The English translation of Italici is the fruit of a fortunate encounter between the Italian/American Digital Project and that side of Piero Bassetti’s multifaceted personality that led to the foundation of Globus et Locus 10 years ago. A few months ago Bassetti—a renowned entrepreneur, politician and a public intellectual— invited us to the headquarters of Globus et Locus in Milan, after discovering i-Italy.org on the Web. There, we had a rich exchange of opinions on what turned out to be a mission we deeply share: the creation of a virtual network for “Italic encounters.” He told us that he had been waiting for years to assist in the spontaneous creation “from the bottom” of the first nodes of that network, and singled out i- Italy.org as one of them. We were flattered by his appreciation: we were aware that Piero Bassetti had been working for years on the theme of Italicity. We also knew that he approaches it in a provocative way—outside of the classical schemes, relieved from the inflated registers sometimes utilized in institutional discourse, and also from the most common stereotypes.
As editors of i-Italy, we are aware that the creation of an authoritative point of encounter, information and communication on the Web for the Italic community is not only possible, but it is a strongly-felt necessity. Together with our bloggers, readers, and on-line community members we have been working at this for over a year in order to lay the first bricks of the kind of Italy-city this book proposes. This is why, brief but incisive as it is, it immediately caught our attention. And we are glad to have contributed to its translation in English and to its diffusion in the U.S. We invite the English native reader—who will find him/herself to be an “Italic” right from the very first pages—to approach this book not as a plea for the revival of some sort of exclusive sense of ethnic belonging, but rather as a sort of textbook for the cosmopolitan Italic citizen of the Third Millennium, one who feels his to be part of a constantly growing network of multiple, intertwined, g-local identities.
From the ‘Preface’ to Italici by Letizia Airos Soria
Participants:
The Italian/American Digital Project invites you to
participate in an open round table
Participants include:
Piero Bassetti
President, “Globus et Locus”
Francesco Maria Talò
Consul General of Italy in New York
Stefano Albertini
Director, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, NYU
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Dean, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute,
Queens College, CUNY
Teresa Fiore
California State University Long Beach / NYU
Fred Gardaphe
Queens College, CUNY
Fabio Finotti
University of Pennsylvania
Simone Cinotto
New York University
Ottorino Cappelli
Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”
Project Coordinator, The Italian/American Digital Project
Niccolò d'Aquino
Journalist, Corriere della Sera
Letizia Airos Soria
Executive Editor, i-Italy.org
Journalist, America Oggi