2015 Programme
Event #6
Alessandro Barbero
The historian's responsibility. Gaetano Salvemini: from Socialist interventionism to anti-Fascism
Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957) is one of the most eminent Italian historians of the start of the 20th century. Leader of the juridical-economic school of thought, which updated Italian historiography by opening it to the lessons provided by more advanced European historiographies, he accompanied his career in university teaching with a constant commitment to political struggle. A Socialist and a Meridionalist, he denounced the corruption of Giolitti’s government’s in the book Il ministro della malavita (1910). A supporter of interventionism during World War I, he lined up against Fascism since its origin, and migrated to Paris in 1925, where he founded the Justice and Liberty movement with the Rosselli brothers. In 1933 he was invited to teach at Harvard; since his return to Italy in 1949, to the end of his life, he continued his battle for a public, free and secular school system.
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 #6
Alessandro Barbero
The historian's responsibility. Gaetano Salvemini: from Socialist interventionism to anti-Fascism

Event #8Approfonditamente
Marco Rossi-Doria, Giulia Tosoni
Kids and school: what, how and where are they learning

Event #13Approfonditamente
Adolfo Ceretti, Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Alfredo Verde
Gender-based violence: Perpetrators, victims and models of intervention.

Event #22
Alessandro Barbero
The historian’s responsibility. Marc Bloch: from the Sorbonne to the Gestapo prisons

Event #25Approfonditamente
Marco Belpoliti, Gianfranco Marrone, Anna Stefi
Laziness, fatigue, and our constant running

Event #26
Eugenio Borgna, Simonetta Fiori
Knowing ourselves and knowing others: a different way of being responsible

Event #35
James R. Flynn, Armando Massarenti
Without an alibi: a voyage across life’s greatest questions

Event #38
Alessandro Barbero
The historian’s responsibility. Ernst Kantorowicz: from the Freikorps to McCarthyism

Event #57Children / Kids
Sante Bandirali e Lorenza Pozzi di uovonero
Read like you’ve never read before
