Cecilia Sala | Telling What Burns

Cecilia Sala | Telling What Burns Thursday, 10 October 2026 | 8:45 pm | Piazza del Sole, Bellinzona Sconfinare Festival

There are moments when events unfold faster than words can keep up. Images appear, overlap and disappear. But what remains of a war once public attention has shifted elsewhere? The voices of those who have lived through it remain. The silences of those who were never heard remain. And lives that continue to search for a future amid the fractures of history. Telling What Burns means drawing close to these places without looking away, searching for words that do not claim to explain everything, but that can hold on to something: a face, a voice, a possibility of understanding.

Cecilia Sala is one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary Italian journalism. A reporter, author and the daily host of the Stories podcast, she has spent the past several years reporting from places where history reveals itself in its harshest form: Iran during the protests and the ensuing repression, war-torn Ukraine, Afghanistan after the Taliban's return to power, and Israel and Palestine in the aftermath of 7 October. In her reporting, podcasts and books, geopolitics is never an abstract concept. It grows out of listening, being present on the ground and meeting the people who experience the tensions of our time firsthand.

For Cecilia Sala, reporting means approaching these conflict zones without surrendering to simplification; finding a language for what so often remains outside the frame; questioning the silences surrounding victims, dissidents, young people growing up under war and authoritarian regimes, and those whose lives are upended by decisions made elsewhere.

At the Sconfinare Festival, Cecilia Sala takes the audience inside the work of bearing witness—where words become responsibility, the human voice can become an act of resistance, and journalism creates a space to understand what the relentless noise of the news cycle risks erasing. An encounter on the indispensable power of storytelling: listening to a world on fire without turning away.

Moderated by Francesca Campagiorni, journalist.

Cecilia Sala is a journalist, reporter and author. Throughout her career she has reported from numerous international crisis zones, including Venezuela, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran, Israel and the Palestinian Territories. She writes for Il Foglio and is the author and host of Stories, Chora Media's daily podcast dedicated to stories from around the world. Her most recent books, all published by Mondadori, include Polvere. Il caso Marta Russo (Dust: The Marta Russo Case, co-authored with Chiara Lalli, 2021), L'incendio. Reportage su una generazione tra Iran, Ucraina e Afghanistan (The Fire: Reporting on a Generation across Iran, Ukraine and Afghanistan, 2023), and I figli dell'odio. La radicalizzazione di Israele, la distruzione della Palestina, l'umiliazione dell'Iran (Children of Hate: Israel's Radicalization, the Destruction of Palestine, and the Humiliation of Iran, 2025). In December 2024, she was arrested in Tehran while on a reporting assignment and was released on 8 January 2025.