The Italian Consulate General in Vancouver dedicated this year’s “Week of the Italian language in the world” to “Dante the Italian”, beginning on 19 October with “Reader’s Day”, a virtual event at UBC (the University of British Columbia) organised by the reader Elena Zampieri that was attended by tutors and students of the Italian language from Vancouver’s main universities.
This was followed by the first of two webinars presented by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Western Canada entitled ‘Music and Sound in Dante’s Divine Comedy’; the cycle concluded on 21 October with the workshop “A Symbolic and Musicological Perspective”. This inspired a group of students to try imagining a soundtrack for the Divine Comedy. The Italian-Swiss film “Il demolitore di camper” [“The demolisher of camper vans”] was shown at the Italian Cultural Centre, in collaboration with the Swiss Consulate General in Vancouver. The Italian Language Week ended with a virtual seminar by Prof. Valerio Zangarini, on “Changing Italian: discovering neologisms, euphemisms and gender issues” , organised by the local branch of the “Dante Alighieri Society” in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto.
