‘At the heart of Rome’: the autumn cycle of the VIVE festival starts with the great protagonists of the international cultural scene

PROGRAMMA SETTEMBRE – DICEMBRE 2024

Thursday 12 September, 18.00
SENSEABLE CITIES
CYCLE: Building telling architecture
SPEAKER: Carlo Ratti, architect

Abstract
The way we live, work and play is very different today than it was a few decades ago, thanks in large part to a network of connectivity that now encompasses most people on the planet. Similarly, today we are at the beginning of a new technological revolution: the Internet is entering physical space - the traditional domain of architecture and design - and becoming an ‘Internet of Things’. The IoT is opening the door to a variety of applications spanning many areas: from manufacturing to citizen participation, from energy to mobility to public hygiene. Carlo Ratti will address these issues from a critical point of view, through the projects of the Senseable City Laboratory, a research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Carlo Ratti Associati design studio.

Biography
An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti is concerned with the future of cities and the built environment. He is a professor of the Practice of Urban Technologies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, and a full professor at the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. He is a founding partner of the international design and innovation firm CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and has founded several start-ups in the US and Europe. A graduate of Politecnico di Torino and École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, Ratti did his MPhil and Ph.D. at Cambridge University, completing his doctoral thesis as a Fulbright Scholar at MIT. In December 2023, he was appointed curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. One of the ten most cited urban planning scholars in the world, Carlo Ratti has co-authored over 750 academic publications. His most recent books include ‘Atlas of the Senseable City’ (Yale University Press, with Antoine Picon, 2023), ‘Urbanity’ (Einaudi, 2022) and ‘Open Source Architecture’ (Thames & Hudson/Einaudi, with Matthew Claudel, 2015).

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-senseable-cities-1003460345907?aff=oddtdtcreator

Wednesday 18 September, 6 p.m.
The Goddess and the King of the Woods. The sanctuary of Lake Nemi.
CYCLE: Landscapes of the Centre of Rome
SPEAKER: Paolo Carafa, Full Professor of Classical Archaeology and Pro-rector of Archaeological Heritage, Sapienza University of Rome

Abstract
Man-made landscapes constitute an incessant flow characterised by continuity and discontinuity, expressed not only in time but also in space. Thus, the ancient city of Rome itself, the main object of our interest, was part of a system of contexts and processes that did not stop at its walls but extended to the suburban countryside and to the territories, sometimes far away, where Rome had acted and finally dominated. The Albano Massif with the area around Lake Nemi was one of these contexts. Here the oldest roots of Latin identity were recognised, some of the most venerable sanctuaries of the entire region were located, and the first political-sacral organisation of Latium had been formed. By also appropriating places like these, Rome was able to renew its instruments of government and sanction its first dominion over neighbouring communities.

Biography
Paolo Carafa is full professor of Classical Archaeology and Pro-rector of Archaeological Heritage at Sapienza University of Rome. He has created an Archaeological Information System (patented) and coordinated research projects dedicated to the architecture and history of urban and rural landscapes of Rome, ancient Latium, Etruria, Magna Graecia and Pompeii. He has published more than 150 contributions including monographs, editions, reference books, articles and other works.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-la-dea-e-il-re-del-bosco-il-santuario-del-lago-di-nemi-1012641797877?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 26 September, 6 p.m.
DIALOGUE OF OPPOSITES. Designing function, dysfunction and storytelling.
CYCLE: Building telling architecture
SPEAKER: Franco Raggi, architect

