The Team Behind Acquerello italiano Audio Magazine
Lao Petrilli
The host of each edition of Acquerello italiano is Lao Petrilli, known to millions of Italian's as a news anchor on Radio Dimensiono, one of Italy's largest commercial networks.
Frances Kennedy
Acquerello italiano is produced by Frances Kennedy, a long-time BBC correspondent in Rome who is also familiar to American audiences as a result of her work for National Public Radio and Marketplace.
Anthony Oldcorn
Anthony Oldcorn is Professor Emeritus of Italian Studies at Brown University. He is the author of a number of books and articles on Italian subjects and has published translations from Italian into English and from English into Italian.
Simon Richardson
Simon Richardson was born in London in 1956. He graduated with a BA in French from the University of Kent at Canterbury and transferred to Italy in 1981, working in the private language school sector. He currently teaches at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy.
Can't wait two months for your next fix of Acquerello italiano? The Acquerello italiano Blog, written by Acquerello italiano Notes editor Anthony Oldcorn, will appeal to anyone who loves our Italian Audio Magazines and wants more of the inside track on all things to do with Italy and Italian culture. Visit the Acquerello italiano Blog today!
Recent highlights from the Acquerello italiano Blog:
Just when we thought the hype was over, this weekend we got the news that the Procuratore della Repubblica (call him the District Attorney) of the port city Civitavecchio in Lazio is about bring an “obscenity” suit against film director Ron Howard and a dozen other people involved in the production and distribution of the 2005 movie The Da Vinci Code, over a year after its Italian release. The Code is long gone from the first-run screens here, but, after the absurdly high-profile London trial for plagiary, and with production about to start on the movie of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (for which Tom Hanks has signed a contract that will apparently dwarf all previous records), you begin to wonder if the courts are simply ingenuous or part of the publicity team. A lawsuit never hurt sales. The plaintiffs are local celibate clergymen offended by the notion that Christ could have fathered a child or Mary Magdalene have been invited to the all-male Last Supper. They want to know why the movie wasn’t forbidden to minors? Apparently, they had no problem with minors getting their fill of the sadistic Aramaic gore of Mel Gibson’s Passion.
I don’t regret never reading or seeing The Da Vinci Code (or Mel Gibson’s Passion). I imagine that it is typical far-fetched scandal-seeking sensationalist fiction, with no claim whatsoever to being historical, inspired among other things by the success of Umberto Eco’s comparatively sober-sided 14th-century mystery The Name of the Rose, which is set in a Benedictine monastery. (The movie, starring Sean Connery, turned out to be something of a flop.) Eco, an Italian Catholic and a true medievalist by formation, treated the monks in his novel like a group of normal people (there are always a few in any group who aren’t normal). He certainly treated them better than Boccaccio in his Decameron, who actually wrote in the Middle Ages, when there were far more of them around. And what Boccaccio didn’t do to them, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his film based on the Decameron, did.
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