Seven Records Set by the Festival di Letteratura Working Class

The Festival di Letteratura Working Class in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence, is an event unique in its kind. What sets it apart is its setting, grassroots spirit, and political drive: literature here is a form of resistance, reclaiming space in a deindustrialized landscape. In 2025, over 7,000 people attended and for the first time, also the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung was present with a stand, distributing its publications. Alberto Prunetti is a key voice in Italian working-class literature and serves as artistic director of the Festival. In an article, first published on Jacobin.it, he highlights the festival’s record-breaking popularity, and how it defies the norms of traditional literary culture — bringing literature back to the people.

Saying “it was a record-breaking edition” is a cliché—it’s said after every event. So here you go: all the records of the most boycotted festival in the world.

The Festival di Letteratura Working Class in Campi Bisenzio, held within the factory site of the former Gkn factory, has reached its third edition and took place this year from April 4 to 6, 2025. Saying, “it was a record-breaking edition” is something every artistic director must say, even when it’s not true. So, in my role as the artistic director of this festival—or, as I prefer to see myself: its program assembler—I’ll have to say it too, jokingly but not entirely. And as you’ll soon see, the records of our festival are quite unlike those of others.

The Festival di Letteratura Working Class was born as a wild idea: to talk about workers’ literature inside a factory, in an industrial zone poorly connected to downtown Florence and far from the logic of cultural gentrification, with the help of a workers’ collective that has been fighting layoffs for years. All this without a penny of corporate funding, instead seeking support from sympathizers and grassroots organizations rather than private sponsors. And yet, it has worked: the festival has grown from year to year, from 3,500 attendees in 2023 to 5,000 in 2024, and 7,000 in 2025. That’s the first record.

But there’s more: in terms of numbers, this makes the Festival di Letteratura Working Class a one-of-a-kind event. Very few events are dedicated to this literature genre, and they’re mostly found in Anglo-Saxon or Northern European contexts. There was a great festival in Bristol in 2021—the Working-Class Writers Festival; there’s a one-day festival in Tampere, Finland; I’ve even heard of an event in South Korea. However, they draw, at most, a few hundred people. What has happened in Italy was totally unexpected: a surge in working-class literature driven by political mobilization, and the creation of a literary audience that doesn’t rely on best-sellers resulting from the profit-driven logic of the publishing industry. Appearing like a meteor from the north on Italy’s literary landscape, the Campi Bisenzio Festival has become the most important Working-Class Literature event in Europe—perhaps even the world. That’s the second record.

One might argue it’s easy to become the world’s biggest festival for such a niche literary genre. But here’s the rebuttal: this festival beats all other cultural festivals in Italy in one key area: sabotage. That’s the third record: ours is the most sabotaged literary and cultural festival in the country.

The Working-Class Literature Festival has faced repeated obstruction: in 2023, the former Gkn factory’s owners threatened legal action against anyone attending the Festival. In 2024, sabotage caused an energy blackout, forcing everyone to relocate to the front courtyard. Attendees were surveilled for three days by a drone, and the factory’s ownership publicly criticized certain speakers, like the well-known actor Elio Germano, who encouraged people to attend. Then this year, right before the Festival began, a third mass layoff procedure was launched against the Gkn workers—an “accidental” coincidence that leaves one both saddened and stunned. Things like this don’t happen at festivals targeting a cultural elite audience.

Here’s the fourth record: among all the initiatives led by the former Gkn factory workers in their fight against layoffs—marches, pickets, flyers—the festival has likely been the one that angered management the most. That’s a record too. Imagine, in a country as petite-bourgeois as Italy, how irritating it must be to the upper class to see a worker on stage holding a book.

Fifth record: the Festival is also the only one where organizers built the stage with their own hands—this year, the former Gkn workers themselves, with help from some stage carpenters, assembled it. That is something you will never see at festivals attended by people in cream-colored linen outfits.

Sixth record: of the 7,000 people at this year’s edition, 5,000 joined the Saturday march, and 3,000 books were sold. That makes it likely the largest demonstration in labor movement history with that many people carrying a book in their pocket. It’s one of the Festival’s trademarks: it intertwines literature and politics, turning literature into a political act.

And finally, the seventh—and perhaps most important—record: the Gkn Workers’ Collective is the protagonist of the longest-running struggle in the history of the Italian labor movement (and possibly the European one, having far surpassed the British miners of 1984). The opening day of the 2025 Festival coincided with day 1367 of their permanent factory assembly.

All these records are, on one hand, the result of thousands of people embracing the struggle of a factory, and on the other, a cultural convergence between a workers’ collective and a group of knowledge workers. And we’re already preparing for a new project: the first Working-Class Cultural Hub, as part of a bottom-up industrial plan developed by the former Gkn workers. It aims to become a European center for working-class literature and culture. But first, the workers must win their battle. Then we might claim another record: surpassing Adriano Olivetti in producing social and cultural wealth from a factory. With one difference: when in Ivrea, cultural activism came from above, led by an enlightened boss, everyone applauded. But when the same thing comes from below, from laid-off metalworkers, all hell broke loose. “Che roba Contessa…”*

Alberto Prunetti is a writer and translator, author of 108 metri. The New Working Class Hero (Laterza, 2018) and Amianto. Una storia operaia (new edition, Feltrinelli, 2023). He is also the editor of the “Working Class” fiction series for Alegre.

*Can be translated with „What a shame, Countness!“ and is a reference to a popular song from the seventies, Contessa by Paolo Pietrangeli, in which an aristocratic woman complains about the workers occupying the factories and claiming an academic education for their children.