Archivi Events | Page 2 of 21 | British Italian society

Following the succes of the exhibtion at Palazzo Pitti (Florence) in 2023/2024, heading to NY in 2025.

The Ghetto of Florence has been for more than two centuries the architectural-material baricentre of Florentine Jewry, being established by Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1570-71, and being then demolished at the end of the 19th century as part of a major urban renewal plan known as “Risanamento” (lit. “the healing”) aiming to change the physiognomy of the old town and turn it into a modern and fully “Italianised” city. The making of the ghetto in Florence represented a major diversion from the “old” Medici’s tolerant standing on the Jewish minority, the implementation of canon laws aiming to mark a physical, material border between the two communities. While officially conceived to marginalise the Jews, the ghetto in fact served as a geographical barycentre, segregating but also protecting its inhabitants, offering them a “physical/material” dimension and point of reference that in the pre-ghetto time the Jews of Tuscany, like those of Italy and of the Diaspora on the whole, had been aprioristically and sistematically denied.

Piergabriele Mancuso received his doctoral degree in Jewish Studies from University College London, 2009. He also studied in Oxford (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies) as a Phd student fellow (2004) and at the Warburg Institute, London (Sophie Fellowship Programme, 2006). He has been Senior Lecturer on History of Music and Venetian History at Boston University Study Abroad and was visiting lecturer at University of Kentucky (College of Fine Arts), “Cà Foscari” University, Venice (Department of Oriental Languages), at Università dell’Insubria in Como, and University of Padua. In 2001 he graduated in music (viola) and for many years he has been a professional contemporary music performer. His research interests include Jewish music and ethnomusicology, Venetian history (that he taught for almost 20 years to American students!) and history of the Jews in Medici Florence. In June 2013 he was appointed director of the Eugene Grant Jewish History Program at the Medici Archive Project. In 2018 he launched the Ghetto Mapping Project, a major research program aiming to reconstruct, on the basis of archival documents, the architectural, demographic and nonetheless artistic-cultural features of the ghetto of Florence. His book on the making of the Florentine ghetto – Before the Ghetto – Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Grand Duchy and the Jews – 1569-1570, will soon be published by Brepols.

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: Telemaco Signori, a Florentine painter (1835-1910) showing a portion of the ghetto a few years before its demolition. The work is now at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

SOLD OUT!

Whereas most studies of the maritime history of Venice are devoted to commerce, crusades and naval conflict, in this talk Professor Deborah Howard addresses the visceral impact of the sea on the Venetian consciousness. The waters of the Adriatic flow through the canals of Venice like blood circulating around a body, just as the daily rhythm of the tides choreographs each day. The lecture will show how mosaicists, painters, engravers, musicians and stage designers alike drew inspiration from the maritime environment throughout the duration of the Venetian Republic.

Deborah Howard is Professor Emerita of Architectural History in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art, a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and Trustee of Venice in Peril Fund. More recently she was elected a Foreign Fellow of the Istituto Veneto in 2024. Her principal research interests are the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto; the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, and music and architecture in the Renaissance. In addition to her posts in leading universities throughout the world, she has published widely in academic journals and is author of numerous books including The Architectural History of Venice, Yale University Press 2002; Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (with Laura Moretti), Yale University Press 2009 and The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (with Abigail Brundin and Mary Laven), Oxford University Press, 2018. In 2023 she was awarded the European Heritage Awards/Europa Nostra Awards for her study into the architectural heritage of industrial development of the Veneto, Italy, in the 16th-century.

A joint event with

the Venice in Peril Fund

A drinks reception will follow the talk.

***

Important Information

Doors open at 6.30 pm
No physical ticket will be issued; your name will be added to our Event Guest List.
If you pay via bank transfer you will not receive a confirmation. Please keep your payment record for reference.
Online bookings close one day before the event. For same-day bookings on the please contact us to check availability.

‘Con un non so che del frizzante’ (‘with a little something sparkling’) is how the poet Giulio Strozzi (1574) described the essence of the madrigal: a short poem, flexible in rhyme and rhythm, ideal for brief, touching scenes of love and longing. In its musical form, it came to take on an extraordinary life of its own, and in The Madrigal Reimagined we present a striking range of settings, from solo voice and lute to a full string band, showcasing every facet of the madrigal’s transformative journey from gentle part song to one of the cornerstones of opera.

Works by Monteverdi, De Rore, Palestrina, Caccini, and others are embellished with remarkable vocal and instrumental ornamentation, and – in this special live presentation to celebrate the CD release – framed by pithy, contemporary readings featuring writers from the Classics to Monteverdi’s contemporaries

Performed by MONTEVERDI STRING BAND with guest artists Hannah Ely (soprano) and Toby Carr (lute, theorbo). Directed by Oliver Webber.

– We do not issue physical tickets. Your name will be added to our Event Guest List.

– Online bookings close the day before the event. If you need to make a booking on the same day, please contact us to check availability.

Members and friends are invited to join us at our annual Christmas dinner, this year hosted at Brasseria Notting Hill. Please note, members priority booking is now ended. Everyone is welcome to join! Do not miss the opportunity to mingle with our members, embrace the festive cheer, and get to know the heart of our Society.

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

The price of £80 pp includes:
A welcome drink, three-course dinner, half bottle of wine pp, water, coffee or tea.

MENU
We have menu options you can choose from. The menu will be sent to registered attendees by email in due course.

We are not making a formal charge for participation in this event. Traditionally we offer attendance at the Leconfield Lecture free of charge to those members who have paid their subscription for the current year. We strongly encourage all others attending to make a minimum donation of at least £15 per participant. If any members would also like to make a donation to help offset our costs, that would be much appreciated.

From the ashes of the war and the first experiments in neorealism, Italian cinema rose to become one of the most important and influential in the world. With directors like Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni and many others it became a byword for art and innovation. This lecture will examine two people who played a vital role in this success; the producer Dino De Laurentiis (1919-2020) and the prolific screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico (1914-2010) Each thought more of the industry than art and worked not only with artistic directors but with the makers of the comedies and genre films that were the bread and butter of Italian film production. Their ways of operating could hardly have been more different: flamboyant and visionary in the case of De Laurentiis, discreet and modest in the case of Cecchi D’Amico. It will be suggested that these modes corresponded to the pattern of gendered labour in the industry, in which female contributions – no matter how important – tended to be invisible. While producers historically received far less credit than directors, the achievements of De Laurentiis are today more widely acknowledged. Yet it is hard to overestimate the role of Cecchi D’Amico in impressing the marks of quality and humanity on Italian cinema that were essential to its worldwide successes in the postwar decades.

Stephen Gundle is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Warwick University. He held academic positions at Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford and London before moving to Warwick in 2008. His research interests lie in the fields of film and cultural and political history, with a special emphasis on Italian cinema and other media and he is author of books including Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy (2007) and Glamour: A History (2008), Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy (2013) and Fame amid the Ruins: Italian Film Stardom in the Age of Neorealism (2019). Several of his books have also been published in Italian. In recent years, he has directed two major research projects on producers and production practices in the Italian film industry.

Photo credit: Camera, Cinecittà Studio, by Sonse at https://flickr.com/photos/34585612@N00/46760148102

who we are

useful links

contacts

+44 (0) 2039741035