Not many people know that the founder of AC Milan and father of Italian football was not a Paolo, or a Franco or a Giovanni……but a Herbert.
Herbert Kilpin was a Victorian textile-worker and amateur footballer, who left Nottingham for Italy in 1891, never to return to the land of his birth. Although he died in obscurity and poverty in Milan in the middle of the Great War, the club he founded went on to become one of the most famous and successful in world football.
Kilpin lived, first in Turin and then in Milan, through an extraordinary period in the development of modern Italy. A century after his death, Kilpin has become the figurehead of the fans on the Curva Sud of the San Siro stadium in Milan. His uncomplicated love of the game, and for the club he founded, serves as a counterpart to the commercialism of modern calcio.
Robert Nieri spent the best part of a decade researching Kilpin’s story before launching his book at il Milan to mark the centenary of Kilpin’s death in 2016. The following year he helped bring to the big screen an award-winning documentary about Kilpin and the fans he continues to inspire.
Robert has also been instrumental in acquainting the people of Nottingham with one of the city’s most influential sons. Kilpin’s birthplace has been renovated; a heritage plaque has been placed on its façade; a Kilpin bus arrives at a Kilpin bus stop outside his house, and passes close to the Kilpin pub in the city centre. The primary school children of Nottingham compete for the Kilpin Trophy in the park where Kilpin played football as a teenager over 130 years ago.
After a century of obscurity, The Lord of Milan has finally come home. Come and hear the amazing true story of Kilpin’s life – and his after-life
Drinks and canapés will be offered after the talk
A Bold and Dangerous Family is the third volume in a quartet about the Resistance before and during World War 2 in Italy and France. It tells the story of Carlo and Nello Rosselli and their mother Amelia, who defied Mussolini during the turbulent years of Fascism and ultimately paid the highest price for their courage. The fourth and last volume of the series, A House in the Mountains, to be published in November 2019, will be about Italian partisans during the 20 month period of civil war in Italy (between September 1943 and April 1945). It is told around the lives of four women fighting in Turin and the mountains of Piedmont. A Bold and Dangerous Family was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2017.
Caroline Moorehead is a historian and biographer. She has previously written lives of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Heinrich Schliemann and Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her role in the French Revolution. She is also the author of various works of with a human rights theme, most recently Human Cargo, a book about refugees. Ms Moorehead is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Drinks will be offered after the talk
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE HELD AT:
Queen Alexandra’s House, Bremner Road Kensington Gore,
London SW7 2QT
Italy is a fascinating destination for lovers of Old Masters, but it also has attractions for contemporary art lovers. Private art foundations, often based in former industrial sites converted into cultural venues, are playing an important role in shaping the contemporary art scene.
Prominent examples are: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaurengo in Turin, created by collector Patrizia Re Rebaurengo and located in a converted railway engine shed; Fondazione Prada, developed by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli and built around their private art collection in a part of Milan which used to be a distillery; and Fondazione Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in a building in an industrial quarter of Milan originally used to build railway carriages and locomotives.
These fondazioni organize multi-disciplinary exhibitions and educational programmes which incorporate painting, sculpture, performance, and multi-media installations. The exhibitions also encompass photography, cinema, video, design and architecture. The fondazioni collaborate with Italian and international museums, and with other institutions and schools, in an effort both to provide artists with new possibilities to explore and to make contemporary art accessible to a wider audience.
Silvia Badiali is a professional Adviser on Art and Finance. She regularly speaks at international art fairs, and at universities in Italy, about the art market and art as an investment. Silvia graduated in economics from Bocconi University in Milan and took a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute in London. She worked in the City of London as an investment banker for more than twenty years, before devoting herself to her real passion, the visual arts.
Drinks will follow the talk
Kindly supported by The Italian Cultural Institute
FOR BIS MEMBERS and 1 guest only
To book please contact the Secretary: elisabetta@www.british-italian.org
Tel: 020 208 2288
We are all familiar with the French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas and his scenes of ballerinas and dancers and of the world of race-courses and jockeys. But few are aware that Degas had close ties with Italy, and that he was greatly influenced by Italian art and artists, especially the Tuscan Impressionist artists of the Macchiaioli School working in Florence in the 1850s-60s, whom he befriended during one of his frequent visits to Italy. Moreover, Edgar’s grandfather, a wealthy international banker, had transferred his family from Paris after the outbreak of the French Revolution, in 1789, to Naples, where Edgar’s father was born. His grandfather owned a splendid Palazzo in Spaccanapoli and a villa at Capodimonte. It was in Naples that Degas made some of his earliest sketches and drawings; and he was instinctively drawn to Italian art. He began copying works by the Italian Masters, especially Da Vinci, Botticelli and Mantegna, in the Louvre.
