Luck in Italy: Modern Princes, from Pinocchio to Foucault's Pendulum
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The Oxford Italian Association TOIA NEWSLETTER NO. 76 May – June 2016 Text and voice, text vs voice: Dante on writing and reading Carlo Ginzburg is a noted Italian historian Taylor Special Lecture and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is by Professor Carlo Ginzburg best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina. The shift from an oral, gestural performance to a silent reading of an invisible, In 1966, he published The Night Battles, and therefore reproducible, text, which does not an examination of the benandanti visionary folk need to be publicly performed, may have been tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth- independently invented, or reinvented, in century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early different societies. modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: The lecture will approach this topic Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. focusing on the crucial role played, within the The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Western tradition, by Dante’s attitude towards Ginzburg, Carlo Ginzburg was born in 1939 in the silent reading of poetry, on the one hand, and Turin, Italy. He received a PhD from the the poetical text as an independent entity, on the University of Pisa in 1961. He subsequently held other. teaching positions at the University of Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles (1988– 2006), and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His fields of interest range from the Italian Renaissance to early modern European history, with contributions to art history, literary studies, and the theory of historiography. He was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize and was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. The Taylor Special Lecture, Main Hall, Taylor Institution, St. Giles, Oxford 5.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 4th May, 2016. Admission is free. All welcome. Representing the Duce: Mussolini and Italian art 1922-1945 Lecture by Dr Giuliana Pieri It is widely accepted that the cult of Mussolini was vital to the way Italian Fascism became a regime and integrated the population into a system of regimented consensus that appeared solid until it was undermined by the setbacks of World War Two. The cult involved the weaving of narratives of “exceptionality” around the figure of Mussolini and the consolidation of these in collective rituals and the re-organisation of public spaces. The public projection of Mussolini’s image through the press, photographs, film, painting, sculpture and posters followed from this. This will allow her to look at both the This lecture has as its starting point the still widely actual cult of the Duce and the counter-cult at the accepted notion that as the artist and art critic, time of the fall of the regime. The second focal Mario De Micheli, put it “la politica del fascismo point will be the aftermath of the arts. What nei confronti dell’arte fu moderata” (Mario De happened to the portraits of Mussolini in the post Micheli, L’arte sotto le dittature, Milan: Feltrinelli, war period? When did they resurface both 2000, p. 51). physically and critically? And why does any of this By focusing on the construction of the matter now? image of Mussolini, its iconographic changes over time, its use in supporting the Duce’s personality cult, and especially the post-war destiny of the th On Tuesday, 17 May, 7.30 for 8.00 p.m. images, Dr Giuliana Pieri probes further into the construction of the notion of Fascism’s moderate At the Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, policy towards the visual arts and looks at the way St. Anne’s College this idea developed in Italian post-war art Entry: Members £2, non-members £5, historical discourse. students under 30 free of charge Two areas will be particularly in focus. The first is the iconography of the Duce. How and why Parking: Bevington Road and adjacent side roads did it change in the period 1922-45? Dr Giuliana Pieri (Dott. Lett. Pavia; MA In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition Kent, DPhil Oxon) is Reader in Italian and the Against Mussolini. Art and the Fall of a Dictator Visual Arts and Head of the School of Modern (London, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art) Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal as part of the AHRC funded research grant The Holloway University of London. Cult of the Duce (www.mussolinicult.com). She has published widely on 19th and 20th She is on the editorial board of the journal century visual culture, cultural history and popular Italian Studies; is general series editor of European literature. Her research interests are firmly in the Crime Fictions and Studies in Visual Culture area of comparative and interdisciplinary studies, (University of Wales Press, Cardiff); and