ITALY READS AND ITALY WRITES AT JCU John Cabot University holds an annual Creative Writing contest to recognize excellence in Italian high school students whose primary language of instruction is not English. Italy Writes began in 2011 as the first “sister” of the 10-year Italy Reads program. A variety of Activities for High Schools followed. Seeded by an NEA grant for The Big Read Rome in 2009, JCU has since offered this annual program of English language reading and cultural exchange that brings American university students together with Italian high school students. Each year, a work of American literature is the focus of discussions, student projects and meetings, public events, and theatrical performances by The English Theatre of Rome. The winning piece for non-fiction this year is about Walt Whitman and American Impressionism. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was this year’s focus of Italy Reads. Next year, the focus will be on Rachel Carson's ground breaking book for environmentalism Silent Spring. Find out more at Italy Reads and Italy Writes on the John Cabot website www.johncabot.edu.
BRUSHES AND WORDS: AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM AND WHITMAN By Cecilia Federici, Liceo Scientifico G. B. Morgagni, Rome, 1st Place, Non-Fiction. Once Henri Matisse said “Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul” and, as such, it is always changing and shaping in unexpected forms. So is Whitman’s poetry, always trying to capture an impression of reality. From an ideological, conceptual and stylistic way, analogies between the American movement and the poet can be easily found. One of the most interesting of Whitman’s dilemmas is life, and the way it is connected to identity. “I meet new Walt Whitmans every day. There are a dozen of me afloat. I don’t know which Walt Whitman I am”, life is something growing and dynamic, it is the accumulation of senses. Identity, as life, is the summary of all the experiences one has gone through, it is an eternal adding process. And here is the origin of diversity: no one has experienced the same as every other person in this world has. So how can an individual be part of a society formed by strangers who have poor in common with him/her? He/she can be, and must be, part of that society because all of them have surely one thing in common: they are all human beings, and as human beings they are inevitably linked by democracy “I say democracy is [...] the highest form of interaction between men”. Democracy for Whitman
50 | May 2020 • Wanted in Rome
is not only “...for election, for politics, and for a party name”, democracy is the “ideological blood” of human society. It should permeate every aspect of human life. In this sense he relates democracy to art: he creates the concept of democratic art, an art where no discrimination is allowed, an art where everyone is equal to the others. So how can a form of art be more unequivocal than photography? Photography has the greatest power of indiscrimination: what’s in the lens is what the public is going to see, no more alteration, modification or adjustment to the reality. The Impressionist concept of art is very similar to Whitman’s “democratic art”: their idea was to capture one single moment that’s unrepeatable. Both the French and the American Impressionists preferred portraying everyday settings rather than imposing a stricter and more classical style to their paintings. But the Americans went for a more “American setting” than their companions in France: despite their French mentors “privileged form and color over subject matter”, the American counterpart adopted the example of Renoir, on their canvas the deep depiction of the transformation of the American society prevailed. Artists like Childe Hassam in Just Off the Avenue,
