His Majesty Black Truffle

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January 22, 2024 – A very special event dedicated to Italian cuisine. A guest chef from Umbria, Junio Valerio Gallina (foto on the right) – trained at the 3 Michelin Star restaurant Niko Romito – taught us how to make the perfect risotto with Winter Black Truffle. Not a normal risotto, but the perfect one!
For this unique Charleston event we welcomed not only the chef but also a delicious load of truffles direct from Carlo Caporicci, the owner of Tenuta San Pietro a Pettine in Umbria (photo on the left).
A very special GRAZIE to Carlo Caporicci, that shipped to us as a donation of 500 grams of the species PREGIATO NERO, the most precious among the black truffles.
Carlo tells that when he was a child he learned the art of interpreting a storm, predicting how the sun or the snow will affect the truffles. 
Work with truffles means to respect the soil, and, above all, it means always being ready for the unpredictable.

 Carlo is third generation. in San Pietro a Pettine where all started in 1948.
The estate has three hundred hectares of age-old woods with protected and reserved truffle grounds and one of the property’s jewels is a Romanesque parish church from the 13th century dominating the striking valley between Assisi and Spoleto.
Another treat of the evening was the rare opportunity to sample the white and the red wines of the Fendi family Umbrian vineyards.

Understanding Piero della Francesca

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November 27, 2023 – Lecture dedicated to Piero della Francesca by Dana Prescott, BA, MA, writer, painter, and educator, who has lived and worked in Italy for most of the past 30 years, will offer a rare insight on the genius of the Early Renaissance painter and how poetry helped us understand his art. Th event will have very special readers for 6 short poems selected by Dana, including Sarah Moriarty, Executive Director of Charleston Literary Festival, and Asiah May, Poet Laureate of Charleston.
See you at Gage Hall, 4 Archdale St, Charleston, SC
Monday, November 27 at 6pm.
A reception with Italian wines and food will follow the presentation.

Now something about Dana Prescott, an incredible woman with a very interesting career. She taught painting and drawing at Temple University, Cornell University, and University of Washington in Rome, amongst other programs. She was Director of the European Honors Program of Rhode Island School of Design and served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. She was Executive Director of Civitella Ranieri for 15 years, until she retired in 2022. Civitella Ranieri is an international residency program bringing together visual artists, writers, and composers, located at a 15th-century castle in the Umbria region of Italy.
Dana Prescott’s work was included in the anthology ‘Apple, Tree’ in 2019 and her poems have been published in the Bennington Reviewand The Journal for Poetic Research, amongst others. She is the editor of the anthology, ‘Feathers from the Angel’s Wing,’ a collection of poems inspired by the paintings of Piero della Francesca.

Musica Italiana night

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August 22, 2023 – Delightful concert by Maestro Yuriy Bekker for Dante Alighieri Society. We were so lucky to listen at a string quartet formed especially for us to play Italian music from Corelli to Vivaldi, from Puccini to Morricone. Maestro Bekker is well known in Charleston as Concertmaster of the Charleston Symphony, and Conductor of the Symphony Pops Orchestra. He is also the Conductor of the College of Charleston Orchestra.
The performance has been held at the charming St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Downtown Charleston, followed by a garden reception.
Italy has been providing some of the world’s best loved music for four centuries. Here is the playlist of the evening:
Baroque:
– Corelli: Concerto grosso, op 6, no 4
– Vivaldi: Spring  from the Four Seasons
Opera:
-Puccini: O Mio Babbino Caro
-Mascagni: Intermezzo Cavaleria Rusticana
Movies:
– Bacalov: Il Postino
– Rota: Amarcord
– Morricone: Cinema Paradiso
– Morricone: Gabriel’s oboe
– Einaudi, Experience
Finale:
– O Sole Mio
– Tarantella

Seven centuries of Divine Comedy

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June 30th – Exclusive event for the DAS of Charleston in Foligno, the Italian city where, on April 11th 1472 was born the first ever printed edition of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The printing was carried out by the master printer Johann Numeister, from Mainz, and Evangelista Angelini from Trevi, with the collaboration of the Foligno minter Emiliano Orfini. The members of DAS have the extraordinary opportunity of seeing the Anastatic Copy of the Edit Princeps and 14 rare and remarkable exemplars of Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece from the 1500’s to modernity. The event at Palazzo Trinci, an architectural masterpiece of the Middle Ages in the city of Foligno, is possible thanks to the cooperation with the City of Foligno and the Biblioteca Comunale “Dante Alighieri” di Foligno.

 

 

Montefeltro versus Medici: Magnificent Monsters

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June 22, 2023 – An event that represents the 2023 DAS highlight. Our guest coming from Italy is Professor Marcello Simonetta, an extraordinary expert on Renaissance history2023 DAS highlight. The lecture is co-hosted with the prestigious Charleston Library Society.
The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy.
More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place.

