Meetings and other initiatives

An internal seminar with the title La cremazione nell’Italia di fine Ottocento (Cremation in Italy at the end of the Nineteenth Century), held in 1994, was closely connected to the research in progress at the time and now completed. In 1995 another seminar was organized, on a topic, Freemasonry, which proved to be of great importance in the outlining of a history of cremation Cremazione e Massoneria nell’Italia di fine Ottocento (Cremation and Freemasonry in Italy at the end of the Nineteenth Century)

A third meeting, with the title Conservazione e distruzione del corpo (Preservation and destruction of the body) was held in 1995(records published). The reports of the first section had an eminently historical cut, while the ones of the other section focused primarily on death as a collective event in the industrial and post-industrial societies from a sociologic and anthropologic point of you as well as from a historical one.

An international meeting with an inter-disciplinary approach was held on the 24^th  and 25^th of September 1999 with the title La scena degli addii: morte e riti funebri nella società occidentale contemporanea ( The Farewell Scene – Death and Funerary Rites in the contemporary Western Society). On this occasion the problem of the crisis of traditional funerary rites was considered, with a special attention to the new ritual experiences of today’s Europe. This was the first of a series of meetings on death topics that the Fabretti Foundation intends to organize every other year.

Meetings in 2000

November 24

A meeting on Ariodante Fabretti nella Torino di fine Ottocento (Ariodante Fabretti in Turin at the end of the XVIII Century) was held in the Sala dei Mappamondi at the Accademia delle Scienze of Turin. Purpose of this meeting was to celebrate and to study the figure of Ariodante Fabretti and to outline his many-sided and lively cultural relations with Turin.

December 2

Day of studies on Il lutto nella società italiana (Mourning in the Italian Society), at the conference hall of the Turin State Archives. It was organized by the ‘Istituto di Tanatologia Psicologica’ of Bologna with the purpose of pointing out some historical and theoretical aspects of mourning, with a special attention to all those people who, due to their professions, have to deal with mourning.

Meetings in 2001

September 28 and 29

Organized by the Fabretti Foundation in collaboration with the ‘Centro interdipartimentale di Studi sull’Utopia’ of the Bologna University and the History Department of the Turin University, the meeting Perfezione e Finitudine. La concezione della morte nelle utopie dell’età moderna e contemporanea (Perfection and Finitude – The concept of death in the utopias of the modern and contemporary age) was held in the conference hall of the Turin State Archives. With its interdisciplinary approach, the meeting focused on the conceptual relation between two themes: on the one side death, the human limit par excellence, on the other Utopia, which, as a project for a different and better society than the real one, carries out different strategies in order to attenuate, neutralize and ignore the very impact of death.  
The first section (afternoon of Friday,September 28), with the title La morte e l’Utopia: temi e problemi (Death and Utopia: themes and problems), with its eminently theoretical cut, focused on the general topic of the concept of death and on those of health, old age and euthanasia, as well as on funerary rites and cemeteries and on metempsychosis.
The second section (Saturday, September 29) focused on the conceptualization of death in Utopia through the centuries, analysing those authors who have studied with different methods and in different geographical areas, from as far back as the Renaissance up to the distopias and to the science fiction of the contemporary age.

Meetings in 2002

December 2

The Fabretti Foundation organized a day of studies on La letteratura guarda la morte. Lo scrittore, la vecchiaia e la fine della vita (Writers, old age and the end of life). Every century had great writers and thinkers that reached a very old age and whose reflections on old age and on death, theirs and of others, have always been the object of deep meditation, as, for example, in the XIX century, Simone de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce, Albert Cohen’s La mort de ma mère, and Bobbio’s De Senectute. The purpose of this meeting was to analyse some literary texts of our age that convey a deep sense of meditation on death and, at the same time, to gather some of the most deep thoughts from writers and artists who spoke about their creativity in relation to their own finitude.