Abstract
A project is trivially a technical procedure for improving the state of things. If a project does not improve the state of things it is a bad project or at best a useless project. If it improves them, it is a good project. Unfortunately, what is not easy to define is the concept of ‘improvement’. Indeed, if we step outside the pure functional aspect of satisfying a performance, as we must, we find that a functional project/object can be unpleasant, ugly and insufficient or at best irrelevant. The relevance of a project therefore, after satisfying the mere function, is based on the communication quotient of something else, i.e. the ability to narrate, evoke, negate, sublimate a condition of relationship with the general context in which the project is located. Historical, technical, aesthetic and I would even say ethical context in the moment in which a project/object suggests a critical and poetic vision at the same time of the state of things. Through the illustration of the work of others and my own, I will try to tell how the communicative power of a project is based on the declination of opposites, on the invention of unexpected juxtapositions, on the unveiling of contradictions, on the negation of its own function or on its poetic deformation, and finally on the ability to recount all this with a synthetic gesture that seeks to make sense of doing and time.

Biography
Born in Milan in 1945, after graduating in Architecture at the Polytechnic in 1969, he worked with Studio Nizzoli, dedicated himself to writing and drawing and collaborated with architecture and design magazines such as Casabella and Modo, which he directed from 1981 to 1983, and with the organisation of exhibitions for the Venice Biennale 1975/76 and the Milan Triennale 1973/85. He took part in the activities of the Radical Design groups and then collaborated with Studio Alchimia with which he realised products and exhibitions. Since 1977 he has combined his activities as an architect with those as a designer, working for brands such as Fontana Arte, Poltronova, Barovier&Toso, Luceplan, Artemide, Danese and Zeus. His works are at the FRAC Museum in Orleans, the Centre Pompidou, the MoMA, the Milan Triennale and the Ceramics Museum in Savona.

Information and Reservations
Free entrance subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-dialogo-degli-opposti-1012704936727?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 3 October, 18.00
Archaeology in Piazza Venezia - History of an Urban Context
CYCLE: Landscapes of the Centre of Rome
SPEAKER: Mirella Serlorenzi, Director of the Baths of Caracalla

Abstract
How has the area of Piazza Venezia changed over time? This is the question we will try to answer by going through XX centuries of history.
Thanks to archaeological excavations, it is possible to reconstruct lost contexts of which historical sources leave no traces. Certainly, the area has always been inhabited, but few know that during the Byzantine reign, at the behest of Emperor Justinian, the mint that produced bronze coins was located here. On the same site was, a few centuries earlier, the Athenaeum, a building for higher studies and a place for debates and conferences. Emperor Hadrian wanted to create a specific and functional architectural typology for that academic institute, a sort of university, where the best lecturers were appointed by the emperor himself and paid through the imperial treasury, in order to provide the city with a cultural body of the highest level. In modern times, the area sees a final use of the ruins of the prestigious Roman building to support the foundations of the Ospedale dei Fornari, of which only the church of S. Maria di Loreto remains visible today. As in a kaleidoscope, the fabrics of the city are born, modified, destroyed, or partially preserved, giving life to new landscapes that are the sum of many cities.
A journey through time that will allow us to discover this central area of Rome.

Biography
Mirella Serlorenzi works at the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma where she is the Director of the Terme di Carcalla and is responsible for the Functional Area Archaeology. Previously, she directed the Museum of the Cripta Balbi, was head of the MNR office in Palazzo Massimo, and directed the National Museum of the Early Middle Ages.
She coordinated the archaeological research under the Enpam Palace in Piazza Vittorio, and is the creator and scientific director of the museological project of the Nymphaeum Museum. She is the scientific director and coordinator of important archaeological excavations in the Esquiline area, in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II and Piazza Dante, and in other areas of the historic centre of Rome. In particular the excavation of the Athenaeum in Piazza Venezia, and the archaeological complex in Largo S. Susanna. At the latter site, he is overseeing the musealisation of the area, which should be open to the public in 2025.
He has overseen major archaeological projects for the study and restoration of buildings: on the Palatine at the Domus Tiberias, in the Forum Boarium in collaboration with the Word Monuments Found, the restoration of the Temples of Portunus and Hercules, and the Arch of Janus. He is carrying out many projects for the PNRR among which he has developed a master plan for a revival of the archaeological area of the Baths of Caracalla. He is a member of the board of the Society of Italian Medieval Archaeologists, SAMI. He has numerous scientific publications to his credit.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Reservations at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-archeologia-a-piazza-venezia-1003504417727?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 17 October, 18.00
Spaniards in Rome, between culture, politics, religion and international relations
CYCLE: An International Capital: Rome and the Foreigners
SPEAKER: Fernando Garcia Sanz Director Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología in Rome

