Monday 4 April, 6pm
An evening to celebrate the memory of Gaia Servadio (1938 – 2021)
We remember our friend Gaia Servadio, a brilliant writer, lecturer, historian, reporter and broadcaster whose books have been translated all over the world, with some of the people who knew her well.
A conversation with Ian Thomson, Simonetta Agnello Hornby, David Gothard, Louise Schofield and Federico Bianchi, chaired by Donald Sassoon. Introduced by Katia Pizzi.
Screening of extracts of the films Alcamo: Anatomy of a Mafia Town, a series of interviews by Gaia in the Sicilian town of Alcamo for Rex Bloomsteins’s 1976 film setting the historical context for the origins of the Mafia and its parasitic emergence in Sicily, in the presence of the director; My Italian Secret (2014), by Oren Jacobi, where Gaia visits Ancona and Osimo, and tells her wartime story; Donne e Soldati (1954), by Luigi Malerba, co-written by Attilio Bertolucci, starring a young Marco Ferreri and featuring Gaia Servadio.
Drinks
Gaia Servadio was an Italian journalist and writer, intellectual, traveller, music and film lover. She moved to London in 1956 and spent most of her life in the British capital. Ever since her first BBC assignment when she was just 18, for a documentary on Sicilian Social activist Danilo Dolci, she worked on several other documentaries for both the BBC and the Italian Rai. As a journalist, she reported from all over the world writing for major Italian and British publications such as La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera, The Times and The Observer. She was an extremely prolific writer who published nearly 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, that have been translated all over the world. We remember fondly the presentation of her latest novel, Giudei (Bompiani), here at Institute last April. Her Belgravia home was a cultural centre and meeting place for politicians, musicians, writers and intellectuals of all kinds, and among her visitors there were the likes of Philip Roth, Primo Levi and Bernardo Bertolucci. Her incredible culture and intelligence was not lost on two Italian Presidents; Sandro Pertini who awarded her with the title of Cavaliere Ufficiale della Repubblica and Giorgio Napolitano, who named her Commendatore. She had three children from her first husband the British historian William Mostyn-Owen, Owen, Allegra and Orlando, and she later married Hugh Myddelton Biddulph.
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