Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

04/23/2024

On April 19th, 2024, our Ph.D. Candidate Juliette Bellacosa defended her dissertation titled “Through the Eyes of the Beholder: Peter Greenaway’s Resurrection of the Italian Renaissance.” Congratulations, Doctor Bellacosa!

04/23/2024

On February 2, 2024, our Ph.D. Candidate Giulio Genovese defended his dissertation titled "A militant Dante: sociopolitical uses of the Sommo Poeta in post-1968 Italy." Congratulations, Doctor Genovese!

01/10/2024

01/07/2024

Spring Semester 2024!

10/19/2023

MAKA: Screening and Discussion on Thursday, October 26 at 4:00pm!

08/16/2023

https://youtu.be/9pUkEG4SRtI
Last spring, Italian Studies Penn Arts & Sciences, through the linguistic assistance of second-year Ph.D. student Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, participated in producing "Orpheus Uncovered." This staged performance presented the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as narrated in music by composers who wrote operas based on this myth: Claudio Monteverdi, Stefano Landi, Luigi Rossi, Antonio Sartorio, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. The Baroque pasticcio was fully staged and sung in Italian on March 29, 2023 at the Penn Museum on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Singers were undergraduate and graduate students majoring in Linguistics, Philosophy, Biochemistry, Neuroscience, etc. The production and video illustrate Penn's mission of integrating academic study and artistic practice, providing students with a unique opportunity to combine scholarship and music performance for a deeper understanding of and immersion in the opera art form.

Penn Music/Italian courses:
Baroque Opera from Monteverdi to Gluck, taught by Mauro Calcagno
Opera and Music Theater Workshop, taught by Meg Bragle
Video by Matte Hewitt

Download program at https://bit.ly/47ulRXv

Support for "Orpheus Uncovered" was provided by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation through an Arts Course Development Grant.

"Orpheus Uncovered" presents the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as narrated in music by composers who wrote operas based on this myth: Claudio Monteverdi, Ste...

08/01/2023

Announcing the 2023-24 Season of the Music in the Pavilion Series at the University of Pennsylvania, which Music and Italian Studies Prof. Mauro Calcagno co-curates with Music colleague Mary Channen Caldwell together with Penn librarians (sign up for the mailing list here to stay up to date! https://tinyurl.com/bdj658hu ). One concert this season (Friday 3/22/24 at 7pm) is devoted to late Renaissance Italian madrigals featuring the extraordinary vocal group Blue Heron from Boston! Sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies, the performance will be complemented during the day by events related to the repertoire (stay tuned for further announcements).

The concerts take place in the beautiful sixth-floor Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion in Van Pelt Library. They showcase an array of professional and international musicians, not only performing gems from standard concert repertoires but also premiering works found in the wealth of materials—print and manuscript—held in the Kislak Center's collections, which will be concurrently exhibited in the adjacent Henry Charles Lea Library.

Here's the line-up:

*Fantasia (Josquin, Schubert, Price, et al.)*
September 14, 2023 (Thursday) — 7:00 pm
With Min-Young Kim, violin, Mandy Wolman, violin, Matthew Bengtson, piano

*Music and Friendship in 18th-Century Philadelphia*
November 23, 2023 (Thursday) — 7:00 pm
With The Raritan Players directed by Rebecca Cypess

*In the Salon of Pauline Viardot*
February 16, 2024 (Friday) — 7:00 pm
Night Music Ensemble with mezzo soprano Meg Bragle

*An Evening of Italian Madrigals*
March 22, 2024 (Friday) — 7:00 pm
Blue Heron vocal ensemble, directed by Scott Metcalfe

Each concert includes a scholarly talk at 6:15 pm alongside a display of archival material from the Kislak Center, followed by the concert (no intermission) at 7:00 pm.

The events are always free and open to the public!

Sign Up Here!

05/23/2023

Congratulations to Prof. Rossella Di Rosa and Prof. Julia Heim on receiving the 2023 Sachs Program for Arts Innovation award!

05/17/2023

The spring semester might be over, but it is time to celebrate our students!

Please join us in congratulating our graduate students who were honored with awards and fellowships this past academic year.

Congratulazioni! 🏆☀️💐

05/16/2023

It is with great sadness that we share the death of our dear friend Robert Cargni, former Associate Director of Arts of International House Philadelphia. We will miss him tremendously. Our condolences to his family and friends.

05/08/2023

We present you today a new Fall 2023 Graduate class, also open for Undergraduate students.

ITAL 5550: Writing on the Walls: Art and Poetry in the Streets of Early Modern Florence (instructor: Cosette Bruhns Alonso)

This course examines the literary and social resonances of mural arts in medieval and Early Modern Italy. We will investigate emerging artistic conventions alongside textual moments that employ ekphrastic descriptions of mural art as a point of departure for larger commentaries on the role of gender, social hierarchies, the labor of the author and the artist, and civic justice. How did mural arts in medieval and early modern Italy shape viewers’ understanding of justice, society, and city life and their role within it? How did Italian authors appropriate artistic conventions, through text, in order to intervene in public discourse on sociopolitical concerns? Through a comparison of images and texts, we will explore the ways in which Italian writers and artists visualized justice, critiqued dominant social hierarchies, and renegotiated gendered spaces in their literary and artistic works. Alongside viewing works of art, course readings will explore literary representations of mural arts, both fictional and real, described ekphrastically in the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Machiavelli, among others. Select readings from the work of Marguerite de Navarre, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Classical antecedents will shed light on cross cultural dialogue on the representation of civic life, gender, and justice in the Early Modern period. Primary source readings will be accompanied by selections from contemporary and critical theory on art history, gender, race, and politics. Finally, we will examine contemporary street art and graffiti in Florence to consider the legacy of these early modern tensions in Florentine culture today.

This course is designed to meet the requirements for the Price Lab for Digital Humanities' DH Credentials for Graduate Students Certificate and the Digital Humanities Undergraduate Minor. **Technical instruction and assistance will be provided at all stages of creating the digital publication. Students are not required to have digital humanities experience prior to enrolling.**