Abstract
The relationship of Spain and Spaniards with Rome has been seen by many more as the search for an ‘idea’ than for a physical space. Perhaps this is why it can be said that each of us carries within us a Rome, a tradition, an individual version of the idea of Rome that has been rooted for so many centuries in its universal sense of humanity. An idea that has been permeable to the changes of our contemporary times, but in which culture has represented the historical bond between the Spaniards and the city of Rome. Reality is increasingly complex and the history of cultural relations with Rome as a stage could not fail to be influenced by the vicissitudes of politics, religious sentiment and the complicated post-1870 international landscape. In the background, however, the creation of the Academia Española de Bellas Artes and the Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología highlights this multiplicity of factors, as well as the genuine quest to capture the profound spirit of the fine arts that only Rome could contain as an international campus of humanistic studies.

Biography
Fernando García Sanz is Investigador Científico at the Institute of History of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid. From 2011 to 2018 he was CSIC's Institutional Delegate in Italy and Director of the Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología in Rome. His research interests include the history of international relations, the history of Spanish foreign policy, the history of Italy and the history of Italian-Spanish relations during the contemporary age. In 2003 he was decorated by the President of the Republic with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, with the rank of Officer.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-spagnoli-a-roma-1003513454757?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 24 October, 6 pm
The Legend of Pope Joan
CYCLE: Figures of History in Ancient Rome
SPEAKER: Annastella Carrino

Abstract
Pope Joan is a legendary figure whose fame spans the centuries, each time marked by increasingly negative connotations. She is a woman in disguise, so cultured as to mislead a world of men that ends up electing her pontiff unanimously. But she is also an impossible pope because she is ‘papess’. And she is and remains a woman, ‘in spite of’ her male clothing, a lively intellect, great culture and brilliant eloquence. A woman whose ‘secret’ body ends up regaining its rights in an unexpected and dramatic way. To the deception of disguise, to the guilt of having occupied the highest seat in Christendom without having any right to it, Joan, through pregnancy and childbirth, adds a sin that takes on demonic overtones.

Biography
Annastella Carrino is a lecturer in modern history and gender history at the University of Bari. She is currently working on issues of gender history and in particular on women's forms of acted violence.
Her most recent publications include Les Rocca de Marseille. Passions et intérêts d'une famille-entreprise, Paris, Garnier, 2020; La violenza femminile fra stereotipi e tabù, introduction to the monographic dossier L'ordine infranto. La violenza delle donne fra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by A. Carrino, in ‘Società e storia’, 182, 2023, pp. 685-698; ‘Il s'agit d'un certain pape ou plutôt d'une papesse’, in ‘Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa’, 2023, 1, pp. 171-178.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-la-leggenda-della-papessa-giovanna-1003584487217?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 7 November, 18.00
An American in Rome: Mary McCarthy (1945-1974)
CYCLE: Figures of History in the Rome of the past
SPEAKER: Marina D'Amelia

Abstract
The reappearance in recent years of Mary McCarthy as the author of successful novels that challenged the taboos of respectable America has left Mary Mc Carthy, a scholar of the European literary tradition and an active promoter of exchanges between American and European intellectuals in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the shade. Since 1945, stays in Europe have been a fixture in the writer's biography: journeys that took her from Portugal to Greece, via Italy. At the centre of the conference, in the context of the wanderings in Italy, the different moments of the discovery of Rome and the frequentation of certain intellectuals, the reflections they give rise to over time by a young Mary McCarthy, at first insecure, tired of theoretical controversies and a champion of a community life that makes room for emotions, gradually overlapping with the prickly and ironic writer whose books were at the centre of much controversy, increasingly involved in the issues at the centre of political debate in the 1960s and 1970s, the political commentator and the scourge of American military intervention in Vietnam; finally, the successful lecturer who challenged the student protests in Genoa in 1968.

