XV INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

PICTURES AND LANDSCAPES of TUSCANY IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

FRIDAY 24 – SATURDAY 25 – SUNDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2021

Biblioteca Comunale “A. Betti” (Former Anglican Church)
Viale E. Whipple 55022 BAGNI DI LUCCA – VILLA (LU)

The “Michel de Montaigne” Foundation and a group of academics from the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics of Pisa University are delighted to announce that an International Conference will be held in September 2021. The event, the fifteenth of this kind hosted by the Foundation since 2008, will be organised in collaboration with the Istituto Storico Lucchese and the Bagni di Lucca Municipality.
In our age, characterised as it is by ongoing, amazing and even disquieting changes all over the world, creating a space for reflection on the protagonists, social agents and pivotal points of the cultural dialogue and identity issues which underlie European tradition can help us to focus on the distinguishing features and evolutions of a deep-rooted heritage. By replacing the idea of a sheerly economic, self-interested globalisation with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’ and its transmission or ‘constructive’ circulation – in an embodied or objectified state –, we aim at bringing back to light a rich network of intellectual and artistic exchanges in a national as well as international perspective.
Our conference project looks to contributions dealing with how places, contexts and landscapes have been memorably described across the centuries in literary works and the visual or audiovisual arts, such as paintings, prints and illustrations, sculpture and landscape architecture, photography, filmmaking and media technologies, digital and video art. More specifically, our interest will be focused on a corpus of images, textual traces and examples of historical and artistic testimony relating to Tuscany’s natural and human landscapes. Tuscan landscapes have been famously evoked, reproduced and re-invented from disparate points of view (mimetic/fictional, synchronic/diachronic, philological/fancifully hybridised) by Italian and European writers, intellectuals and artists, who have thus left a lasting mark throughout history and on our collective imaginary. Therefore, attention shall be paid to the aspects and elements of sceneries infused with semantic and communicative power (both within and beyond our national borders), mythopoeic overtones (the genius loci, folklore and legends, iconography, symbolic meanings) and references to cultural subtexts (the habitus and social arena, value systems and the epistemic order, status indexes).

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◊ SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Marcello Cherubini, Roberta Ferrari, Laura Giovannelli
◊ ORGANISING COMMITTEE: Marcello Cherubini, Angela Amadei, and other staff members of the Montaigne Foundation
◊ IN COLLABORATION WITH: Comune di Bagni di Lucca, Istituto Storico Lucchese (Sede Centrale)
◊ SPONSORED BY: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca

All information queries, must be sent to:
– Marcello Cherubini, Chairman of the “Michel de Montaigne” Foundation, marcello.cherubini40@gmail.com (mobile phone: 335 5821080)
– Roberta Ferrari, roberta.ferrari@unipi.it
– Laura Giovannelli, laura.giovannelli@unipi.it