Dante, a Webinar by author Alessandro Barbero
February 25, 2021 at 12:30 PM (Central Time)
Presented by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco with the Italian Cultural Institutes of Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Toronto and Washington DC, on the occasion the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s passing.
On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, in collaboration with the IICs of North America, under the patronage of the Embassy of Italy in Washington D.C., celebrates the master through several online initiatives.
In his groundbreaking book, Dante, Alessandro Barbero examines the life, times and world of the medieval creator of the masterpiece The Divine Comedy. Barbero follows Dante through his adolescence as the son of a usurer who dreams of belonging to the world of nobles and men of letters; through the dark corridors of politics, where his ideals are shattered in the face of the petty rivalries and rampant corruption; and through his wandering in exile, where he discovers the incredible diversity of fourteenth-century Italy—
from its commercial metropolises to the insular world of its smaller courts. But the book also looks at the sorrows and silences that make it difficult to reconstruct entire periods of Dante’s life, and presents a variety of different hypotheses, allowing readers to form their own ideas, in the way a detective story might invite them to unravel the thread of events and come to a conclusion on their own.
The webinar is moderated by Prof. Michael Subialka (UC Davis). This event is in English.
Born in Turin in 1959, Alessandro Barbero is professor of Medieval History at the Università del Piemonte Orientale. His historical novel Bella vita e guerre altrui di Mr. Pyle, gentiluomo (Milan, Mondadori, 1995) (Beautiful Life and Foreign Wars of Mr. Pyle, Gentleman) was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize (1996), and translated into seven languages. For many years he has contributed to the newspaper La Stampa and the television program Superquark. Since 2013, Barbero has appeared in the Rai Storia programs a.C.d.C. and Passato e presente.
Michael Subialka teaches Comparative Literature and Italian at UC Davis, where he researches modernism with special focus on the intersection of literature and philosophy. He has also published on Renaissance and early modern Italian literature and thought.
Register at https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OnoQ8hugRUishTMPKzHGZA