In Italian, trama means both weft and plot. It is the thread that runs through a textile and the thread that runs through a story. It can describe the structure of a fabric, the architecture of a narrative, or even a hidden design beneath the surface of events. GIUNGLA 2026 follows these intertwined meanings, tracing the connections between books and textiles, memory and imagination, heritage and invention.

Trama is what links the book to the textile. Both are inscribed surfaces, built through layers, shaped by repeated gestures and knowledge passed down through generations.

Throughout European history—and particularly in Lucca—the silk industry and book production have shared techniques, metaphors, and structures: from the Jacquard loom, a precursor to the computer, to sewn pages; from decorative patterns to the architectures of text.

As Voltaire observed, the “manufactures of the human mind” can be seized just like prohibited fabrics: ideas and textiles travel together, spread across borders, are controlled, and are handed down.

In weaving, trama is the thread that crosses the warp. In literature, trama is the structure that connects events. In politics, it can become a hidden scheme or conspiracy.

GIUNGLA 2026 inhabits this ambiguous space.

Across the State Library, the Museum of the Cathedral, and the city itself, the festival follows the threads that connect the cultures of books and textiles: two technologies of memory built through patience, repetition, and interlacing. Threads of silk, threads of words, threads of images.

The exhibitions and conversations gathered under the sign of trama explore surfaces that retain time, archives that generate plausible fictions, stories that illuminate reality and others that distort it. For every trama is a construction: it can preserve a truth, transmit knowledge, invent a world, or weave a deception.

To follow a trama is always to enter a story—and to accept the risk of becoming lost within its threads.

The works and encounters in this edition move through surfaces that preserve traces, archives that generate possible worlds, patterns that transmit knowledge, and narratives that make visible what has not yet been seen. They also pose a simple question: who weaves the trama?

Heritage then appears not as something fixed and immobile, but as a fabric continually rewritten, where history and imagination, document and invention, coexist within the same design.