NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Istituto Italiana di Cultura join to celebrate in a two-day conference, the 150th birthday of Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1926).
The first event will be on November 30 at 6:30 p.m. at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò – NYU and it will be dedicated to Deledda’s legacy in the United States.
The second day seminar, on December 1 at 5:30 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, will consider the innovative and revolutionary figure of Deledda as our contemporary, concluding with a screening of the documentary film Grazia Deledda, La Rivoluzionaria (in Italian with English subtitles), by Cecilia Mangini and Paolo Pisanelli.
On the morning of December 1 at 11 a.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute, a unique program will be dedicated to secondary school instructors and students, featuring Alexa’s “Parole di Grazia” with audio segments revealing the life of Grazia Deledda and the settings of her novels, including taped readings of excerpts from her work. “I’ve developed these conversations with an eye on the future,” explains Valeria Orani, the New York-based curator of the seminars.
For Anthony Muroni, the Committee’s Artistic Director, “It is especially important that the city of New York, with its history of freedom, defense of civil rights, and attention to the role of women in society, should participate in this homage to an author who helped lift restrictions on women and, before anyone else, set out on the road to self-determination, as rendered in the lives of the protagonists of her novels.”
The events are organized with the support of the Consulate General of Italy in New York and the NY seminars have been programmed in collaboration with the Institutional Committee for the 150th Anniversary of Grazia Deledda, including the Province and Municipality of Nuoro, Museo MAN, UniNuoro, and the Fondazione Banco di Sardegna.
