Event Details
Tue, November 28, 2017
18:00 – 19:00
VILLA LA PIETRA
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese 120
50139 Firenze, Italia
A lecture by Beatrice Sica, University College London.
This talk deals with images of cavalrymen and knights in twentieth-century Italian culture from the pre-WWI to the post-WWII period, looking at how men on horseback (or off the saddle!) were depicted in literature, arts, popular artefacts and publications, animations, and films. Images here are regarded as a language, and the talk aims to show “the semantic, syntactic, communicative power of images to encode messages, tell stories, express ideas and emotions, raise questions and ‘speak’ to us” (W.J.T. Mitchell). Following practices of rewriting across different media, the talk also discusses the politicization of these images of cavalrymen and knights from Futurism to the commedia all’italiana.
Featured Biographies
Beatrice Sica
READER, ITALIAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Reader in Italian Studies at University College London and also EURIAS fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna for the current academic year. She was the recipient of other fellowships and grants, including the Fondazione Sapegno fellowship at the Collège de France in Paris (2010-2011), and the Lauro de Bosis visiting fellowship at Harvard University (2011-2012). She is the author of Poesia surrealista italiana (2007) and L’Italia magica di Gianfranco Contini: storia e interpretazione (2013), as well as other essays on Futurism, Surrealism, and magical realism; literature, ideology, and the arts during Fascism; and Franco-Italian cultural exchanges in the interwar period. Her research focuses on Italian culture in a European context and she is currently working on a book on images of cavalrymen and knights in twentieth-century Italy.