News & Events

Rosemary Sullivan will give a lecture entitled Narrating History/Narrare la storia in which she will talk about her book Villa Air-Bel. She will be introduced by Carla Comellini of Bologna University.

France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, and scores of other cultural elite who have been denounced as enemies of the Third Reich the fear of imminent arrest, deportation, and death defines their daily life. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive.

Villa Air-Bel delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history. It is a remarkable account of how a diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

Rosemary Sullivan is the bestselling author of Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession and The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, Shadow Maker, won the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. She is a poet and a professor of English at the University of Toronto

For more about Rosemary Sullivan and Villa Air-Bel, visit her website: http://www.rosemarysullivan.com/

The talk will be followed by a screening of the short The Road Out directed by Juan Opitz and produced and narrated by Rosemary Sullivan

Contact: Associazione Culturale Italo Britannica, Via Farini 35, 40124 Bologna, Tel 051 221249, info@italobritannica.com.
When: 18.00 on 12 May 2010
Where: Associazione Culturale Italo Britannica, via Farini 35.
Admission Free.