Members and friends are invited to join us at our traditional Christmas dinner, this year hosted at Demartino Restaurant. Everyone is welcome to join!

DETAILS OF THE EVENING:
7 pm welcome drink
7.45 pm three -course dinner
10 pm carriages

The price of £70 pp includes:
A welcome drink, three-course dinner, half bottle of wine pp, water, coffee or tea.

MENU
We have four menu options you can choose from. The menu will be sent to attendees by email in due course.
Should you have any special dietary requirements, please let us know promptly.

BOOKINGS CLOSE ON 20 November

The pandemic made possible what was unthinkable. Two Italian Governments, Conte II and Draghi, succeeded each other in writing and implementing the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, an extraordinary program of investments and reforms. The Draghi Government included in it a number of fundamental reforms (PA, justice, competition) as binding objectives of the Plan, which therefore represents a structural change in the way the Italian PA functions. As such, the NRRP has the potential to revive spending on ordinary investments in a Country that historically does not know how to spend more than a small portion of development and cohesion funds.

But while the two Governments devoted themselves to long-term planning for investment and reforms, they had to manage emergency economic policies, first for the pandemic and then for the gas price crisis. And it is so that in the years between 2020 and 2022, the Italian political debate experienced a paradox: long-term investments were announced with the NRRP, but structural reforms were shelved, due to a political legacy that put them back on the shelf during Conte II and due to cross-party vetoes with the Draghi Government.

As a result, major reforms remained on the back burner. Today, however, missed reforms and the temptation of current Government spending may put the NRRP at risk. The current Government must therefore focus on the legacy of the Plan rather than questioning its assumptions. The risk is not only to lose funding, but most of all Italy’s credibility in Europe.

 

Marco Leonardi is visiting professor at LSE and full professor of Economics at the Università degli Studi of Milan. His interests are in labour and education economics. He was economic adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office in the Renzi and Gentiloni Governments; then adviser to Economy Minister Gualtieri and head of the Economic Policy Planning and Coordination Department in the Draghi Government. With Egea he published “Le riforme dimezzate” (2018) and “Partita Doppia” (2023).

 

A drinks reception will follow the talk

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DISCLAIMER: By participating in a BIS webinar or live event you automatically agree to authorise recording of audio and visual content during the event and consent to subsequent use of the recording in the public domain. This recording may include questions, comments and poll responses provided by you during the event in addition to your name, voice, image or likeness. This recording will be made available after the conclusion of the live event as part of the BIS webinar archives, and will remain available indefinitely. If you do not wish to consent to the recording, please do not join the event or contact us to discuss your concerns.

 Prof. Marco Leonardi

Fede Galizia is not a name widely known today. Despite enjoying considerable success during her lifetime, she was then neglected for centuries until her recent rediscovery, still largely in progress. She was active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Milan, at the time of the Counter-Reformation, and is an unusual figure in many respects: she did not marry, she earned her living as a painter and engaged in several different genres, including religious paintings (at the time seldom commissioned to female artists). However, Fede Galizia is mostly known today as a pioneer of the still-life genre. The purpose of the lecture would be to provide a brief overview of Galizia’s life and the cultural environment in which she operated, analyse her artworks and style, as well as investigate her posthumous fortunes, in particular the reasons which may have led to her semi-obscurity.

 

Lara Veroner studied Art Business at Christie’s (London) and then earned a Master’s Degree in Fine and Decorative Arts and Design from Sotheby’s Institute of Art (London) with a thesis on the Milanese female painter and still-life pioneer Fede Galizia. Her research interests focus mainly on Old Masters and Photography. She started collecting photography in the early 2000s, is a patron of The Photographers’ Gallery (London) and a member of the Commissioning Committee of the Hayward Gallery (London). She currently runs a family office and she previously worked as a lawyer at Barclays Bank (London) and at major US and UK law firms, being dually qualified as a lawyer in Italy and New York.

 

A drinks reception will follow the talk

***

Please note, we do not issue physical tickets. Your name will be added to our Event Guest List.

