Today, the Italian Embassy in Tehran opened the 21st Italian Language Week in Iran with a lecture on the author Leonardo Sciascia, introduced and moderated by Giuseppe Perrone, Italian Ambassador in Tehran, and opened by Senator Emma Bonino, President of the National Committee of the Centenary Celebrations of Leonardo Sciascia.
The lecture, held in a hybrid format in the Italian Ambassador’s Residence in Farmanieh, with guests in attendance and online connections from Iranian universities and Italy, focused on the reconstruction of the relations between Leonardo Sciascia and Iran, in honour of the Centenary of Sciascia’s birth which is celebrated this year.
Senator Bonino opened the programme by recalling how the figure and legacy of Sciascia belong not only to Italy but are also the heritage of other countries that may appear culturally distant, such as Iran, itself the cradle of a millenary civilisation.
Ambassador Perrone then linked the success of Sciascia in Iran to two crucial factors: courage and nonconformity, on the one hand, and the model of sociality that recurs in his novels, similar in many ways to Iranian sociality, on the other.
Giovanni Capecchi, member of the National Committee of the Centenary Celebrations of Leonardo Sciascia, and Prof. Mohammad Hossein Kiaei of the University of Tehran also spoke, while Giacomo Longhi, an Iranianist at the University of Milan, and Saban Ghiaei, author of the recent translation of “Sicilian Uncles” into Persian, then engaged in a talk on the relevance of Sciascia’s thought in modern-day Iran.
The lecture ended with a reading from “The American Aunt” by Iranian actress Setareh Eskandari.
The lecture on Sciascia and Iran is part of the calendar of lectures on the great Italian author held around the world, sponsored by the National Committee of the the Centenary Celebrations and organised by the Associazione Amici di Leonardo Sciascia and the University for Foreigners of Perugia, under the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
The celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Sciascia’s birth, sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Tehran, also include screenings of Damiano Damiani’s film “The Day of the Owl” (1968), based on Sciascia’s 1960 novel of the same name, and Francesco Rosi’s “Illustrious Corpses” (1976), based on the novel “Equal Danger”, written by Sciascia in 1971.