Marcello Simonetta earned his laurea at Sapienza in Rome and his Ph.D. at Yale University. He has authored several books, among which his Medici trilogy, “The Montefeltro Conspiracy” (Doubleday, New York: 2007, translated in ten languages), “Volpi e Leoni. I Medici, Machiavelli e la rovina d’Italia” (Bompiani, Milan: 2014, translated in 4 languages) and “Caterina de’ Medici. Storia segreta di una faida famigliare” (Rizzoli, Milan: 2018, translated in four languages).  He is currently a Senior Scholar at The Medici Archive Project in Florence, and is also teaching at NYU and Syracuse Florence.

THURSDAY, JUNE 22 , 6PM @ Charleston Library Society 164 King St, Charleston, SC 29401

The relationship between the US and Italian fashion

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May 18, 2023 – We are excited to present The May event dedicated to Italian fashion. Guest speaker Marcella Martin, coming expressly to Charleston for our event.
Ever since the famed Sala Bianca fashion shows in 1952, Italian fashion has captured the American market and imagination. With its ease of wear and styling, the work of designers like Emilio Pucci and the Fontana sisters set Italy apart from the haute couture that still characterized French design in those early years. In the 1970s, with the beginning of the Made in Italy phenomenon, Italian fashion became both an economic success and a source of reflection. In Italy and the United States, exhibitions of Italian fashion highlighted the ingenuity of the designer, especially those like Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, who had cultivated an international presence. This presentation will look at the phenomenon of Italian fashion in the US, from its successful retail showing to its inclusion in American art museums. It will also consider the impact of the success of Italian fashion on Italian Americans in the 1980s, and the mutual benefit that the celebration of Italian designers afforded.

Marcella Martin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Italian Studies at New York University. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Culture: Costume Studies also from New York University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies she was a Lecturer in the history of fashion and Curator of the Textile and Costume Collection at Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is currently working on her dissertation project  titled: “Fondazione Fashion: Contemporary Art, Brand Museums, and the Pursuit of Modern Italy” in which she uses four exhibitions of Italian art and fashion to trace the prehistory of brand museums and their unique relationship to contemporary art in Italy. This spring she curated the exhibition “Made in Italy, Sold in America: Fashion in Attenzione Magazine, 1979-1987”, which is currently on view at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo at New York University and she is also a Fellow at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York.

Please e-mail to info@dantecharleston.org for detail.

The history of an old enemy

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April 19, 2023 – After events about Music, Literature, Cinema, Art, Language, it’s time to talk about Scienc with a very special lecture by Saverio Gentile.
Professor Gentile, born in Capua, is an amazing communicator and he managed to gather an extraordinary rich presentation about the very long history of cancer – since the Paleolithic – and the pioneering role of Italian scientists who are leading the way into a new era of cancer prevention, detection and treatment.
Saverio Gentile is an Associate Professor and Leader of the Laboratory of Ion Channels in Cancer in the Department of Cell and Molecular, Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). After 9 years at Loyola University in Chicago and 4 years at University of Chicago, he moved to Charleston last year.

Lecture Room of DRUG DISCOVERY BUILDING
70 President Street Charleston, SC 29425

Tips and advice to speak Italian

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March 27, 2023 – A whole event dedicate to Italian language. It will be a very special lesson by professor Marinella Marino Griffith (College of Charleston) to become a better Italian speaker on your next trip to Italy!

Monday, March 27
from 6 to 7:30 pm
@ Thaddeus Street Jr. Education Center Lobby
25 St Philip St, Downtown Charleston, SC 29401

Celebrating the Florentine master

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February 22, 2023 – An evening dedicated to Franco Zeffirelli in the 100th anniversary of his birth with the screening of Rebel Conformist by movie director Anselma dell’Olio.
He died at the age of 96 in 2019 and he was one of the greatest directors and intellectuals of the last century, whose creative fervor gave the theater some important productions also in these first two decades of the new millennium. In years of reinterpretations as daring as they are profound, the Florentine master has often been criticized for a certain aesthetic taste, a formal rigor, an attention to detail that sometimes veered towards the Baroque, and which instead constitute his trademark, born from a deep faith in the theatre, from an immense culture and from a deep and peculiar technical knowledge of that world. A cross and a delight for many enthusiasts and critics, the theatre, like Zeffirelli’s cinema, has its own hallmark in the meticulous attention to detail and in the search for beauty. Great set designer, that oleographic taste that has sometimes been reproached for him, would rather seem the joyful and aware affirmation of the celebrant who is preparing to renew and officiate the mystery of a rite: charm and grandeur they are essential elements of sacredness, (re)creation of that truth which is at the basis of the mystery.
https://www.fondazionefrancozeffirelli.com