2014 Programme
Event #39
Alessandro Barbero
How Do Wars Break Out? The Falklands War
On 2 April 1982 Argentine troops landed on the Falkland Islands, a British colony that Argentina had always laid claim to. The military junta, which already had thousands of desaparecidos on its conscience, hoped to muster up the consensus of a country crushed by inflation running at 600%, and did not imagine that a modern European democracy could react with a declaration of war. Instead that’s just what happened: the British government led by Margaret Thatcher sent out its fleet to recapture the islands. But in what way did the mechanisms of politics, pressure from public opinion and the game of international alliances lead the Argentine generals to get their calculations wrong, and the United Kingdom government to take on the responsibility for a war?
Alessandro Barbero is a historian and a writer and a tenured professor of Medieval History at Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale e Vercelli. He writes for La Stampa and Tuttolibri. He is a contributor on the television program Superquark and the shows Il tempo e la storia and a.C.d.C., broadcast by Rai Storia. His publications include: Benedette guerre. Crociate e jihad («i Libri del Festival della Mente», 2009), Lepanto. La battaglia dei tre imperi («i Libri del Festival della Mente», 2010), Donne, madonne, mercanti e cavalieri. Sei storie medievali («i Libri del Festival della Mente», 2013), published by Laterza; Gli occhi di Venezia (Mondadori, 2011); Il divano di Istanbul (Sellerio, 2011); Dietro le quinte della Storia. La vita quotidiana attraverso il tempo, written with P. Angela (Rizzoli, 2012); Le Ateniesi (Mondadori, 2015); Costantino il vincitore (Salerno Editrice, 2016); Le parole del papa (2016) and Caporetto (2017), published by Laterza. Il divano di Istanbul (2011), Alabama (2021) and Poeta al comando (2022) and Brick for stone (2023), published by Sellerio.
Event #20
Paolo Cornaglia Ferraris, Marcello Massimini
The Secret of the Consciousness and its Measurement
