Multipli Forti: Italian Literary Fiction Festival
June 07, 2022, 10:30 AM - 23:00 PM
A transatlantic window on the major literary trends of Italian fiction of our time, told by the authors who have written and are writing it.
The first edition of the Italian Contemporary/Literary Fiction Festival will take place in New York City, from June 6-8, 2022. This literary celebration, thematically titled Multipli Forti: Voices from Contemporary Italian Literature is a transatlantic window on the major literary trends in contemporary Italian fiction, featuring a select group of luminary Italian writers.
For a full description of the event, click here.
PROGRAM AT CIMA ON JUNE 7, 2022
10:30 a.m. Carlo Lucarelli and Michela Murgia
with a video by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
RESPONSE BY: Minna Zallman Proctor and Giancarlo Lombardi
MODERATOR: Eugenio Refini (New York University)
in Italian (with translations)
3:00 p.m. Jonathan Bazzi and Walter Siti
with a video by Nadia Terranova
RESPONSE BY: Todd Portnowitz and Michael Frank
MODERATOR: Alessandro Giammei (Yale University)
in Italian (with translations)
6:00 p.m. Teresa Ciabatti, Valerio Magrelli, and Sandro Veronesi
RESPONSE BY: Jenny McPhee
MODERATOR: Monica Calabritto (City University of New York)
in Italian (with translations)
THIS EVENT IS FREE. Reserve your tickets HERE for June 7 at CIMA!
For the program of the other days of the Festival, click here for June 6 at the Italian Cultural Institute, and click here for June 8 at Rizzoli Bookstore.
Staging Injustice Film Series: Nuovomondo by Emanuele Crialese
May 26, 2022, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
An in-person screening of Emanuele Crialese’s “Nuovomondo” surrounded by works of Italian modern art!
The ninth film in our Staging Injustice Film Series, Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006) is directed by Emanuele Crialese and stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, and Vincent Schiavelli.
Synopsis (via IMDB): The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before she arrives to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.
The film will be introduced by Prof. Anthony Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures. He is co-founder and co-director of Bordighera Press; and past president of the Italian American Studies Association and of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. Concentrating on cinema, literature, and semiotics, he has authored numerous books in both English and Italian. His latest books include Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014); Un biculturalismo negato: La scrittura “italiana” negli Stati Uniti (Franco Cesati Editore, 2018); Signing Italian/American Cinema: A More Focused Look (Ovunque Siamo Press, 2021); and The Columbus Affair: Imperatives for an Italian/American Agenda. (Casa Lago Press, 2021). He is executive producer and host of the Calandra Institute’s TV program, Italics, produced in collaboration with CUNY TV. He also writes a column for La Voce di New York, entitled “The Italian diaspora.”
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON SCREENING AT CIMA.
General Admission: $10
CIMA Members and Students with valid ID: $5
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
In Scena! Italian Theater Festival: EXILE, by and with Alessandro Tampieri
May 16, 2022, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
The New York City-based Kairos Italy Theater along with the Italy-based KIT Italia and NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò present at the Center for Italian Modern Art EXILE, by and with Alessandro Tampieri, in Italian with English supertitles. The performance is part of Play It Again In Scena! A very special 2022 coming back edition of the annual Italian Theater Festival NY.
EXILE (CONFINO)
Written & Performed by Alessandro Tampieri
Running time: 60’
Produced in partnership with City of Bologna Cassero LGBTQI+ Center & Centro di Documentazione Flavia Madaschi
Special mention at Premio Antonio Caldarella for contemporary dramaturgy
A story inspired by real events and told in 18 scenes about the life of Angelo P., who is arrested and exiled from Italy under Fascism for being gay. Angelo is a fictional character who is a symbol for homosexual persecution everywhere.
An actor, director and author, Alessandro Tampieri graduated in Philosophy and trained in Theater in Italy, Ireland and the United States. He worked on projects such as “Discesa agli Inferi”, “Animenude”, “Shakespeare in Death” for Bologna Musei and the ASCE European Significant Cemeteries network. He directed “Torri” for Friends of the Johns Hopkins University, Bologna Estate; he wrote and directed the Chamber Opera project “The Masters of the Opera” for Teatro 1763 / Perspective and curated the cultural Festivals “La parola alle donne” and “Orizzonti migranti in viaggio da Dante alla Costituzione”. As a dramaturg, he collaborated with the show “for Frida” for Infinity Dance Theater in New York City. He was a lecturer at the regional institution ERT Emilia Romagna Teatro. He is currently working on the human specific project “MetROzero”.
