Tim Parks in conversation with John Foot
Chaired by Nicol Degli Innocenti (Il Sole 24 Ore)
Introduced by Katia Pizzi (Director, ICI London)
How does Italy really work? The bestselling writer on Italian culture sets out to answer the big question
From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and Italian Ways, Italian Life is a particular reckoning with a beloved adopted country. It takes place in a university in the north. Valeria, a talented young woman from hot, dusty Basilicata, enrols together with thousands of others for a degree course that could take anything between three and ten years to complete, given the vagaries of the system. She has sacrificed a great deal to get here. However, as both Valeria and her rich supporting cast of students and professors will soon discover, there are dark and capricious forces at the institution’s heart.
In the author’s own words: “I am inviting you now to plunge into an Italian fable, to discover a new emotional landscape and become yourself, if only momentarily perhaps, in the final climactic pages, Italian”.
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan. He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, In Extremis, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the John Florio Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize.
John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History at the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. He specialises in twentieth century and contemporary Italian history on which he has published extensively. His publications include: Milan Since the Miracle; Calcio. A History of Italian Football; Italy’s Divided Memory; Pedalare! Pedalare!; The Man Who Closed the Asylums and, more recently, The Archipelago. Italy since 1945. He is also a regular contributor to The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and History Today.
Nicol Degli Innocenti has been a London-based correspondent for Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading economic and business daily, since 2014. In the last four years, she has focused mainly on Brexit and on arts and culture. Before that, she worked for the Financial Times in Johannesburg and London. After obtaining her degree and doctorate (Ph.D) from the London School of Economics, she moved back to Italy to join Il Sole 24 Ore in 1990 and worked on the foreign desk for ten years before moving to South Africa where she worked for the FT, Il Sole 24 Ore and ANSA.
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