Virtual Villa Le Balze: The Decameron and the Hoyasaxon

Storytelling and the Plague, Yesterday and Today

The first event of our Virtual Villa Le Balze series will be a lecture with Professor Laura Benedetti of the Georgetown University Italian Department. Prof. Benedetti holds the Laura and Gaetano De Sole Professorship of Contemporary Italian Culture and has served as a Faculty in Residence at Villa Le Balze.

With the participation of:

– Peter DiGiovanni
– Anne Dyer Fontaine
– Michael Mazzariello
– Jacqueline Nowakowski

In Spring 2020, as the COVID pandemic swept through the U.S. and forced Georgetown University to switch to distance learning, a group of students and their professor found inspiration in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of novellas told during the great pestilence of the mid-1300s. Like their medieval counterparts, each of these contemporary storytellers became queen or king for a day, entertaining the rest of the group with a tale that best illustrated an issue central to their lives. Ideally set against the virtual background of the Tuscan hills around Villa Le Balze, the Hoyasaxon constitutes the result of their collective endeavor.

This will event will be hosted on Zoom. Webinar details will be sent after registering via Eventbrite.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to villainfo@georgetown.edu by September 16, 2020. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. A captioned version of this presentation will also be made available by September 30, 2020 at villalebalze.georgetown.edu.

All events in the series are in support of Villa Le Balze’s Loggia Fund. Supporting the Loggia Fund will allow the Villa to have increased space for programming and will help ensure the Villa’s long term financial viability.