2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

and Flora Dennis (at the Academy); Valeria Cafà (at the Metropolitan
Museum); and Francesco De Angelis (at Columbia), who offered
me his thoughtful comments and advice and also introduced
me to further scholars of classical art.
During my stay at the Academy I attended many lectures and
conferences at the Institute of Fine Arts, the Met, the Frick and, of
course, at Columbia (among the most impressive was Marco Maiuro’s
and Francesco De Angelis’s international conference, “Archeology
and the City”). It was, however, the multidisciplinary community
of the Academy itself which made my academic year: I am very
grateful for the opportunity to have had deep cultural exchanges
with scholars working on philosophy, anthropology, musicology
and so on.
In these semesters, two works of mine were published: an
article on Vasari and Andrea del Sarto in the exhibition catalogue
Il Primato del Disegno (Edifir, 2011), and an essay on the Rome of
Urban VIII in Atlante della Letteratura Italiana (Gabriele Pedullà and
Sergio Luzzatto, editors; Einaudi 2012).
In January I was awarded a post-doc fellowship at the IMT in
Lucca which I had to decline, as I was then granted a permanent
position as Lecturer at the Università Federico II in Naples. As
many other Fellows were awarded positions through Europe and
the States, I hope that our paths will cross again, to recreate the collaborative
and stimulating atmosphere that characterized our stay at
the Academy.
Maddalena Spagnolo takes up a permanent position as Lecturer at the
Università Federico II in Naples.
Stefano Tomassini
At the Academy I worked on a project entitled “Dance Libretto as
social text: the Italian dance librettos in the Cia Fornaroli Collection
at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.” The
project centers on the in-depth study of the Italian dance librettos
from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collected at the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The aim of the project
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