The event is part of:
Organized by:
Staging Injustice Film Series: Rocco e i suoi fratelli by Luchino Visconti
May 12, 2022, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
An in-person screening of Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco e i suoi fratelli” surrounded by works of Italian modern art!
The eighth film in our Staging Injustice Film Series, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) is directed by Luchino Visconti and stars Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, and Annie Girardot.
Synopsis (via IMDB): Widow Rosaria moves to Milano from Lucania with four of her sons, one of whom is Rocco; the eldest son, Vincenzo, already lives in Milano. In the beginning, the family has a lot of problems, but everyone manages to find something to do. Simone is boxing, Rocco works in a dry cleaner’s, and Ciro studies. Simone meets Nadia, a prostitute, and they have a stormy affair. Then after finishing his military service, Rocco begins a relationship with Nadia. A bitter feud explodes between the brothers–will it lead to murder?
The film will be introduced by Prof. Nelson Moe. Prof. Moe will share his observations on the work of director Luchino Visconti, whose cinematic art was profoundly influenced by novelist Giovanni Verga and by the geographical poetics of the divide between North and South in Italy.
Nelson Moe is associate professor of Italian and Film at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (University of California Press, 2002). The Italian edition was published as Un paradiso abitato da diavoli: identità nazionale e immagini nel Mezzogiorno(L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004). He has written widely on topics ranging from Verga, Gramsci, the poetry of Amelia Rosselli, as well as Alberto Lattuada’s film Mafioso and the Neapolitan song, “Tammuriata Nera.” He is currently completing a book on The Godfather.
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON SCREENING AT CIMA.
General Admission: $10
CIMA Members and Students with valid ID: $5
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
Staging Injustice on Stage: Pellizza’s Quarto Stato at the Theater
May 10, 2022, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
An online presentation by Prof. Luca Valentino on the making of Il sole della fiumana, a play inspired by Pellizza’s painting Il Quarto Stato.
Professor Luca Valentino will illustrate Il sole della fiumana, a play he directed and staged in Volpedo alongside Alfonso Cipolla and Giovanni Moretti in occasion of the centennial anniversary of Giuseppe Pellizza’s painting Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate). The play, distributed throughout the village of Volpedo, featured a mix of professional actors and village inahbitants whose ancestors served as models for Pellizza’s landmark painting. The stories narrated by the inhabitants brought back to life the personal and collective challenges that the women and man of Volpedo faced at the turn of the twentieth century: extenuating labor, hunger, migration, but also a great sense of community and the roots of a struggle for better conditions that continues to this day. The play also included original songs of protest from the era. Performed for the first time in 2001, Il sole della fiumana has been staged numerous other times, including in connection with the Milan Expo in 2015.
Luca Valentino is Professor of Performing Arts at the Conservatory of Music of Alessandria, Italy, where is also Artistic Director of “Scatola Sonora”, an international festival of small-scale opera and musical theater (at its 25th edition in 2022) named after a collection of Alberto Savinio’s writings. An international expert on Alberto Savinio, Valentino has adapted the artist’s works for performances on stage. He has written numerous essays on Savinio, as well as the book ‘L’arte impura. Percorsi e tematiche del teatro di Alberto Savinio‘. Valentino has directed many operas in Italy and abroad, spanning from the XVII century repertoire to contemporary works with a particular focus on new musical theatre, operas written for young people and chamber theatre. He has also served as drama director and playwright, and curated special events in connection with museums and art exhibitions.
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s
Admission is free
Behind the Paintings: Invisible Worlds of Artistry. A musical night with Anna Lomax and David Marker
May 04, 2022, 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
This presentation, led by anthropologist Anna Lomax Wood and David Marker, will illustrate the musical heritage of the people that are the subjects of many of the paintings featured in Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880-1917. Farmers, emigrants, rice weeders, sulphur miners, and factory workers all had distinct and complex musical cultures that ethnomusicology has studied and preserved through important campaigns of field recordings, such as the one completed by Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella in 1954, and the work of ethnomusicologists to study and preserve this intangible cultural heritage continues to this day.
The event will showcase select recordings from Alan Lomax’s archive, contemporary recordings by David Marker, and a concert featuring original traditional instruments.
