De-stereotyping the Italians:

What do Americans really know about the Bel Paese?

Recently we have questioned the way different cultures and ethnicities are represented in media and the arts, sometimes even rejecting masterpieces of the past as embodying obsolete and offensive ideas. The Italian stereotype, however seems to have survived: dark hair, strong accent, exasperated gestures, deep religiosity, inclination to dishonesty, a diet of pizza, spaghetti and “espresso”, and in the case of men, often served by over caring yet suffocating female figures. On the other hand, this image is flanked by another of a higher profile: Italians are heirs of an ancient civilization, educated, elegant in the way they dress and live, often approached with a sense of inadequacy and deference. But where does the real culture of the Italian people lie? In this talk, Dr. D’Angelo will investigate the ancient and modern that have contributed to the construction of the Italian stereotype, from travel diaries and portraits of grand tourists of the XVIII century to the most recent media images, in order to reconstruct the origins and the developments of a phenomenon that persists today.

Laura D'Angelo is a contemporary art and architecture historian. She graduated from Rome Tre University's Faculty of Humanities and received a European Master in History of Architecture at the Academy of Saint Luke. Her education and early career were spent in international institutions such as Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and Paris, where she worked at the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Louvre Museum. She earned her PhD in 2008 at the University of Roma Tre with a thesis focused on the institutional role of the artist Giulio Aristide Sartorio. In 2010 and 2017, she participated in two PRIN (National Interest Research Project) fellowships at the University of Roma Tre. Since 2016, she has been an adjunct professor of Contemporary Architecture at the University of Arkansas Rome Program, where she currently carries her main scientific and teaching activities and has collaborated with La Sapienza University since 2020. Her research interests are social, architectural, and urban developments of modern Rome, Italian public art, and the art and culture of the 1970s.