UCD Italian Seminar Series 2025-2026 (Trimester 1)

Trimester 1

All the talks can be attended by using the following Zoom link: (opens in a new window)https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/j/4743564280

25 SEPTEMBER 2025 - 5.00 pm (In person @Newman D301 & on Zoom)

Title: Primo Levi’s Antifascism Between Past, Present and Uchronia
Speaker: Simone Ghelli (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)

Abstract: Considered as one of the most important witnesses and writers of the Holocaust, Primo Levi is still today scarcely perceived as an antifascist intellectual, even though he had an experience as a partisan in the Italian Resistance, and especially even though his public activity as an antifascist intellectual. In this seminar, I will reconstruct Levi’s antifascist thinking by focusing on his essayistic production of the 1960s and the 1970s, where Levi developed an original reflection on the nature of fascism and its historical meaning for post-war Europe. My intention is to demonstrate how Levi’s understanding of Memory, its civic and moral function, is structured upon a multi-temporal dynamic that keeps the past of Auschwitz and the social-political tensions of the present in communication. In particular, I will focus on the role played by the uchronic hypothesis of the victory of the Axis, which constitutes the core of Levi’s rhetorical strategy. In Levi, alternative history helps not only to stress the urgency of Memory before the resurgence of neofascism, but also to claim the indissoluble bond between Memory and the antifascist values of freedom and equality that animated the desperate fight of the Resistance against European fascisms.

23 OCTOBER 2025 - 5.00 pm (On Zoom)

Title: Shedding New Light on Vittoria Colonna: A New Edition of Her Letters (Marsilio, 2024)
Speaker: Marianna Liguori (University of Padua)

Abstract: The seminar focuses on the critical insights emerging from the most recent edition of Vittoria Colonna’s letters, the most important woman poet of the Italian Renaissance. The session will highlight the innovative aspects that have surfaced through a close critical reading of her correspondence, both in terms of reconstructing the multifaced nature of Colonna’s personality, and her epistolary strategies. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which Colonna managed to enter the “canon” of Renaissance authors, a process that also involved a highly conscious engagement with the culture of letter writing.

10 NOVEMBER 2025 - 5.00 pm (In person @Newman D101 & on Zoom)

Title: A Reader of Many Books: Italo Calvino and the Bible
Speaker: Emilia Di Rocco (Sapienza University of Rome)

Abstract: In Calvino, uno scrittore di formazione, Daniele del Giudice argues that Italo Calvino’s relationship with his craft, with his books and with the unfolding of his works was that of a writer of formation, the latter understood as one who expects to find and bring about small changes within himself. Among the stories that appear to him through images, the writer of formation chooses the one that can accommodate the need to find an existential attitude towards a given issue. Starting from Del Giudice, we can ask what the place of the Bible in Calvino, a “writer of formation”, is. Did the Bible produce any small change in his works? Did the Bible have influence at all on his critical work? What biblical narratives did he choose to write a story that allowed him to tackle an existential issue? This talk seeks to discuss these questions based on examples from Calvino’s critical and creative works.