Reserve your tickets HERE!
Anna Lomax Wood is an anthropologist and public folklorist. She is the President of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), established in 1985 by her father, legendary musicologist Alan Lomax. In 1996, when Alan Lomax was disabled by a stroke, Wood took responsibility for overseeing his archive, housed at Hunter College, and implementing his unfinished projects, most notably the production, which she undertook in 1997 with Jeffry Greenberg, of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records. It is a suite of more than 100 CD’s in ten series, of music recorded by Alan Lomax in the deep South, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the British Isles, Ireland, Spain and Italy. Upon her father’s death in 2002, ACE worked with the Library of Congress to preserve, restore, digitize, and transfer Alan Lomax’s original recordings, photographs, and videos to the Library’s American Folklife Center, In 2005, Wood and Mr. Greenberg produced an 8-CD box set issued on Rounder: Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. In 2009, she produced the 10-CD, Alan Lomax in Haiti, issued by Harte Records.
David Marker is an ethnomusicology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in pastoral and peasant music of rural southern Italy. For the past fifteen years he has been vigorously documenting oral culture music traditions in southern Italy as well as learning and playing the zampogna, chitarra battente, organetto and other traditional Italian instruments. In 2010 he published a self-made documentary film, Zampogna: The Soul of Southern Italy, which chronicles bagpiping traditions in southern Italy (available on YouTube). Much of the impetus for his ethnographic documentation work is inspired by the careers of Alan and Anna Lomax and he is honored to have worked with Anna on several projects involving Italian music. He has family in both Sicily and Campania where he enjoys visiting friends and relatives during his field recording trips.
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
Staging Injustice Study Days
April 29 - 30, 2022
April 30, 2022
CIMA hosts the international conference Staging Injustice Study Days on April 29-30. This event provides an opportunity for CIMA’s fellows to share their new research alongside other scholars.
The Study Days aim to investigate the major themes of CIMA’s current exhibition, Staging Injustice: Italian Art 1880-1917, curated by Giovanna Ginex, as well as to contribute to the general debate on Italian art of the period. The conference sessions were conceived by CIMA Fellows Camilla Froio, Eduardo De Maio, and Giorgio Motisi, following an open call for papers.
The conference will take place in a hybrid format: The first panel of each day will take place online, while the later panels will be in-person. In-person tickets include the opportunity to follow the online morning sessions at CIMA on our screens.
Friday April 29
2 PM. [VIA ZOOM] Chair: Camilla Froio – Italy at the Turn of the 20th Century
Sara Boezio, “End of the Century Social Tensions: Italy and the Challenges of Modernity”
Nicol Maria Mocchi, “Visual Models and Borrowed Imagery in Fin-de-siècle Italy”
Eduardo de Maio, “ ‘How Do You Feel about Socialism? Sympathetic, Adverse, or Indifferent?’ International Sources and Italian Socially Engaged Art, 1882-1914”
3:30 PM —Keynote Speech
Vivien Greene, “Arte per l’Umanità”
4:30 PM. [IN PERSON] Chair: Giorgio Motisi — Through the Lens of the Artists: Orientalism, Marginality, Colonialism and the Social Question
Camilla Froio, “Selling ‘the Orient’: Alberto Pasini’s Paintings in Gilded Age America”
Chiara Pazzaglia, “ ‘Era povero, nato dal popolo’. At the Origin of the Critical Myth of Vincenzo Gemito in the Early Twentieth Century”
Giulia Beatrice, “Ardengo Soffici’s Room of the Mannequins (1914): a Colonial Tale on the Eve of the War”
[VIA ZOOM] Annadea Salvatore, “ ‘I Believe that the Mission of Art is Something More than that of the Florist or the Milliner’: the Figurative Reflection of Duilio Cambellotti Between Human Piety and Propaganda Effort”
Saturday, April 30
10 am. [VIA ZOOM] Chair: Eduardo de Maio —The Urban Scene: Rome, Milan, and Turin
Gloria Bell, “Sculpting Indigeneity in the Eternal City: Edmonia Lewis and Ferdinand Pettrich”
Sharon Hecker and Catherine Ramsey Portolano, “Milano Capitale Im-morale: the Prostitute as Literary and Artistic Symbol of Social Deviance”
Anna Maria Panzera and Emanuela Termine, “Turin 1910-1913. Early Feminist Movements and the Quest for Women Artists’ Professional Status”
1 pm. [IN PERSON] Chair: Camilla Froio— Microhistories of Justice and Injustice
Giorgio Motisi, “A Lexicon of Injustice: Rethinking Titles in Italian Socially Engaged Art”
Anna Aline Mehlman Dumont, “Un proprio lavoro: Women’s Textile Work Between Charity and Industry in Morbelli’s Vecchie Calzette”
[VIA ZOOM] Romy Golan, “Staging Equality in Postwar Italy”
4 pm. [IN PERSON] Chair: Giorgio Motisi— Perceptions of Gender and Subalternity in Italian Visual Culture
Sara Vitacca, “Working Bodies: Labor and Virility in Italian Visual Culture from the Early Twentieth Century”
Viviana Costagliola, “An Italian Gaze on the Southern Question. The Representation of Southern Italy in the Monthly Review of the Italian Touring Club (1895-1915)”
FINAL DISCUSSION
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
Staging Injustice Film Series: Acciaio by Walter Rutmann
April 28, 2022, 6:00 PM - 7:10 PM
6:00 PM – 7:10 PM
An in-person screening of Walter Ruttmann’s “Acciaio” surrounded by works of Italian modern art!
