Lecture by Ass. Prof. Giorgia Alù (The University of Sydney)
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Italo Calvino’s birth
2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino, the undisputed protagonist of the Italian cultural scene after WWII. For the occasion, several events dedicated to this important figure have been and will be organized throughout Italy and in the world, coordinated by the Calvino Laboratory of the La Sapienza University of Rome. The Italian Cultural Institute has also decided to hold an event dedicated to Calvino and his role in the modernization of the Italian language, part of the cycle of conferences entitled “The Reinvention of Italian” and scheduled for Thursday 28 September at the the Institute. Ass. Prof. Giorgia Alù Chair of Italian Studies at the School of Languages and Cultures of the University of Sydney, will entertain a conversation with the director of the Institute, Paolo Barlera. In particular, they will discuss the relationship of Calvino’s writing with the demands coming from the field of photography, which have contributed to the emergence of a new phase of Italian language.
Novelist, short story writer and journalist Italo Calvino was one of the most celebrated Italian writers of the 20th century and a strong contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in in Cuba in 1923 but raised in Sanremo (Liguria). His father was a professor of tropical agriculture at the University of Turin, and young Calvino was to pursue sciences, but eventually he chose to study literature. During WWI, at the age of 20, he joined an anti-fascist resistance group called the Garibaldi Brigade. After the war he returned to his studies of literature, and started also writing for some communists papers such as L’Unità. In 1947 Calvino published his first novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, (The Path of the Nest of Spiders), which was followed, in 1949, by a collection of short stories based on his wartime experiences, Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last). His interest in folk tales and traditions led to the publication, in 1956, of Fiabe italiane (Italian Folk Tales), a collection of 200 Italian folktales originally inspired by the works of Vladimir Propp. Subsequently he continued to write stories and novels that incorporated elements of fables, myth and fantasy into modern and historical settings. Among Calvino’s most famous works of this kind: Il visconte dimezzato (1952) (The Cloven Viscount), Il barone rampante (1957) (The Baron in the Trees), Il cavaliere inesistente (1959) (The Nonexistent Knight). His later works of fantasy is Le cosmicomiche (1965) (Cosmicomics). In the later novels Le città invisibili (1972) (Invisible Cities), Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973) (The Castle of Crossed Destinies), and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler), Calvino uses playfully innovative structures and shifting viewpoints in order to examine the nature of chance, coincidence, and change. In 1985 Italo Calvino died suddenly in Siena a brain haemorrhage.
Giorgia Alù completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research interests range from modern and contemporary Italian literature, Italian cultural and social history to comparative literature and visual studies. Before coming to Sydney in 2008 she taught at the University of Warwick and at the University of Reading (UK). She is currently working on three projects. The first one explores how photographs together with other texts evoke ethical considerations and emotional evaluation for both their authors and viewers/readers in particular situations of upheaval, exclusion and confinement, in and outside of Italy. Furthermore, she is developing a new study on how Italian female photographers have engaged in issues of ethics and aesthetics and in the transmission and preservation of cultural heritage in Italy since the 19th-century. Lastly, she is Chief Investigator in the collaborative ARC Discovery Project “Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive” (2021-2024), a project which aims at mobilising Australia’s considerable and under-utilised non-English language resources in order to rethink its migrant and settler history not.
The lecture will be in ENGLISH.
Free entry. Limited seats.
Booking essential: www.eventbrite.com.au