The thousand seats for Alessandro Barbero’s conference were sold in less than a minute. Same thing for the second performance of the Italian historian, the next day, in the city center of Sarzana, in Tuscany. The subject of his presentation which brings together the crowds is however not in the news of the moment: “1204: the crusaders discover Constantinople”. The electric atmosphere under the vast marquee of the Festival della Mente, a series of conferences of academics and writers organized every first weekend of September, suggests the astonishing notoriety of the professor Barbero, specialist in the Middle Ages.
When the sixty-year-old with glasses and light-colored pants makes his way through the crowd to the stage, the phones go up and curious people without tickets crowd around, on the square, to catch snippets. The announcement of an hour and a half lesson, instead of the one hour initially planned, then triggered prolonged applause. With his hurried delivery, Alessandro Barbero retraces the destiny of the preacher Foulques de Neuilly, of the knights Geoffroi de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari, dazzled by their discovery of the Ottoman capital conquered during the Fourth Crusade, at the beginning of the 13th century.e century.
Once his story is finished, at 11 p.m., the teacher doesn’t stop there: sitting at a table, he signs his books and does the selfie exercise until past midnight. His ten-day tour, in nine Italian cities, has only just begun. “Later, while walking with him on the street, many people kept stopping him to talk to him and take a photo, describes Benedetta Marietti, the festival director. He’s an academic turned rockstar. »
A desk, a microphone, a hand in your pocket
The author of around forty books, including several historical novels, has become, in five years, the darling of a good part of Italy. In addition to the numerous festivals of which he is one of the headliners, his conferences, now uploaded to YouTube and podcasts on Spotify, quickly gathered several million fans. How was this medievalist, a recognized expert in the history of war, able to transform into a celebrity? “It is often explained to me that my passion carries the public away”, suggests Alessandro Barbero, in an office at city hall, a few hours before his conference.
Equipped only with a desk and a microphone, one hand in his pocket, the historian talks about historical figures as varied as Joan of Arc and Saint Catherine of Siena. Or, more recently, on the author of Master and Marguerite, Mikhail Bulgakov, during a presentation on Russian literature. Irreproachable on the facts, the professor tells behind the scenes of major historical events and allows himself a few quips, all in extremely accessible Italian. “I definitely don’t want to address an audience of experts,” he specifies.
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