Melanie Hughes’ book War Changes Everything, based on a family archive, is the true story of two remarkable women.
Through their eyes we see the vibrant, often polarised Italian community in London in those turbulent times and its varied and profound impact on the world of ideas and political thought. The two bitterly opposed groups – Fascists, on the one hand, and diverse left-wing factions on the other – were very active in those years, holding meetings and rallies, publishing articles, newspapers and books, raising awareness of the struggle at home and abroad. Some even plotted assassination attempts.
As the 1930s drew to a close, the prospect of war became a terrible reality and the peace-loving majority were caught between two conflicting ideologies, two countries and their cultures. They found their status altered from valued members of society to “enemy aliens” – suddenly they were pariahs in the place where they had lived and worked for generations; they were attacked and vilified by those they had once called friends.
By contrasting the history with the particular – national events with personal recollection – Nadia and Melanie paint a vivid picture of these tumultuous years and those who lived through them.
Melanie Hughes was educated at the Lycee International de Londres, and trained at the Central School of Speech & Drama. She went on to act in theatre, television and films. She began writing for Ken Russell in the TV series Lady Chatterley and worked on further projects for him, the BBC, London Films and Union Pictures. Her first book was Mrs Fisher’s Tulip. Her most recent books are War Changes Everything and its sequel Midnight Legacy.
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Nadia Ostacchini was born in London of Italian parentage and graduated from University College London with a BA (Hons) degree in Italian before training at The Academy Drama School. She has worked as a professional actress, voiceover artist and corporate presenter.
Nadia’s stage work has included several major national and international tours and she has featured in various corporate videos and commercials. Nadia was the Narrator in Moving Dreams, an intergenerational heritage multimedia theatre project funded by Arts Council England in association with the ICA – The Fleet (Italian Community Association of Peterborough UK).
Nadia is the Artistic Director and Producer of Tricolore Theatre Company. Un Bambino di Nome Porro, a bilingual English/Italian play for children premiered at The Pleasance Theatre in November 2019. Her forthcoming show will be about Joseph Grimaldi (1778 – 1837), the most popular English entertainer of the Regency era who transformed the role of clown into a star of pantomime.
www.tricolore.org.uk / nadia@tricolore.org.uk
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Melanie Hughes Nadia Ostacchini
Raffaele Reinerio is a Client Management Executive who has been working for more than 20 years at Armando Testa Group. He started in the London office, spent two years in Bologna, where he became the link between Max Information, an agency part of the Group, and the mother company, before moving in 2015 to Los Angeles, where he participated in the opening and setting up of the American office. In his professional career he’s been very lucky to work with great clients such as Lavazza, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Lines, P&G, Angelini Pharma, Poltronesofà, Baci Perugina, Montenegro, De Longhi and Riva.
If you wish to attend this event, please register by clicking the “book now” button. You will be redirected to our Zoom registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
PLEASE NOTE: we are not making any formal charge for participation in this event. But we strongly encourage all those attending to consider making a donation (we suggest a minimum donation of £5 per event) to enable us to maintain our programme of events and to support our other cultural initiatives.
In photo: Michele Mariani
We will look at Dante Alighieri’s portrayal of divine light (optical and spiritual) and the legacy of his Paradiso. This involves the direct impact of his extraordinary vision, and also the general diffusion of his literary portrayal of the extra-terrestrial realm of spiritual light. We will see Dante and the painters mutually striving to meet one of the greatest of all visual challenges. That challenge was how to describe extremities of divine light that were beyond the scope of our earth-bound sense of sight. The artists include Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and the Baroque painters of luminous domes and vaults.
Martin Kemp is an Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford University. He was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute, London. His 30+ books include: The Science of Art, Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale), and The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago). He has published and broadcast extensively on Leonardo da Vinci, including the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci, The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man and Leonardo (both Oxford). His Christ to Coke, How Image Becomes Icon (Oxford) looks at 11 representatives of types of icons across a wide range of public imagery. He wrote regularly for Nature, the essays for which have been published as Visualizations and developed in Seen and Unseen (both Oxford) in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. Recent books include: Art in History (Profile Books), Mona Lisa with Giuseppe Pallanti (Oxford), Living with Leonardo (Thames and Hudson). In 2019 he published five books on Leonardo including a co-authored book on Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and an edition of the Codex Leicester with Domenico Laurenza. He has been a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. He has curated and co-curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and other themes, at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Barbican Art Gallery London.
He now devotes its time to speaking, writing and broadcasting.
If you wish to buy the book “Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light Painting”, please click HERE
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PLEASE NOTE: we are not making any charge for the participation in this event. But we are always grateful for donations, however small, to enable us to maintain our programme of events and to support other cultural initiatives. If you would like to offer a donation, please use the related button on the right or arrange a bank transfer to:
The British Italian Society
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Professor Martin Kemp
Credits: Marie Boyle
Dr Anna Beer will be exploring the lives and works of a handful of ground-breaking female composers, arguing that the most important factor to their success in their own time (however circumscribed that success might have been) was the exceptional community in which each woman worked. Exploring these vanished creative communities, most notably in Florence and Venice, she will be asking some tough questions about the place of women in our current arts world, about community, and about Italy and its cultural identity today.
Anna Beer, a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford is an author and educator with a distinguished record of both popular and scholarly publication in the fields of history, literature and the arts. Her 2016 celebration and exploration of the achievements of female composers through the centuries ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music’ – which brought together her twin passions for music and women’s history – has been making waves in the arts world since its publication. She continues to work with musicians and programmers to bring this neglected repertoire to musical life.
If you wish to attend this event, please register by clicking the “book now” button. You will be redirected to our Zoom registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
PLEASE NOTE: we are not making any charge for the participation in this event. But we are always grateful for donations, however small, to enable us to maintain our programme of events and to support other cultural initiatives. If you would like to offer a donation, please use the related button on the right or arrange a bank transfer to:
The British Italian Society
Sort code: 20-36-88
Account No: 30197866
Please quote: donation
Ravenna has eight World Heritage sites—churches, baptisteries, chapels and monuments dating from the fifth and sixth centuries AD which are renowned especially for exquisite mosaics portraying biblical scenes and figures. They were designed, constructed and decorated over decades during the era of the fall of the western Roman empire, against a tide of invasion, regime change, conflict and a destructive Italian civil war. How did Ravenna achieve such architectural and artistic glory in this era? Michael Starks, in his book Understanding Ravenna, recounts the city’s unique experience as the capital both of the late western Roman empire and of its successor Gothic kingdoms and brings out the important cultural contribution of the kingdom of Italy headed by Theodoric the Ostrogoth and the strong links between Ravenna and the emerging Byzantine empire of the eastern emperor Justinian.
Michael Starks is a published writer and a keen traveller. A history graduate from Cambridge and a former television producer, he is the author of A Traveller’s History of the Hundred Years War in France (Cassell, 2002). Starks has taken a special interest in the ancient history of France and the countries around the Mediterranean, travelling to Greece, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, and Iran. After a career at the BBC in London, he moved to Oxford to become an associate of the university and a member of Lady Margaret Hall
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Since it was founded in 1941, the British-Italian Society has worked to promote knowledge and understanding in the UK of Italian culture, including Italy’s history, institutions, way of life, language and wider contribution to civilisation.
The British-Italian Society
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