Webconference in Italy: Italo Calvino and the Brazilian Constitution

On April 30th, 16h-18h (CET), Professor Marcilio FRANCA (Brazil) will deliver a webconference at the Turin University (Italy) on the theme “Il Diritto Costituzionale Brasiliano e le ‘Lezioni Americane’ di Italo Calvino. Leggerezza, Rapidità, Esattezza,Visibilità e Molteplicità nella Costituzione del 1988”. Professor Mia CAIELLI (Italy) will be the discussant. The event is free and open.

On June 6th, 1984, Italo Calvino – one of the most important Italian writers of the 20th century – was invited by University of Harvard to deliver the traditional Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures for the 1985/1986 academic year. Calvino accepted the invitation and decided that he would cover in his conferences six literary values that deserved to be preserved in the course of the new millennium. Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency would be the themes and titles of each of his lessons.

He wrote five of them before getting to Harvard and he intended to write the last one (consistency) after his arrival. However, Calvino passed away on September 19th, 1985, shortly before setting off to the United States, thus before the conferences and before preparing the last of his six lessons. Posthumously, the five conferences written so far were collected in one volume entitled Lezioni Americane: Sei Proposte per il Prossimo Millennio, whose English version is entitled “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”.

The conference will explore if and how those literary values described by Italo Calvino – lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity – have echoed in the world of Brazilian Constitutional Law post-1988.

Marcílio Franca is Professor of Constitutional Law at the Federal University of Paraíba (Brazi) and Visiting Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the Law Department of the Turin University (Italy). Since 2016 he is serving as Alternate Arbitrator at the Permanent Review Tribunal of MERCOSUR (Asunción, Paraguay). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Law (University of Coimbra, Portugal, FCT Fellowship) with a post-doc in Law at the European University Institute (EUI, Florence, Calouste Gulbenkian Fellowship).

The event will take place on the Webex platform and will be accessible by invitation. To register for the webinar, please write to eccellenza.law@unito.it

More details at: https://bit.ly/3cV6V7l