Bookmark this independent blog

Friday 29 April 2016

Charlotte Brontë's Bicentenary in Italy

A member of the Italian Section writes:
Maddalena De Leo and Caterina Lerro
On Thursday 21 April Italy celebrated Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary in a number of ways and the Italian Section of the Brontë Society was of course  involved through its representative, Prof. Maddalena De Leo. She was asked to take part to two radio broadcasts, the first on Rai Radio2 (Ovunque6) and the second on Rai Radio3 (Fahrenheit) where she talked of Charlotte, her importance today and the ‘feminism’ throughout her work.

The day in Italy was also celebrated in the Sicilian town of Bronte, where a meeting was held with journalists, teachers and students who spoke of Charlotte and read some of her prose. The Italian representative was invited there as well, and appeared on a Skype conference to greet all Sicilian citizens and to read a message expressly sent from the Brontë Society to the Mayor of the town of Bronte. It was a wonderful occasion to create a promising bridge between England and Italy.

In the afternoon a major conference organized by the Italian Ministero dei Beni Culturali was held in Naples at the National Library with Maddalena De Leo and Caterina Lerro as speakers in front of a large and involved public. Prof. De Leo read her interesting paper about Charlotte’s heroines in Juvenilia and in the novels mainly pointing to the differences existing between the first and the second group of them, Prof. Lerro spoke of the meaning of Jane Eyre as a novel, commenting on three of its most important pages (the incipit – the meeting with Rochester – ‘Reader, I married him’) with the help of her students who played the parts of the characters.

No comments: