ITALY

Area: 301 308 km² - Population: 58.9 million - Capital: Rome
Official language: Italian - Date of joining EU: a founding member in 1957

A few indications
Italy, a veritable «living museum», offers an exceptional range of cultural and historical treasures. Civilisations and architectural styles often overlap: Etruscan, Greek and Roman remains, Arabo-Norman monuments, Gothic churches, Renaissance palaces and Baroque fountains
The museums overflow with masterpieces of Greco-Roman statuary and works by the great Italian painters such as Michel-Angelo, Raphael and Caravago.
The Latin writers of antiquity (Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca) were succeeded, as of the end of the Middle Ages by the triumvirate consisting of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the first standard-bearers of the Italian language. In the 19th century, Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni distinguished themselves as the leaders of the Romantic Movement. Closer to our own time, several novels by Alberto Moravia have been made into movies (A Ghost at Noon, The Conformist, Boredom). But for the general public, it is Umberto Eco who now symbolises Italian literary output.
The Italians, who invented music theory as well as the violin (the famous Stradivarius), the piano and opera, left their mark on the history of music thanks to such composers as Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Scarlatti. Works by Puccini, Verdi, Bellini and Rossini, illustrious representatives of bel canto, continue to be operatic successes all over the world.
The famous Roman studios called Cinecittà have enabled Italy to become one of the precursors of the 7^th art. The names of Visconti, Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci remain inseparable from the international cinema heritage. These days, such young movie-makers as Nanni Moretti, Giuseppe Tornatore and Roberto Benigni are breathing new life into Italian cinema.

Organisation of cultural policies
Cultural initiatives in Italy are distinguished by the varied nature of the entities involved in them. Cultural affairs are managed by a complex system of administrative entities whose powers are divided among several sectors and are applied at several administrative levels. Four levels of government (the State, regions, provinces and municipalities) divide up responsibilities in the cultural domain. Trans-national cultural cooperation outside Europe is mainly up to the Ministry of foreign affairs. That Ministry has established a specific general department called «cultural, promotion and cooperation», which acts through 93 Italian institutes. One of the main functions is organising cultural events.
As viewed by the Italian administration, the cultural heritage — the « beni culturali » in Italian — includes the architectural heritage, the museums, the libraries and the archives (the Ministry of the Cultural Heritage and the Environment, which is relatively new, established by combining the old general department of antiquities and Fine Arts with the State Archives). The promotion of theatre, music and the cinema is up to the general department of cinema and the general department of public entertainment.

Events connected with the country

Franco-Italian tandem

November-December
Cinema
France and Italy look at each other.
Some young French and Italian artists are invited to make some short films by using cell phones, and to present them in the urban space in Rome and in Paris.
www.dedale.info  

And also …

Starting on 5 July in Avignon, the Avignon Festival
Living entertainment
Romeo Castellucci / Societas Raffaello Sanzio
One of the main guests at Avignon Festival this year, Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio, present three plays, drawing their free inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

27-28 July in Montpellier, Opéra Comédie
Opera
Sallustia, by Giovanni Battista Pergolese, an opera in 3 acts (1732).
Design and staging: Jean-Paul Scarpitta.
By the Cappella della Pietà dei Turchini,
Directed by: Antonio Florio.
In connection with the Radio France Festival in Montpellier.

26 September-5 January in Paris, Louvre Museum
Exhibition
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506)
The Louvre Museum is devoting a major retrospective for the first time in France to this eminent Renaissance figure in northern Italy.

30 September-7 October in Annecy
Cinema
Italian Cinema Festival
Works of the year (feature-length films and documentaries), homage to Anna Magnani on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of her birth, pre-premiers, meetings with directors…

15 October-26January in Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou
Exhibition
« Le Futurisme et Paris ». ( Futurism and Paris)

9^th September to 4^th October 2008 in Grenoble,
Event - Illustrating history / illustrare la storia
Exhibition “Palladio, engraver of the Commentaries of Julius Caesar”
40 original engravings from the Rinaldi-Tonello collection at the municipal library the Bibliothèque municipale d’étude et d’information
International conference “Humanisms, engraving and antiquity: the reconquest of the Past”
(2^nd and 3^rd October, CRHIPA, Mendès France University, Grenoble)
Daily lectures “In the footsteps of Caesar”
In partnership with the University of Macerata/Fermo (Italy) which will repeat the same event

• Updated: 04.09.2008

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