Programs:
History:
1 – The origins of Rome.
The first evidence of written records, the transition from monarchy to republic, the archaic society.
2 – The Fall of the Roman Empire
3 – Religious movements in medieval Italy
4 – The Maritime Republics
5 – Italy in 1400
6 – The Civilization of the Renaissance
Contemporary History
1 – The Italian Risorgimento
2 – Italy in World War I
3 – The fascist period
4 – From World War II to the struggle for liberation
5 – The period after the WW2: ideological contraposition and reconstruction
6 – ’60 years: Italy’s economic boom
7 – ’70 years: Dalla contestazione alla lotta armata (From contestation to armed struggle).
Literature
1 – Dante Alighieri
2 – Ludovico Ariosto
3 – Niccolò Machiavelli
4 – Ugo Foscolo
5 – Alessandro Manzoni
6 – Giovanni Pascoli
7 – Italo Svevo
8 – Italian poetry between the two world wars (Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale)
9 – Neorealism (Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Beppe Fenoglio, Francesco Jovine, Vasco Pratolini, Italo Calvino)
10 – The variety and dialect theater (Eduardo de Filippo)
History of art
1 – The artistic culture in Republican Rome
2 – Gothic and Romanesque in the Italian
Middle Ages
3 – Giotto and the Scrovegni Chapel
4 – The first Florentine Quattrocento (Masaccio and Donatello)
5 – Botticelli and The Birth of Venus
6 – Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, Raffaello and the courtesan celebration of Leo X
7-Tiziano the renewal of the tradition
8 – The protagonists of the pictorial renewal: Tintoretto and Veronese
9 – Caravaggio
10 – Bernini: architect and sculptor
11 – Antonio Canova: from the beginning to the mythological works
12 – Modigliani: Formal purity and psychological insight
Philosophy
1 – The life, works and thought of St. Augustine
The knowledge and divine enlightenment, true wisdom, God and the Trinity, evil and freedom, the creation and the time
2 – The life, works and thought of St. Thomas Aquinas
Essence and existence, creation and nature, morality, the origins of Thomism
3-natural philosophy and the new science:
Platonism, magic and astrology, Bernardino Telesio, Tommaso Campanella and Leonardo da Vinci
4 – The life, works, the thought of Giordano Bruno.
The Copernican universe, the problem of the infinite and the logic
5 – The life, works, the thought of Galileo Galilei
The “book of nature”, the knowledge: subjective and objective quality. Science and Theology
6 – The life, works, the thought of Giambattista Vico.
Sense, imagination, reason. Language, poetry and myth
7 – The Italian Enlightenment
8 – Philosophy in Italy in the 1800’s
9-The life, works, philosophy of mind and the four forms of Benedetto Croce.
Concepts and pseudo-concepts, economics and ethics, historicism
10 – Life, the works of Antonio Gramsci. The philosophy of praxis, hegemony and culture, the science of Marxism