iItaly.org

Venetians are increasingly abandoning their hometown.

With only one resident for every 140 visitors, Venice’s fragile fate has become emblematic of the future of historic cities everywhere as it capitulates to tourism. Archaeologist and art historian Salvatore Settis describes how “hit-and-run” visitors are turning landmark urban settings into shopping malls and theme parks, and how mass tourism and global cultural homogenization is destroying what was once a great city.

Brief Bio

If Venice Dies
(2016, New Vessel Press)

by Salvatore Settis
English translation by André Naffis-Sahely

Settimana della lingua italiana nel mondo. XVI edizione.

On the occasion of the fifth centenary of the first edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso The Italian Cultural Institute presents a round table on Language and Translation of Orlando Furioso in collaboration with City University of New York, NYU and Columbia University.

Speakers:
Daniela D’Eugenio (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Ariosto 1516-1532 and Harington 1591: “Translation” of Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases in the ‘Orlando furioso’

The Italian nation-state has been defined in part by practices of mobility. Tourists have flowed into the country from the Grand Tour era to the present, and Italians left in massive numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the largest voluntary emigration in recorded world history. Italy has more recently been a destination for immigrants whose tragic stories of shipwreck and confinement are often in the news.

Curated by Renato Miracco

Massimiliano Gatti presents a stunning record of work: recent images from Syria (Palmyra, Apamea, Resafa) and Iraq (Khorsabad, and the Jerwan site, both near Mosul). The exhibition – which includes photographs of structures before their deliberate destruction; sites looted for profit; and fragile ruins that remain intact – is not a work of journalism, but rather a poetic investigation of objects and structures as metaphor. 

The relationship between graphic design and publishing spans throughout the twentieth century, presenting several artists who have imprinted many editorial series and entire publishing houses with their individual graphic trait. Suffice to mention Ferenc Pinter and John Alcorn.

During the last decade this tradition was revitalized by the breakthrough impressed by Guanda who wanted to standardize their entire graphic content with the work of Guido Scarabottolo, followed by the interesting experiments by Matticchio, Toccafondo, Bologna, Shout, Zagnoli, and many others.