This week, Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) Founder and President, Antonio Giordano, M.D., Ph.D., participates in a lecture sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Institute for European Studies.
The topic, “The Filangieri-Franklin Correspondence: a 240-year long discourse between Italy and the US,” will explore the long tradition of collaboration on science and civic life beginning with the founding father and the famous philosopher.
More information, and registration, is available here.
Featured Speaker: Amedeo Arena, Full Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Naples Federico II; Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley
Speakers: Sergio Strozzi, Consul General, Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco; Anna Maria Di Giorgio, Director, Italian Cultural Institute San Francisco; Antonio Giordano, Director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine; Patrick Spero, Director of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum
Moderator: Jeroen Dewulf, Director, Institute of European Studies
Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, Department of Italian Studies, Program for the Study of Italy, Italian Cultural Institute SF, Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco, America Philosophical Society, The National Italian American Foundation, Federico II University
On August 24, 1782, the Neapolitan Enlightenment philosopher Gaetano Filangieri sent his first letter to Benjamin Franklin, who had already received two volumes of Filangieri’s treatise on good government, The Science of Legislation, from a mutual acquaintance, the Neapolitan diplomat Luigi Pio. A lively correspondence ensued and lasted until 1788, the year of Filangieri’s untimely death, just a few days short of his 35th birthday. With his last letter to Filangieri, dated October 14, 1787, Franklin enclosed a copy of the US Constitution as a token of his gratitude for Filangieri’s “invaluable work” on legislation. While the extent of Filangieri’s influence on Franklin and, through him, on the making of the US Constitution is still being assessed by scholars from several countries, the Filangieri-Franklin correspondence certainly marks the starting point of a discourse on certain values shared by many Italians and Americans, values that are still relevant nowadays and that are central to the identity of both nations. This talk will examine some of those shared values as well as their most relevant historical concretizations.
About the Sbarro Health Research Organization
The Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) is non-profit charity committed to funding excellence in basic genetic research to cure and diagnose cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic illnesses and to foster the training of young doctors in a spirit of professionalism and humanism. To learn more about the SHRO please visit www.shro.org
