2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

ments on the interesting and powerful lens through which the
Academy is exploring the Holocaust from one year to the next.
Amongst our conferences this year were those sponsored by
the Banca d’Italia—to whom we are most grateful—on Italy and the
World Economy, at which both Fabrizio Saccomanni and our Nobel
Laureate Edmund Phelps spoke (amongst other distinguished
speakers), as well as Professors Nadia Urbinati and Charles Sabel.
On this occasion, feeling that the critiques of the management of
the Italian economy voiced by several speakers was exaggerated, I
made an impassioned plea on behalf of the promise of young Italian
intellectuals and scientists as representing the hope of Italy—and of
Europe—for the future. In this context of economic crisis, I emphasized
the value of investment in education, culture and science.
The extent of the applause indicated how widely the sentiments I
expressed were shared by our very large audience.
Less than a week later, this meeting was followed by what has
become one of our best-attended events every year—the Academy’s
annual conference on new developments in the neurosciences. This
year the conference, organized by former Fellow Alessia Pannese,
was entitled Brainbeat: Frontiers in the Neuroscience of Music. Many
internationally-known scholars in the area of neuroscience and music
participated, with results that were once more as enthusiastically
received as in past years. And less than a week after this—to give an
idea of the intensity of our programs at various critical points in the
year—a symposium on artistic relations between the Low Countries
and Italy in the late Middle Ages was held in our building, attended
both by scholars and by museum curators, under the direction of
Professor Wim Blockmans, ex-director of the Netherlands Institute
for Advanced Study and visiting professor at Columbia.
The reach of Italian culture, and the connections between Spain
and Italy, formed the subject of our April conference entitled Beyond
Italy and New Spain: Itineraries for an Iberian Art History, organized by
Michael Cole, Professor of Italian Renaissance Art, and Alessandra
Russo, Professor of Latin American and Iberian Culture, to both of
whom we are most grateful. This event gained exceptionally wide
attention and generated much excitement across the academic
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