Giorgio Bassani’s 100th Anniversary in New York

Giorgio Bassani was a novelist, poet, critic and public intellectual, whose influence continues to grow internationally. In his works, among them the Garden of the Finzi-Continis, he chronicled Italian life under fascism and beyond. His unique literary voice was recognized in the On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani, Centro Primo Levi and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York will present a new volume of lectures and interviews that Bassani gave between 1966 and 1972: New York Lectures and Interviews, by Giorgio Bassani, CPL EDITIONS, 2016.


The event will take place on May 10th, 2016 at 6:30 pm, at the Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Ave, New York, NY 10021 and will feature Giorgio Van Straten, director fo the ICI, Dalia Sofer (writer), Andrè Naffis-Sahely (poet and translator), and the writer’s daughter, Paola Bassani. AdmiUS among others by Harold Bloom, who included his late novel The Heron in his The Western Canon.


Bassani portrayed the city of Ferrara and its inhabitants, with extraordinary insight and clarity. Both place and people are immersed in an abstract dimension relating to the late 20th-century crises of dislocation, solitude and personal anguish.


As an editor for the publishing house Feltrinelli, Bassani was instrumental in recovering the manuscript of one of the greatest Italian novels, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), which had been repeatedly rejected by major publishers in the 1950s.


During the 1960s and 1970s Giorgio Bassani spent considerable time in the United States, as president of the ecological association Italia Nostra, overseeing the translation of his works and most notably teaching at American colleges and universities. The lectures and interviews contained in the new volume published by CPL Editions in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and the support of Fondazione Giorgio Bassani, were originally given at the Italian Cultural Institute on Park Avenue. ##


For additional information contact: [email protected] or visit: www.primolevicenter.org and www.iicnewyork.esteri.it