 

DISCLAIMER: By participating in a BIS webinar or live event you automatically agree to authorise recording of audio and visual content during the event and consent to subsequent use of the recording in the public domain. This recording may include questions, comments and poll responses provided by you during the event in addition to your name, voice, image or likeness. This recording will be made available after the conclusion of the live event as part of the BIS webinar archives, and will remain available indefinitely. If you do not wish to consent to the recording, please do not join the event or contact us to discuss your concerns.

Photo credit: Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT

Contact us if you wish to be included in the wating list.

 

At the end of the Middle Ages, Venice was one of the most populous cities in the Mediterranean, one of the most dynamic and one of the richest. The Rialto markets overflowed with food, the busy streets of the Mercerie were filled with precious goods, and the countless workshops scattered around the city produced day after day the objects and artefacts that fed the Venetian international trade networks. But what was the ecological cost of such wealth? How did the lagoon manage to absorb the waste produced by the tens of thousands of inhabitants who populated the city? What were the consequences in terms of pollution of the activity of the butchers and dyers, of the saturation of the canals by hundreds of boats and ships, of the constant construction and reconstruction of magnificent palaces and churches ? This lecture will explore the environmental history of the Venetian lagoon in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the history of pollution and analysing how, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the government of the Serenissima and the inhabitants took action to safeguard their environment, a history that is bound to raise questions about the issues the lagoon and the city of Venice still face today.

Claire Judde de Larivière is a professor of medieval history at the University of Toulouse. Her work focuses on the history of Venetian society at the end of the Middle Ages, in particular the common people, their political actions and forms of social organisation. Her publications include The Revolt of Snowballs: Murano confronts Venice, 1511 (2018), and she co-edited with Maartje van Gelder, Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic: Political Conflict and Social Contestation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Venice (2020). Her latest work L’ordinaire des savoirs: Une histoire pragmatique de la société vénitienne (XVe-XVIe siècle) was published in 2023. She is currently leading a research project on pollution and waste management in the Venetian lagoon and the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages.

 

This event is jointly hosted with the Venice in Peril Fund

 

A glass of prosecco will follow the talk

***

Please note, we do not issue physical tickets. Your name will be added to our Event Guest List.

DISCLAIMER: By participating in a BIS webinar or live event you automatically agree to authorise recording of audio and visual content during the event and consent to subsequent use of the recording in the public domain. This recording may include questions, comments and poll responses provided by you during the event in addition to your name, voice, image or likeness. This recording will be made available after the conclusion of the live event as part of the BIS webinar archives, and will remain available indefinitely. If you do not wish to consent to the recording, please do not join the event or contact us to discuss your concerns.

 

Bookings for this event will open at a later date.

 

The Charles de Chassiron Lecture 2024

 

Women in the Byzantine Empire are seldom addressed in relation to art, yet manuscripts, paintings, jewels, architecture and fashion are imbued with their agency. This lecture presents an art-historical survey reinstating women into the history of the late Middle Ages across the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean.

 

Dr Andrea Mattiello holds a PhD from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham, and another PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in Venice. He has published and lectured on Medieval, Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture, queer art in Antiquity, female agency in Byzantium and Greek-Italian exchanges in fifteenth-century Humanism. He has held a number of prestigious research fellowships and has lectured at Università IUAV of Venice, the University of Birmingham, Università di Salerno and Christie’s Education London. He co-edited the volume Late Byzantium Reconsidered and is currently working on a monograph on the queens at the late Palaiologan Byzantine court in Mystras.

 

A drinks reception will follow the talk

***

Please note, we do not issue physical tickets. Your name will be added to our Event Guest List.

 

DISCLAIMER: By participating in a BIS webinar or live event you automatically agree to authorise recording of audio and visual content during the event and consent to subsequent use of the recording in the public domain. This recording may include questions, comments and poll responses provided by you during the event in addition to your name, voice, image or likeness. This recording will be made available after the conclusion of the live event as part of the BIS webinar archives, and will remain available indefinitely. If you do not wish to consent to the recording, please do not join the event or contact us to discuss your concerns.