Democracy and Pandemics

The conference, dedicated to the relationship between spirituality and medicine from a comparative and trans-historical perspective, examines popular, vernacular, complementary, alternative, indigenous, and biological medicines. The alternative healthcare movements to scientific medicine that challenged the management of the pandemic often have religious and/or spiritual roots, and have had significant political repercussions, providing new momentum to nationalism, populism, and fundamentalism.

Five years have passed since Covid-19 struck the world, profoundly influencing thought and social relations. The study day aims to assess the consequences of the pandemic through a reflection on sounds and musical practices, which will be among the research themes of the Institute in 2025, also within the framework of the online workshop series Musical Perspectives.

Within the extensive sacred and secular output of Ciconia, the seminar focuses particularly on the ceremonial motets, including Ut te per omnes celitus / Ingens alumnus Padue. Composed in Padua and explicitly dedicated to Zabarella, the piece describes divine omnipotence and alludes to an apocalyptic scenario through the words omnippater qui cuncta nutu concutit.

The possibility that this scenario refers to the plague is suggested by the resurgence of the disease in Padua in 1404, which forced Zabarella to withdraw, perhaps with some of his familiares, to Cittadella. This hypothesis will be examined alongside the connections between the plague and not only the biographical events of Ciconia and his patrons but also contemporary musical repertoires. Barbara Zanichelli and Pedro Memelsdorff will lead the seminar, which is organised in collaboration with and the support of the Concordance Foundation (Basel), the Alamire Foundation (Leuven), Irma Merk Stiftung, and the L.+Th. La Roche Stiftung (Basel).

The Longhena Library hosts an exhibition of documents and publications dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, focused on the theme of the last two plagues that struck Venice, the public health policies of the Serenissima, and the cultural and artistic repercussions experienced as a response to the catastrophe. Additionally, the exhibition is enriched through multimedia solutions, featuring images, texts, sound recordings, and videos, offering visual content that allows for a deeper understanding. Overall, it provides an experience aimed at engaging the visitor, with the goal of connecting historical documents, past scientific experiences, and historical perspectives with the languages of contemporary technology.

This study day is organised in collaboration with the Laboratorio Soldado de Nápoles, directed by Gabriele Frasca of the University of Salerno. The group investigates the intertwining of the First World War and the pandemic as a determining factor in shaping the artistic and cultural climate of the 1920s. The papers offer a series of critical readings that range across various artistic and disciplinary fields: from the faces of the disease in Egon Schiele to the figures of contagion and contamination in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the interweaving of cosmopolitanism and musical nationalism in Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat, to the impact of the pandemic on the devising of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Sette canzoni.

The exhibition aims to evoke and stage the cultural and artistic climate of the early decades of the eighteenth century in Venice, which served as the backdrop for the birth and formation of Casanova.

The exhibition project spans the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Palazzo Cini Gallery, with scientific coordination by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History. At its core is the extraordinary collection of caricatures from Anton Maria Zanetti il Vecchio’s Album, alongside a selection of paintings, drawings, engravings, objects, books, and other artefacts from the Foundation’s collections, as well as valuable loans from Italian and international museums and private collections.

Particularly fascinating will be materials from the Nino Rota Archive held by the Institute of Music, related to the famous film Casanova by Federico Fellini (1976): notebooks with musical notes, handwritten scores, and photographs. Additionally, documents from the Malipiero Archive will be available, showcasing the renowned composer’s particular interest in the Venetian eighteenth century, to which he dedicated a significant body of works, as well as a text (Giacomo Casanova and Music, in Il filo d’Arianna. Saggi e fantasie, Einaudi, 1966), of which notes and transcriptions are preserved.

Fondazione Giorgio Cini has always had a vocation for dialogue between the humanities and the sciences and is recognised as a place for reflection on global issues. With the symposium Global Health in the Age of AI: Charting a Course for Ethical Implementation and Societal Benefit, organised last November, the Foundation renewed this commitment by inaugurating a new cycle of international meetings aimed at facilitating the identification of solutions to contemporary challenges. This year, the conference Democracy and Pandemics aims to explore how democracies can address the challenges posed by pandemics, approaching the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The symposium brings together experts from medicine, economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, and law, to develop global and sustainable solutions. The event underscores the importance of international collaboration and seeks to provide concrete reflections to minimise the human and economic damages of future health crises.

The aim of the meeting is to explore the role of theatre as a cultural heritage of democracy, starting from examples of contemporary stagings of dramatic texts centred on the great pandemics and epidemics in history. Following a theoretical approach to the subject, the event will feature testimonies from scholars and artists regarding the most significant contemporary productions dedicated to these themes, including The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, staged by Giorgio Strehler in the 1960s, and The Plague by Albert Camus, produced by Claudio Longhi for the Teatro Stabile di Torino and by Serena Sinigaglia for the Teatro Stabile di Bolzano in the 2000s.