150 years of Italian unity

The Italian Cultural Institute of Paris continues its cycle "Happy Birthday Italy: Culture and Identity since 1861" with the support of Enel France, among others. September will see a series of discovery events on the process of Italian unification from a contemporary perspective.

Throughout 2011, the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, with the collaboration of Dante Alighieri Company - Committee of Paris, is presenting the cycle "Happy birthday Italy: Culture and Identity since 1861," which is seeking to revisit Italian national history in the light of present events. A series of multidisciplinary events including film, art, history, music, photography and literature, is being organized, in part with the support of Enel France.

Music and Cinema

The Autumn season at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris was inaugurated on September 13 with "The melodies of Unity" which brought together three of the most representative figures of the Italian jazz scene: Andrea Pozza on piano, Riccardo Del Fra on bass and Andrea Marcelli on drums. The musicians offered new interpretations of the melodies of the great composers of contemporary Italian musical history and a selection of their original compositions. The ICI is also continuing its cycle "On wings of gold. Opera and the construction of Italian Unity," which was a great success with the public at other meetings on Italian melodrama. In this context, on October 6 the ICI will present a double homage: "Liszt in Italy. A piano recital by Giovanni Bellucci." This will be an evening of celebration of both the 150th anniversary of Italian Unity and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt. The links between Italy and the Hungarian composer are many: in both his life and his musical output he borrowed extensively from Italian history, from Dante to Verdi.

The Risorgimento

"Lessons of Unity" inaugurated by Paul Ginsborg on June 1, will continue from September to December. Following on from the previous symposium on Cavour, the cycle organized at the Paris ICI by Gilles Pécout, professor at the ENS and Director of Studies at EPHE, will welcome Italian, French and European historians to study the great individuals and groups who marked the Risorgimento and shaped the national and international memory of the Italians, from Unification to the present. This lecture series is organized in collaboration with the Department of History of the ENS and the chair of Italian and Mediterranean History at the EPHE. Among upcoming events, as part of "Happy Birthday Italy: Culture and identity since 1861," the retrospective "The Risorgimento at the movies," will be inaugurated in November.