Biography
Marina D'Amelia has taught Modern History at La Sapienza University in Rome. Over the years she has interwoven investigations of consolidated interest in the tradition of historical studies such as the history of corruption and justice, of political languages, of merchant and curial families in the ancien régime, with newer issues such as the history of the family and female literacy and writing, the history of motherhood and the stereotype of mammism in Italian society. She moved with a certain freedom from the 16th to the 19th and 20th centuries, straddling social history and cultural history. She was among the founders and editors in 1981 of the four-monthly ‘Memoria. Magazine of Women's History' and also founder of the Italian Society of Historians (SIS).

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-unamericana-a-roma-mary-mccarthy-1945-1974-1003594928447?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 21 November, 18.00
Beato Angelico, today
CYCLE: Travels and sojourns of artists in Rome
AUTHOR: Carl Strehlke, art historian

Abstract
In 1955, major exhibitions were held in Rome at the Vatican and in Florence celebrating the Florentine Renaissance painter Fra Giovanni da Fiesole on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death at the Minerva convent in Rome. A Dominican friar, he was known by members of his own order shortly after his death as Beato Angelico, just as the theologian Thomas Aquinas was called Doctor Angelicus. In the 1960s, the great writer Elsa Morante asked: was Fra Giovanni a revolutionary? After the 1955 exhibition and Elsa Morante's provocative question, we look at the friar's art in a new way. This will be the topic of the conference: how we see Fra Angelico today in relation to the artistic and religious society of his time. And to answer Elsa Morante's question: yes, he was a revolutionary.

Biography
Carl Strehlke, born and raised in Boston, completed his studies at Columbia University in New York and worked for thirty-five years as curator of the John G. Johnson Collection of European Paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He curated exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Philadelphia and New York on St. Francis, Sienese Renaissance painting, Beato Angelico, Pontormo and Bronzino. He also wrote the catalogue of the Johnson Collection and, with Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, the catalogue of the Bernard and Mary Berenson at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University's Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. He is currently working on a forthcoming exhibition on Beato Angelico for Palazzo Strozzi in Florence that will open in September 2025.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-beato-angelico-oggi-1003655329107?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 28 November, 18.00
No Space No Time
CYCLE: Building Telling Architecture
SPEAKER: Massimiliano Fuksas

Abstract
There are different ways and sensitivities to put together a lecture, or rather a conference. In years gone by, in certain periods of my life as an architect, I would establish possible variations and use them for months. In the early 2000s in Tokyo, inspired by a film, I chose the title ‘Lost in Translation’, which was followed by ‘Lost 12345’ and so on. Years earlier, when I was a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, I seem to have used ‘Landscape no morphology’ or ‘tectonic geography’. It was still the 1990s, I started when I was teaching at the École Spéciale d'Architecture, called by Virilio. With the annulment of the concept of architectural space, today, after the traversal of the virtual and consciously inclined to consider visual perception a convention, I believed that colours and dimensions were representations beyond the real and hypotheses to the point of the annulment of certainties, and that perception was a formula that expressed itself in an uncertain and very often random universe. Lawrence's Chaos Theory appeared, the algorithm that defines it, we know it... It is from this concept that we will begin.

