The Italian Cultural Institute in New York recently launched the “Stanze Italiane” project, an initiative for celebrating Italian art, literature, music, design and the Italian landscape on a digital platform accessible to all those who want to immerse themselves in the treasures of Italy, even from thousands of kilometres away. The aim is to bring Italian culture to the United States and to the world and, at the same time, to bring the United States and the world to Italy.
Conceived by the director of the Institute, Fabio Finotti, the website was launched on March 22 and includes ten spaces full of multimedia content: a digital storytelling with high resolution images, transformed into maps of textual and audiovisual contents, and music extracted from songs belonging to every genre and every musical era suitable for the different themes of the Rooms. The iconography of the site is constructed through some symbolic images of Italy and its relationship with New York made available by museums, foundations, institutions and private collections – the National Gallery of the Marche, the MART of Trento and Rovereto, Casa Leopardi, the Renzo Piano Foundation.
“Stanza in our language is an architectural space, but it is also a literary and musical space: stanzas are that of a poem or a song. In this space – as articulated and welcoming as a home – lovers of Italian culture will be able to find what they are looking for: memory and innovation, dialogues and insights that intertwine past and future. And above all they will find a community that unites Italians and Italics: those who live in Italy, and those who breathe its civilization and nourish it while living outside the peninsula” said the director Finotti.
The rooms currently open are three: Atrium, dedicated to the history of the New York Institute with a series of historical images of the building that houses it at 686 Park Avenue from the 1960s; Dante’s Room, on the Supreme Poet to join the celebrations of Dantedì planned by the Italian government on 25 March; Stoà, the portico, a meeting place, passage and look from the inside to the outside and vice versa.
In the coming months all the others will be open to the public – Gallery, to get to know characters and works of Italian art or related to Italy; Auditorium, a space for cinema, music, television and all forms of audiovisual production up to the internet; Fireplace, for the most intimate dialogues on characters and books that unite the two sides of the ocean; Library, to celebrate the treasures of the Italian language; Children’s Corner, dedicated to the little ones; Design Workshop, to celebrate Made in Italy; Horti, not to forget the beautiful Italian landscape.
