Within the 10th edition of the “Incontri di cultura” in Vietri sul Mare, the cultural association La Congrega Letteraria presents the historical essay “MALINCONIA BAROCCA”, by prof. Aurelio Musi, historian, journalist, officer of merit of the Republic, and former professor at the University of Salerno. Volume published by Neri Pozza.
The appointment is for Friday, November 10, at 18:30 pm at the Council Chamber of the Municipality, at Corso Umberto I n.83, Vietri sul Mare (SA).
Following the institutional greetings of the mayor Giovanni de Simone, the journalist presenter and moderator Aniello Palumbo will bring into dialogue with the author: Maria Anna Noto, associate professor of Modern History and Social History at the University of Salerno; and Mariano Ciarletta, PhD in Historical Studies at the University of Salerno. The evening will be enriched by the friendly singing participation of M° Pasquale Auricchio, countertenor.
Following the specialist interventions, there will be ample opportunity for debate with and among the audience present. Admission is free until all seats are taken. Participants in the event who request it will be issued a regular certificate valid for legal purposes.
For information, the email address is active: congregaletteraria@gmail.com, and the telephone numbers for WhatsApp messaging are: 347 9074117 – 327 2176649.
Biography
Aurelio Musi, historian, journalist, officer of merit of the Republic, member of various Academies, has taught at the University of Salerno and in American universities. Among his most recent volumes: The Empire of the Viceroys (Il Mulino 2013), The Kingdom of Naples (Morcelliana 2015), Philip IV (Salerno Editrice 2021), Modern South. From the Spanish Viceroys to the End of the Two Sicilies (Salerno Editrice 2022), The Great Illusion. Thirty Years After Tangentopoli (Biblion 2022). Neri Pozza has published History of Solitude. From Aristotle to Social Networks (2021) and Maria Sofia. The Last Queen of the South (2022).
The book
Between history and literature, music and art, poetry and philosophy, the essay accompanies the reader to the heart of the Baroque, keeping its guiding sentiment as its North Star: melancholy. An age of decadence, of futile and vain theatricality, of ornamentation devoid of substance: the Baroque has long appeared as an age of transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, marked, like every period of transition, by an aesthetic and moral crisis. Returning to the studies that, over time, have highlighted its specificity, Aurelio Musi instead shows, in these pages, how the Baroque was an age of conflict that is located directly at the roots of the Modern. An age in which disorder seeks the path of order, in an unstable balance between deception and truth, the Baroque appears to you as an era of melancholy in which the feeling of life is inseparable from a profound instinct of death, from the perception of a shipwreck in the things of the world and in the psychic life of its inhabitants. The melancholic soul of the century is revealed in the stories of melancholic men and women that are told here: those of Robert Burton, Cervantes, Descartes, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, of women artists like Artemisia Gentileschi and of nuns closed in the solitude of convents, just as it is found intact in the alternation between harmony and counterpoint typical of the music of the period, made of chromaticisms, polyphonies, canons and imitations. Traversing every field of European artistic and intellectual history, Aurelio Musi composes a fascinating portrait of an era full of contrasts and modernity, marked by the perennial tension between transience and dream.
2023, p. 176, €13,50
ISBN: 9788854527294
Series: Little Library
Genres: Essays
Article published on November 3, 2023 - 11:00
