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