Belgium. Organised by the Italian Embassy in Brussels and the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels, the cycle of “Conversazioni in Piazza” (Conversations in the square) featuring Italian journalists, essayists, writers, critics and scientists in conversation with representatives of the Belgian and international scene, is continuing in the two “Italian squares” (the Italian Cultural Institute and the Residence of the Italian Embassy) as an important extra tool for comprehensively promoting the Italian language and culture in Belgium.
At the second event, which took place on 8 November at the Italian Cultural Institute, the author and literary critic Benedetta Craveri, a member of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, presented her most recent book La Contessa (Adelphi, 2021 and Flammarion, 2021) in the presence of distinguished guests such as the philologist, specialist in Italian literature, and honorary Professor at the University of Liège, Pierre Jodogne, who is also a Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, and Sophie Basch, Professor of French literature at Paris Sorbonne University (Paris IV).
Thanks to the scholarly rigour and brilliant exposition of her historical treatments, in which the female roles are always to the fore, Benedetta Craveri, who is the granddaughter of Benedetto Croce, has come to international renown as an author of essays and monographs, as in the case of her masterful account of the Countess Virginia Verasis di Castiglione, considered one of the most beautiful and fascinating women of her time, and described by Craveri as a woman who “knew how to use her charm, but also her political intelligence, audacity, her will to dominate, and her extraordinary acting ability, to reach a goal that was unimaginable at the time: to freely dispose of her own existence”.
