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

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

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

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

GREENVILLE CIRCLE
We invite you to join us for a Summer Salon, presenting “Divine Dante,” with Dante Scholar Natalina Ferlauto.
Dante’s continuing influence engages the novice to the expert, as there is always something to discover and a new way to increase your understanding of the way that Italian literature presents us with themes still relevant today.
As John Ciardi said, “The gold of Dante runs deep, but it also runs right up to the surface.”

We look forward to meeting with you and gaining fresh new insight from Dante’s Divine Comedy, with our Dante Dialogue.

Summer Salon
Friday, August 26th, 2022
6:30pm-8:00pm
Younts Conference Center
Furman University
1250 Duncan Chapel Road
Greenville, SC 29617

Free for members – Non Members $30