The theme of the 20th edition of the Week of Italian Language in the World (October 19 to 25) is Italian Between Word and Image: Graffiti, Illustrations, Comic Books. To mark the event, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto will present a lecture by Professor Vittorio Frigerio on the history of Italian “fumetto” (comics).
The Many Lives of “Fumetto”: The Richness and Variety of Italian Comics
Thursday, October 22 | 3:00PM EDT
This talk will provide a bird’s eye view of the development, growth and diversification of Italian comics starting with their popularization in the first years of the 20th century, thanks to magazines such as the weekly Il Corriere dei Piccoli, and ending with today’s “graphic novels”. From the start, Italian “fumetti” entertained an ambiguous but strong relationship with modern painting, the world of literature, and eventually cinema. They evolved progressively, through the upheavals of the Second World War, into a massive market enjoying great popularity with readers of all ages and producing a wealth of original creators, several of whom would exert an important influence on the development of the genre worldwide. We will present here an array of some of the most significant of these authors, to name a few, Sergio Tofano, Benito Jacovitti, Aurelio Galleppini, Grazia Nidasio, Hugo Pratt, Magnus, Guido Buzzelli, Dino Battaglia, GiPi and Zerocalcare, and their most unforgettable characters and stories.
VITTORIO FRIGERIO
Vittorio Frigerio is Emeritus Professor in the Department of French at Dalhousie University (Halifax, N.S.). He is a specialist of 19th century French literature, in particular the works of Alexandre Dumas père. On comics, he is the author of the book Bande dessinée et littérature : intersections, fascinations, divergences (Macerata : Quodlibet Elements, 2018). He has created the multilingual online journal Belphégor (https://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/?lang=en) dedicated to the study of popular literature and media culture, where he has been able to pursue and foster his interest in comics as an artistic and literary form. He is presently editing an upcoming issue of the U.S. journal Paradoxa on “Comics and/or Graphic Novels”.
