SPEAKERS:
Laura Di Nicola: Parlare alle Americhe
During his travels to the Americas, Calvino held important conferences, always demonstrating a deep knowledge of the audience he was addressing. Those were occasions, which, to some extent, forced him to “wrap up”, to look at Italian culture from afar and at the same time to observe the Americas up close, but also to question himself as an Italian or, better, European writer.
Laura Di Nicola is associate professor of contemporary Italian literature at Sapienza University in Rome.
Martin McLaughlin (ZOOM): Calvino’s Essays on Anglophone American writers
This centenary event is entitled Italo Calvino (1923-2023) and the Americas. This is of course a huge topic, given how significant both North and South America were for Calvino. So I will limit myself to one area of his output that is relatively understudied, namely: ‘Calvino’s Essays on Anglophone American writers’.
Martin McLaughlin was Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford from 2001 to 2017, and is now an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Giulio Ciancamerla (ZOOM): America, God’s country: Italo Calvino’s film reportage
Starting from 1959, Italo Calvino’s relationship with the United States was enriched with unexpected implications: the intense youthful passion for Hollywood films and the attention towards Americanism mixed with an “immediate emotional reaction” to American society and its big cities. New York in particular “had a grip” on him, to the point of having him questioning his intolerance for travel literature.
Giulio Ciancamerla has a PhD in historical, literary and gender studies at Sapienza University.
Valerio Cappozzo: Calvino visible but invisible: the relationship with the American press and publishing
If a seventh category could be added to the six of the American Lessons, it would be that of invisibility which best defines Calvino’s attitude towards American publishing and the press. In North America he looked for new writers to translate for Einaudi but did not maintain particular epistolary exchanges with intellectuals, publishers or journalists as, for example, did Sciascia, Bassani, Pivano and Soldati.
Valerio Cappozzo is Associate Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi.
