The line of drawing is beautiful, from someone who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and from someone who knows how to dominate expressive communication through the sign.”
The book was accompanied by the artistic structure THE BOX in the Primaticcio gallery of the Dante Alighieri headquarters in Rome
VITA PERSONALE IN DUE RIGHE
Vivendo tra la Svizzera e il Medio Oriente, ha costruito una famiglia con due bellissimi bambini, e Rappresenta la fusione di due universi apparentemente lontani uniti in armonia.
You can find broadcasts, articles, collaborations in magazines and newspapers, videos on art exhibitions on:
www.melaniefrancesca.com
youtube for radio and television: Melanie Francesca on TV
Published books:1997 Luna di carne, Tranchida editore
1997 Cocktail, Gremese
1997 Angeli d’asfalto, Olympia press
1999 La dinamite degli angeli, poesia
2000 Giorni di sabbia, ed. Il portico
2002 Adrenalina, Gremese editore
2003 Caccia d’amore, Gremese editore
2004 Catalogo d’arte
2005 Arabian Blonde, Oscar Mondadori
2007 Visioni, poesie, Camilliti editore
2007 Vampiria, Camilliti editore
2015 Art catalog THE BOX
2017 L’Occidentale (Cairo editore, Rizzoli)
2018 La donna perfetta (Cairo editore, Rizzoli)
2019 L’angelo (Cairo editore, Rizzoli)
2022 Il Maestro (Cairo editore, Rizzoli)
2023 I libri del segreto, Giorgio mondadori
2023 The Angel, traduzione, by Europa Books
2024 Il sussurro di un Dio, Castelvecchi editore
Solo Exhibitions:
2003 Abu Dhabi (United Arabs Emirates) under the patronage of the Minister of Culture Nahyan bin Mubarack al Nahyan, in the presence of the Swiss Ambassador Francoise Barras
2003 Dubai (United Arabs Emirates) under the patronage of the Minister of Culture
2005 Galleria Cortina, Milan, Icons of our time, preface by Giampiero Mughini
2015 Dubai, Pro art gallery, under the patronage of His Highness the Minister of Culture Nahyan Bin Mubarack al Nahyan
2016 Art Dubai, THE BOX, installazione in una piazza pubblica a DIFC
2017 Cap Kuwait, THE BOX, Cap Gallery
2021 ottobre, Milano Gallery, Expression of the soul
2022 Sanremo febbraio, durante il festival, villa Ormond Melanie espone THE BOX
2023 galleria Primaticcio, associazione Dante Alighieri, con Maria Rita Parsi, Dott. Masi e l’editore Carlo Motta
The presentations of the books (in bookstores and on TV) are numerous and can be viewed on the website and YouTube
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IL GIORNALE
“Melanie, successful model, artist and writer has shot off with Milanese culture in her mind and is aiming at the heart. A book published by Gremese, Caccia d’amore, recently presented at the Duomo’s gallery. An exhibition of drawings, which, today, can be seen at the Cortina gallery. And an avalanche of recognitions from the aristocracy of contemporary culture. (…) The young Italo-German artist bases everything on provocation. A provocation that Melanie lives like a true mission in order to shake a figurative situation that she considers motionless…”
LA STAMPA
(…) Melanie, revelation of literature and emerging celebrity in the midia … It’s exactly her flourishing beauty that leaves the interlocutor impressed: especially if aware that behind her fresh talent of literature is a pin-up body and flowing plaited hair like a medusa. … Books written at full gallop, with rhythm and almost cinematographical immediacy.
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
Melanie’s sixth novel. Writer of the beat generation, but also a cover-girl, model, illustrator of the biggest European reviews.
L’ESPRESSO
“A sort of Italian-style Erica Jong, with a doll-like face like a Lolita and a white and buttery physique (…) Even for Sgarbi, the busty Melanie promises well:” She has a good writer’s cut …”
IL MESSAGGERO (2000)
Former model, today an uninhibited writer with a future as an actress … She was … regional champion of three thousand meters (“I ran ten kilometers a day”). She was a model to earn her living. She is a writer only since last year, author of a shower of books, like the rhythm of her life. “My characters are very icy, they have to be, they are beings of the North, like I am. You Italians, damn it, bring out my romantic heart. …”