Event Details
Mon, June 22, 2026
18:00 – 20:00
Villa Sassetti
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence, Italy
Registration required
Poetry Reading and Screening
Two original takes on revelations of light & shadow. Esteemed poet Chloe Yelena Miller will read from her recent book Perforated and award-winning visual artist Vito Adriaensens will present a poetry film triptych shot entirely on super 8mm in the garden of Villa La Pietra. Tra la terra e il cielo azzurro brillante.
Perforated by Chloe Yelena Miller (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026)
Chloe Yelena Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, Perforated, is about the grief of private and public losses. Architecture and light frame loss through the lens of motherhood, mortality and love from the United States to Italy.
Covid, immigration, climate change and school shootings sound alarms in Perforated. Woven through the collection is “New York City,” a long poem broken into smaller pieces reflecting on 9/11 as it continues to reverberate in the author’s life. Public events transform into private experiences as the narrator searches for strength.
English and Italian Vocabulary poems, a series that began in Miller’s first book, Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021) and chapbook, Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013) explore how language can structure emotions. In “English Vocabulary: To Mourn,” Miller asks, “What if mourning is my engine?” She remembers relatives and loved ones who have died, working to undo mortality through memory.
Miller reflects on her family’s Italian origins and her time in Italy. As the final poem, “Palimpsest,” offers, we can make our worlds visible through art and light as we build upon the past. We are mortal and fragile, but we can remember each other and persist.
Tra la terra e il cielo azzurro brillante (Between the earth and the bright blue sky) by Vito Adriaensens
A poetry film triptych shot entirely on super 8mm in the garden of Villa La Pietra. Tra la terra e il cielo azzurro brillante takes on the perspective of the garden’s many statues, as they ponder the fabric of life from their pedestals above Florence. A film in the tradition of the pasquinade and the epigrammatic musings of Anton Francesco Doni’s I Marmi, with a score by renowned composer Jordan Dykstra.
Featured Biographies
Vito Adriaensens
FILMMAKER, NYU TISCH SHOOL OF THE ARTS
Vito Adriaensens is a Belgian filmmaker, scholar, and Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in the Undergraduate Film and Television Program. Vito is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema and the author of Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema. As a filmmaker, he goes by Vito Rowlands, and works mainly on celluloid. His experimental short films have screened internationally and his first feature is the Metamorphoses-inspired Ovid, New York.
Chloe Yelena Miller
WRITER
Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C., with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and also the poetry chapbook Unrest(Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a BA in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003).