Franco Baldasso
Democracy and Defeat: Literary Dissent during the Transition to Post-Fascism in Italy

The transition from the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943 to the establishment of a new political order in 1948 is still today a most controversial period in Italian culture and history. This talk sheds light on the range and fluidity of opinion in years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions by focusing on nonaligned intellectuals, such as Carlo Levi and Curzio Malaparte. From opposite political standpoints, Levi and Malaparte stressed the continuity between the new democracy and the previous regime and denounced the lack of the alleged moral regeneration of Italy.

Baldasso is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and assistant professor of Italian and director of the Italian studies program in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Dylan Francareta
Guida Sicuro
Più Attenzione
Meno Incidenti

Dylan Fracareta is interested in how conditions and constraints can be leveraged to generate content, foster exhaustion, and promote adaptive, responsive, meaningful, and inventive outcomes. The act of walking serves as a vehicle for discovery or recovery, while recording, collecting, and manipulating (i.e., inherent features of an iPhone camera) encourage more attention. Elements of chance eliminate decisions and anxieties, enabling the protagonist to be free to see, embrace, and make meaning from daily observations.

Francareta is the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize Fellow in Design and design director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The event will be held in English. Watch Baldasso’s shoptalk live at https://livestream.com/aarome.