Between September and December 2020, the French Institute of Italy organised a national cycle of 14 Franco-Italian meetings in 7 Italian cities (Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Mantua, Milan, Rome and Turin), in order to deepen the dialogue between France and Italy on the challenges of the present.

These encounters took place in partnership with Italian festivals such as the Festivaletteratura in Mantua, Insieme the festival of Letterature, Libre Come and Più libri più libero in Rome, the Bookcity festival in Milan, the Science festival in Genoa and the GiovediScienza festival in Turin.

Other meetings took place under the umbrella of the " Farnese Dialogues ", a series of Franco-Italian meetings initiated in 2018 in the prestigious Farnese Palace and focusing on the most important challenges of our time.

The "No man is an island" programme takes the unprecedented experience of confinement as a starting point to question the paradox of our hyper-connected and yet fragmented societies, in order to better understand local and global interdependencies, and to seize the opportunity of this historical break to imagine other ways of living together.

Details of the events and the full programme can be found here.

  • The "Fragmentation and Interdependencies" debate was held on 23 October 2020 and brought together the philosopher Bruno Latour and the astrophysicists Carlo Rovelli and Aurélien Barrau.

  • The dialogue "The new face of the city after the emergency" brought together the architects Luca Molinari and Giovannu Longobardi, in dialogue with Villa Medicis residents Alice Grégoire and Clément Périssé.

Among the great Italian figures taking part in this series of debates: the astrophysicist Carlo Rovelli, the philosophers Donatella Di Cesare and Nuccio Ordine, the writer Michele Mari, the architectural historian Luca Molinari and the priest Federico Lombardi.

On the French side, economists Esther Duflo (Nobel Prize in Economics 2019) with Abhijit Banerjee, economist Gaël Giraud, writers Valérie Perrin and Maylis de Kerangal, comic book author Emilie Plateau, geopolitologist Virgine Raisson, the Alexandre Dumas specialist Claude Schopp, the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, the physicist Gérard Mourou, the astrophysicists Jean-Pierre Luminet and Aurélien Barrau, the historian Michel Pastoureau, the psychologist Stanislas Dehaene and the philosopher Olivier Remaud. Other speakers included scientific and political figures such as Jean-François Delfraissy (doctor, president of the National Consultative Ethics Committee and of the Covid-19 Scientific Council), Mireille Delmas-Marty (lawyer, president of the Pharos Observatory of Cultural Pluralism and Relationships), and field actors such as the biologist photographers Béatrice Kremer-Cochet and Gilbert Cochet, the entrepreneur Julien Dossier and the activist Nelly Pons.

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Project leader: Florence Ferran (scientific and university cooperation attaché)