A morning of studies and insights into the figure of the great Venetian traveler and popularizer with the contribution of the students
Aula Magna of the Francesco Algarotti Institute in Venice packed, Saturday 4 May for the day celebrating the 260th anniversary of the death of the traveller, popularizer and brilliant Venetian intellectual who gave his name to the school dedicated to him 62 years ago. For the occasion, the conference entitled was staged “Francesco Algarotti, what a guy!” in which the students also took an active part.
But who was Francesco Algarotti? Born in Venice in 1712, he studied in various cities, he was an Italian writer, essayist and art collector, polimate, philosopher, poet. Enlightenment spirit, Anglophile, erudite endowed with knowledge that ranged from Newtonianism to architecture, to music, he was a friend of the greatest personalities of the time: Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Boyer d’Argens, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Among his correspondents were Lord Chesterfield, Thomas Gray, George Lyttelton, Thomas Hollis, Metastasio, Benedict XIV, Heinrich von Brühl, Frederick II of Prussia. He died in Pisa in 1764.
Presenting his figure, introduced by the Headmaster Diego Bottacin, were professors Klaus-Werner Haupt and Sebastiano Amato who carried out a scientific excursus on the figure of Algarotti, prof Cristina Cortese who recalled the importance at that time of the “Travel Notebook” used by foreign intellectuals who came to Italy for their “grand tour” and in this way fix the memories and sensations of what they admired in the Bel Paese.
But the students, strengthened by their experiences in the field of new digital technologies, involved everyone present first of all with an online questionnaire to be filled out with smartphone in hand with which everyone was able to measure their degree of affinity with the illustrious Venetian and a video in which it was staged a suggestive imaginary interview between some students and the ghost of Algarotti, among the streets of Venice, the Library of San Francesco della Vigna, his birthplace and the school itself. At the end of the morning one of the students, Alessandro Barbiero, donated to the school an oil on canvas painting depicting Algarotti, taken from a work by the painter Jean-Etienne Liotard from 1745. The beauty and attention to detail amazed everyone.
Principal Bottacin was satisfied: “I saw a school capable of producing culture, innovation, the interpretation of what they study with digital tools. I had fun, a curious morning, surprised by so many unsuspected talents like the author of the painting.
Algarotti was a modern character and precursor of various aspects of contemporaneity and from today it guides our work even more
to train curious kids with a desire to travel and learn”.
Riccardo Musacco