The seventh film in our Staging Injustice Film Series, Acciaio (Steel, 1933) is directed by Walter Ruttmann and stars Piero Pastore, Isa Pola, and Vittorio Bellaccini.
Synopsis (adapted from wikipedia): Mario, a cyclist bersagliere, is discharged and returns to his job as a worker at the Terni steelworks, trusting to find and marry Gina, who was his girlfriend. But during his absence, Gina became infatuated with Pietro, also a worker. The film concentrates on this difficult situation.
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON SCREENING AT CIMA.
General Admission: $10
CIMA Members and Students with valid ID: $5
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
Tragedy at the Margins: Exploring Verismo in Opera
April 25, 2022, 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
An in-person lecture on 19th century opera composers turning their gaze to the social implications of injustice.
Opera has dealt with injustice and political conflict since its inception around 1600. It is towards the end of the nineteenth century, though, that composers – in conjunction with the blossoming of a new musical style traditionally known as Verismo – turn their gaze towards the social implications of injustice and to characters, who were normally left at the margins of the genre. If Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) – a tragedy about peasants in deep rural Sicily – is commonly considered the foundational example of “opera verista”, the ramifications of Verismo go well beyond artistic realism and naturalism. In fact, whereas numerous Verismo operas bring on stage dramatic situations that resonate with concurrent developments in literary and artistic realism, it is as a musical language that Verismo powerfully overrides previous operatic traditions. This talk will look at the ways in which social injustice and the representation of marginalized characters came to the fore in opera between 1890 and WWI, while also addressing the specificity of the operatic aesthetics vis-à-vis other mediums of artistic expression in the period.
General Admission: $15. Members and Students: Free.
About the lecturer:
Eugenio Refini (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2010), is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. Prior to joining NYU, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick (2010-2013) and he taught at Johns Hopkins University (2014-2019). His interests include reception, translation, and the intersections of music and literature, with a focus on vocal music and opera. Among his recent publications, the monograph The Vernacular Aristotle: Translation as Reception in Medieval and Renaissance Italy(Cambridge UP, 2020) and articles on Renaissance Quarterly, The Italianist, and Romance Quarterly. Refini’s next monograph, Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy, is forthcoming with Legenda (2022). He has received fellowships from Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, the Bodleian Library, the Warburg Institute and he has recently been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for the academic year 2021–22. His current book project studies the reception of the myth of Ariadne across poetry and music from 1600 to 1900.
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
Staging Injustice Film Series: I compagni by Mario Monicelli
April 15, 2022, 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM
4:00 PM – 8:00 PM
An in-person screening of Mario Monicelli’s “I compagni” surrounded by works of Italian modern art!
The sixth film in our Staging Injustice Film Series, I compagni (The Organizer, 1963) is directed by Mario Monicelli and stars Marcello Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, and Gabriella Giorgelli.
Synopsis (via IMDB): The story of exploited textile factory workers in Turin, Italy at the turn of the century and their beginnings of their fight for better working conditions. Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni) is sent by (presumably) the Socialists to help them organize their strike and give form to their struggle.
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON SCREENING AT CIMA.
General Admission: $10
CIMA Members and Students with valid ID: $5
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.