Media: Posdata _ Suplemento literario de Levante-EMV
Original tittle: Un Mèdici de Palmera
Author: Angels Gregori
Photography: Ricardo Gómez-Acebo
Date: 24th May 2025
A Médici from Palmera
Once, at one of the meals with Vicent Todolí in which he kept talking about literature in a way that was as suggestive as it was unacademic, without any desire to give lessons on anything, but rather conveying the passion that books had given him throughout his life, I asked him why he had not devoted himself to literature. And he answered me briefly but forcefully: because he had too much respect for literature. That was more or less twenty years ago, but this answer has come back to me insistently these days while I was living with the book he has just published and which has fascinated me: Quisiera crear un jardín (y verlo crecer), edited by Juan Lagardera and published by Espasa. A work in which Todolí explains the entire life journey that led him to become a reference in the world of contemporary art on an international level. And a book where, even so, that is the least of it. Because as you turn the pages, this book is, above all, a firm way of being in the world, from art, from literature, from the kitchen and from the earth. Literature is more questions than answers, and this is Todolí’s constant attitude in each of the territories he has approached throughout his life, from the curiosity of wondering, of questioning.
A journey around the world that ends – and finds its essence – at the origin, in Palmera, in the memory of his people, where years ago he began to buy land to avoid an urban development plan and where he has finally created his open-air museum, the Todolí Citrus Foundation, which includes around five hundred citrus varieties and which, in the end, is the answer that gives meaning to all his questions. The most paradise-like desire to belong that I have ever seen. The Italian poet Nanni Balestrini wrote that sometimes trees grow in the direction of the sky, which is more or less what he has done, and that, in a way, Francisco Brines repeated to him on several occasions, when he compared him to Hermes, saying that he was like a messenger of the gods who, with his sandals, touched the earth to get his momentum.
Next Saturday 14th June, Poecítrics will take place at its foundation, a poetry festival which this year will be in its third edition, and which will bring together poets such as Leire Bilbao, Joan Carles Martí, Vicente Gallego, Mario Obrero and Raquel Lanseros. An event that is already becoming a must in our region for all those who do not want to miss an afternoon full of verses in a unique museum, in the open air, like Thoreau’s desk. For me it is an event that I hold in special esteem, for many reasons; one of them, because since I was a teenager I have seen the respect with which Todolí treated poetry. And I can think of many others, such as thinking about what has happened and what is still happening, and about everything that has had to happen in the Safor region. A territory that, from Ausiàs March to Gregori Maians, is the cradle of our classics and one of the greatest exponents of the Enlightenment, and with the directions the world is taking, I have the feeling that in this region, between us all, we are increasingly shielded, through words, against institutionalised hatreds and fanaticisms that never cease to grow.
A few days ago we celebrated twenty years of the Poefesta in Oliva with almost a thousand people attending, which is something of a miracle in a town where poetry has always been treated as a matter of state. And, the same week, the inauguration of Gandia Pensa took place, a space of reflection for citizenship which, in its first act, at the same time that a new pope was coming out in the Vatican, in the Borja Palace of Gandia we were moved by the presence of Theodor Kallifatides, an author who through his work has left one of the greatest witnesses of our times, embracing all the questions that concern the human condition, from the feeling of belonging to the problems of identity. A humanist who has made us understand that truth requires an honest relationship between thought and word, who has taught us the dignity of discomfort and the perplexity of collective indignation, and who has made us see, in short, that culture is the only possible instrument against barbarism.
Years ago, a neighbour from Oliva told me that thanks to the Poefesta, her quality of life had improved. A sentence that I have not forgotten. Because, in the end, this is what it is all about. The public authorities have the responsibility to guarantee cultural rights to all citizens, beyond the great capitals of the country. And all the more so if they depend on an autonomous administration that does not guarantee them. And even so, what happiness, in spite of everything, to be able to guarantee spaces of understanding without having to depend on it. And to be able to walk between centuries in a single region. And to be able to boast of the commitment to beauty that comes from having a Medici from Palmera, a Kallifatides in the Ducal Palace and a Poefesta with almost a thousand attendees. Perhaps this is why any space for dialogue that is generated among citizens is, more than ever, an act of resistance.
