Graham Avery
Thursday June 3, 2010
6:00 p.m
Sigeric: An Anglo-Saxon Archbishop in Tuscany
Archbishop Sigeric passed through Tuscany on his way from Rome to Canterbury in the year 990. His itinerary, recorded in a MS in the British Library, is the earliest account of the Via Francigena, the medieval route to Rome from Northern Europe. Following its designation as a European Cultural Route, many guide-books and local way-marks refer to Sigeric - in fact, he is better known in Italy than in his native land. Graham Avery, Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute, explains why Sigeric went to Rome, which places he passed in Tuscany, and the historical significance of the Via Francigena.
Alexandra Richardson
Wednesday June 9, 2010
6:00 p.m
Alexander Hardcastle and the Greek Temples of Agrigento
For every ten people who know about Austin Layard, Arthur Evans and Howard Carter, perhaps only one has heard of Alexander Hardcastle (1872-1933). Yet as Alexandra Richardson shows in her recent biography Passionate Patron, Hardcastle holds a high place among these rich, self-taught and passionately dedicated amateurs, whose money and enterprise opened up a golden age of archaeology. She tells the moving story of a life traumatised by war service in South Africa, precariously rebuilt among the almond groves and ruined temples of Agrigento, then cruelly torn apart by the stock market crash of 1929.
Jeremy Lane
Wednesday June 16, 2010
8:00 p.m
Waking the Dead: The Hades Episode in Joyce’s Ulysses
For Bloomsday this year we concentrate on the sixth chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, generally known by its Homeric title ‘Hades', which we will read in its entirety during the afternoon. In this talk Jeremy Lane considers the importance of death in Joyce's fiction, and relates the episode to Ulysses more widely, providing an entry to a broader attempt at understanding this ‘novel to end all novels'. Jeremy Lane is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex.
Danile Weissbein
Wednesday June 23, 2010
6:00 p.m
Literary Anglomania or Anglophilia? The Case of J.L. Borges
By an irony of fate, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is less well known in Britain than elsewhere. Yet not only was he brought up by an English grandmother and an English-speaking father, but he read deeply and omnivorously in the field of English literature and philosophy, and lived all his life in a mental universe that was largely that of a late-Victorian savant. This talk explores this aspect of Borges's oeuvre, which though widely acknowledged has never been given its due.
Michael John Angel
Wednesday June 30, 2010
6:00 p.m
Pietro Annigoni: English Portraits and Tuscan Frescoes
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988), the portraitist and fresco painter who was catapulted to world fame after painting Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. Michael John Angel, who knew Annigoni well, is a figurative painter who since 1997 has run the Angel Academy of Art in Via Fiesolana, Florence. This illustrated talk focuses on Annigoni's English portraits, while not overlooking the frescoes painted here in Tuscany.
The British Institute in Florence
Library and Cultural Centre
Lungarno Guicciardini 9
Tel.05526778270
www.britishinstitute.it