is a especially the intersection of the verbal and the member of the executive committee of the visual, and the role of Italian visual culture in the Society of Italian Studies. construction of Italian identity both in Italy and She is currently co-investigator of the abroad. Recent volumes include The Cult of the AHRC funded project Interdisciplinary Italy 1900- Duce. Mussolini and the Italians from 1914 to the 2020: Interart/Intermedia. Her contribution Present (2013, with S. Gundle and C. Duggan), and focuses on Italian Modernism and the intersection Italian Crime Fiction (2011). between the fine arts, design (pre- and postwar) and Italian culture as part of the project’s collaboration with the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, official partner of the project. Dr. Giuliana Pieri, speaking at the exhibition 'Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator' Boccaccio meraviglioso (Wondrous Boccaccio) 120 minutes duration, Italian with Italian subtitles “The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, re-create a distant past in Boccaccio meraviglioso: the plague year of 1348, when ten young Florentines take refuge in a country villa and pass the time by telling stories. The film, based on Boccaccio’s Decamerone, dramatizes both the storytellers and their tales. The Tavianis place the action—which ranges from the pathos of a woman revived by a lover’s touch to the comedy of a craftsman who’s the butt of a metaphysical practical joke—in ancient buildings and landscapes that seem to vibrate with erotic passions inflamed by the presence of death." The New Yorker Veteran auteurs Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s The Decameron focuses on five of the 100 stories in the classic Italian masterpiece and boasts stunning locations and an all-star cast. The stories are set against the backdrop of a 14th century, black plague-stricken Florence, where ten young men and women have escaped the Black Death by relocating to a country villa where, one by one, they take turns telling stories of love, fate, and resurrection. Wondrous Boccaccio is a poetic tribute to the stories that emerged from one of the darkest periods in Italian history, and the imaginations that fuelled them. Stunningly shot in several castles, towers and medieval ruins in Tuscany and Lazio, this visual gem is a luscious Taviani-style feast for the eyes. THE DIRECTORS: Paolo became passionate about cinema after seeing Rossellini’s Paisan. After writing and directing shorts and plays with his brother, Vittorio, he made his first feature in 1962 and they’ve worked together ever since. Their vast careers include prestigious wins in Cannes for Palme d’Or winner Padre Padrone (1977) and Grand Prix du Jury winner La Notte di San Lorenzo (1982). Caesar Must Die (2012) earned the brothers a Golden Bear in Berlin. Showing at the Sadler Room, Rewley House, Wellington Square, Friday, 3rd June, 7.45 p.m. All welcome. Note this film is in Italian with Italian sub-titles. Metered parking available in Wellington Square. Luck in Italy: Modern Princes, from Pinocchio to Foucault's Pendulum The Henry Rowlatt Bickley Memorial Robert Gordon works primarily on modern Lecture, 2016, will be delivered by Professor Italian literature, cinema and cultural history. He is Robert S. C. Gordon, the Serena Professor of the author or editor of twelve books, including Italian at the University of Cambridge. several on the work of Primo Levi (e.g. Primo Levi's Luck, superstition and magic have long Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report, The been an object of study amongst anthropologists Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi). of distant cultures. But to the critic or cultural He has also published on the wider field of historian working closer to home, it might seem postwar cultural responses to the Holocaust, strange to study such phenomena in a single especially in the book The Holocaust in Italian country or culture. These feel more like universal Culture, 1944-2010 and the co-edited volume notions that transcend national borders. This Holocaust Intersections. lecture is interested in luck and what it has looked He is co-editor of Culture, Censorship and like in Italy, particularly in the modern era, when the State in 20th-Century Italy and his work on secular thinking has competed with sacred cinema includes the books Pasolini. Forms of thinking as a means of making sense of our lives Subjectivity and the BFI Film Classics volume and our actions. Drawing on a range of modern Bicycle Thieves, DVD and blu-ray audio Italian literature, from Carlo Collodi to Umberto commentaries, and articles and essays on Eco, the lecture asks if there is such a thing as Holocaust cinema, early film and literature, ‘luck in Italy’. 'Hollywood on the Tiber', and censorship. He is the author of a general account of modern Italian literature, A Difficult Modernity: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Italian Literature.