Rome and/in the Movies, 202 B.C. - 2005 A.D.
Professor Boitani's lecture will examine Rome in the cinema, going through the history of Rome by way of the movies, and the history of cinema by way of Rome. Boitani's wide-ranging investigation will consider films by Alessandro Blasetti, Gérard Corbiau, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Mario Monicelli, Nanni Moretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Rossellini, Ridley Scott, Alberto Sordi, William Wyler, and many others. Intriguingly, Boitani suggests that Rome is itself a kind of film.
Piero Boitani, Professore ordinario di letterature comparate, Sapienza Università di Roma
Medievalist and modernist, Dante scholar and comparatist, Professor Boitani has authored a great number of books, including Chaucer and Boccaccio, English Medieval Narrative of the 13th and 14th Centuries, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, The Bible and its Rewritings, and, with Notre Dame University Press, The Genius to Improve an Invention. His most recent books include Parole alate (Mondadori, 2004),The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Winged Words: Flight in Poetry and History (The University of Chicago Press, 2007), Letteratura europea e Medioevo volgare (Il Mulino), and Il Vangelo secondo Shakespeare (Il Mulino).