Edgar visited Italy yearly from 1854 to 1886, except for 1872-3, when he visited America, where he painted the Office of the Musson Cotton Traders in New Orleans. He spent three productive years in Italy from 1856-58, first in Naples, where he painted his grandfather’s portrait, views from his villa and Vesuvius, and then in Rome, copying works by Bronzino and other Italian Masters, and sketching members of the Roman working classes. Then, travelling via Orte, Orvieto, Perugia and Assisi (to see Giotto’s frescoes), he arrived in Florence. Besides finding inspiration in the Uffizi, it was in Florence that Degas met the Macchiaioli School. They encouraged Degas to paint plein air subjects realistically and to explore the close relationship between man and horse. This instilled in Degas a life-long love of horses, and inspired his celebrated paintings and drawings of race-course life. Italy, especially Naples, held a special place for Degas; and Italy, and Italian culture, particularly the art of the Macchiaioli, were formative influences on him. This lecture, containing new research on Degas, will be accompanied by illustrations of some of Degas’ most important work.
Dr Denis V Reidy has had a life-long interest in nineteenth-century culture, especially Anglo-Italian relations. He graduated in Italian and French from Leeds University, where he was awarded the Lucy Whitmell Prize. He then taught at Leeds University, and was a Lecturer in Italian Language at the University of Sheffield. In 1975, he was appointed Head of the Italian and Modern Greek Collections at the British Library, and was responsible for organizing many exhibitions, including on Sir Anthony Panizzi 1789-1879, The Italian Book 1465-1800, and The British Library’s Italian Collections. After completing an MA on The Influences of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy on Dante’s Convivio at Birkbeck College, he was made an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, London, where he lectures on Italian printing. He was awarded a PhD from the Royal Holloway in 2015. He has published nine books, and over one hundred articles in scholarly and peer reviewed journals, and has delivered more than one hundred lectures at universities including Oxford, London, Milan, Reggio Emilia, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Caracas and Istanbul.
In 2017, Denis was awarded the Premio Barone Carlo Poerio con medaglia del Presidente della Repubblica Italiana at a ceremony in Naples in recognition of his contribution to research on Anglo-Italian relations, and especially for his publications on Italian Risorgimento history.
Drinks will follow the talk
This is a popular event and early booking is recommended.
In case of a waiting list, priorities will be given to BIS members.
Only one guest per member allowed.
Cellini’s most glamorous production is the high-point of Italian goldsmith work, featuring in almost every book on the History of Art. Its patron was King François I of France, whose fashionable new palace gave its name to this episode in the history of style – the School of Fontainebleau. Yet how well do we really know it?
New colour images taken in Vienna, after its recovery in 2006 from an audacious theft, reveal its intricate details in enamel, almost as if we had it in our hands. Its superb artistry and challenging intellectual content will be instantly apparent. Cellini himself gives a riveting account of its inception, and of its positive reception by the King and negative one by his mistress, Mme d’Etampes. Later it was used as a wedding present for a French princess.
It was then – with a change of owner’s taste – almost melted down, and the identity of the artist was lost, until a perceptive Austrian museum curator in the early 20th Century connected the anonymous, but distinctive, object with the masterpiece so lovingly described by its creator in Cellini’s famous Autobiography.
Formerly a Trustee of the British-Italian Society, Charles Avery is a specialist in European, particularly Italian, sculpture. A graduate in Classics from Cambridge University, he obtained a Diploma in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and a doctorate for published work from Cambridge. Charles was Deputy Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1966-79) and a Director of Christie’s for a decade. Since 1990 he has been an independent historian, consultant, writer and lecturer.
Charles’ books include Florentine Renaissance Sculpture (1970), Donatello: an Introduction (1994), Giambologna, the Complete Sculpture (1987), Bernini, Genius of the Baroque (1997 – paperback, 2006), The Triumph of Motion: Francesco Bertos (1678-1741) and the Art of Sculpture (2008) and A School of Dolphins (2009). His latest book, Joseph De Levis & Company: Renaissance Bronze-Founders in Verona, was published in 2016.
Drinks will be offered after the talk
We will not be able to give refunds for cancellation later than 48 hours before the event
Since it was founded in 1941, the British-Italian Society has worked to promote knowledge and understanding in the UK of Italian culture, including Italy’s history, institutions, way of life, language and wider contribution to civilisation.
The British-Italian Society
86-90 Paul Street
London EC2A 4NE