Biography
Of Lithuanian origin, Massimiliano Fuksas was born in Rome in 1944. He graduated in Architecture from La Sapienza University in Rome in 1969 and has been a leading figure on the contemporary architectural scene since the 1980s. From 1994 to 1997 he was a member of the Urban Planning Commission of Berlin and Salzburg. From 1998 to 2000 he was Director of the ‘VII International Architecture Exhibition in Venice’: ‘LessAesthetics, More Ethics’. From 2000 to 2015 Massimiliano Fuksas was author of the architecture column, founded by Bruno Zevi, of the Italian weekly ‘L'Espresso’ and from 2014 to 2015, together with Doriana Fuksas, he edited the Design column of the Italian daily ‘La Repubblica’. He has been a visiting professor at various international universities including Columbia University in New York, the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. In his work, Massimiliano Fuksas has always devoted special attention to the analysis of urban problems and large metropolitan areas, with an eye always turned to innovation.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-no-space-no-time-1003662169567?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 5 December, 18.00
The Austrian presence in Rome in the 19th century
CYCLE: An International Capital: Rome and Foreigners
Speaker: Andreas Gottsmann, Director of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome

Abstract
With the ‘Venetian inheritance’ after the Peace of Campoformido in 1797, Palazzo Venezia also passed to the Habsburg monarchy and served as the Austrian embassy to the Holy See until the First World War. After 1870, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy had his offices here, while his residence was in Palazzo Chigi.
However, Rome was not only of interest to Austria as the city of the Pope and later the Italian capital, but also as a centre of the arts. Scholars came here every year, most of them sent from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. They would stay in the Eternal City for at least a year and cultivate their studies in the tower of Palazzo Venezia. With the opening of the Vatican archives from 1882 there was also an Austrian academic representation in Rome, namely the Historical Institute, which was located in Via della Croce until the First World War and was a point of attraction for many scholars from the Habsburg Monarchy.

Biography
Andreas Gottsmann studied history at the University of Vienna, then collaborator of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since December 2013 he has been director of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome. Main research interests: Austrian history of the 19th century, the national problem and the Habsburg monarchy; in particular, on the history of Italians, he analysed church-state relations in Austria and between Austria and Italy.

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability.
Booking at the link: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-la-presenza-austriaca-a-roma-nel-xix-secolo-1003667655977?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thursday 12 December, 18.00
Francesco Primaticcio, a Bolognese from Fontainebleau to Rome
CYCLE: Travels and Stays of Artists in Rome
SPEAKER: Dominique Cordellier

Abstract
Born in Bologna in 1503 and educated in his native city, Francesco Primaticcio, an exact contemporary of Parmigianino, worked first in Mantua and then for forty years at the French court, spending most of his life as a painter, sculptor and architect far from Rome. It was to him, however, that King Francis I of France, driven by his imperial ambitions, asked to transform his castle at Fontainebleau into ‘a new Rome’. This desire for prestige, as sincere as it was impossible, a true ideal dream, led the artist to make several trips to Rome. But he did more than that. This lecture will examine how an ‘Italian abroad’ used all his virtuosity to leave a profound, and sometimes hidden, mark on the antiquities of Rome and their recomposition by Renaissance artists in this apogee of the ‘modern manner’ that is now known as the ‘School of Fontainebleau’.

Biography
Dominique Cordellier is Conservateur du Patrimoine honoraire and has spent his entire career at the Louvre Museum in Paris. There he studied and exhibited drawings by Italian and French artists of the 15th and 16th centuries and curated major exhibitions, devoting particular attention to Raphael and his disciples (Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giulio Romano) as well as the great protagonists of the more elaborate ‘modern manner’ in Italy (Beccafumi, Parmigianino) and France (Rosso Fiorentino, Luca Penni, Francesco Primaticccio). He is currently continuing his research on the artists of the Fontainebleau school and their French satellites (Jean Cousin, Charles Carmoy, Geoffroy Dumonstier, etc.).

Information and Reservations
Free admission subject to availability
Reservations at: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-al-centro-di-roma-francesco-primaticcio-1003678498407?aff=oddtdtcreator

‘At the heart of Rome’: the autumn cycle of the VIVE festival starts with the great protagonists of the international cultural scene

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