Walking through Sofia with Georgi Gospodinov
Giorgia Spadoni’s literary guide follows the city through its streets, stories and layers of time.
Photography: Sketches of Sofia / Janet 45
The light in Yavorov’s house, the whereabouts of Sofia’s lions,
and the invisible routes running from Natural Novel through The Physics of Sorrow and Time Shelter to The Gardener and Death: these are some of the threads Giorgia Spadoni follows in In Sofia with Georgi Gospodinov. First published in Italian, the book was announced for a Bulgarian edition by Janet 45. It belongs to an Italian series exploring cities through the work of writers and artists. Alongside Paul Auster’s New York, Murakami’s Tokyo and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul comes Gospodinov’s Sofia. Other volumes follow Dostoevsky through St Petersburg, Marcel Proust through Paris, Van Gogh through Amsterdam and Banksy through Bristol.
In Sofia with Georgi Gospodinov travels through time as well as space.
We read our way through the Sofia of the 1980s, the 1990s and the present. A city never belongs only to today, and Gospodinov’s writing continually brings the past into the here and now. Put on comfortable shoes and follow Spadoni and Gaustine into this urban literary adventure.
The journey begins in the final decade of communist Bulgaria, moves through the turbulent transition of the 1990s and the early years of the new century, and reaches the contemporary city. Streets and squares become time shelters, witnesses to Balkan history. Founded in 2012 by Rome’s Giulio Perrone Editore, the Passaggi di dogana series, or “Crossing Customs”, reimagines the travel guide as something beyond a directory of addresses and prices:
literary, poetic and geographical prose.
Spadoni brings a close connection with Bulgaria to the project. She completed a master’s degree in translation at Sofia University and attended a creative-writing course taught by Gospodinov. The Bulgarian edition of In Sofia with Georgi Gospodinov was announced for October 2026. The English title used here is a translation of the book’s title, not an announcement of an English-language edition.
The Physics of Sorrow on the National Theatre’s main stage
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