(20 July 2016) On Tuesday, July 26, during the exhibition “Pompeii a Roman city”, currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal presents at its head office, a lecture entitled “the conquest. Hellenism, Rome and America”, by Professor Luciano Bossina, classical Philology professor at the University of Padua. The history of Hellenism in fact it is also a story of conquest and colonization. A peripheral kingdom like Macedonia, semi-barbaric in the eyes of the Athenians, first winning Greece, then all the East. The same will later do Rome, according to the iron law of universal empires traced by Polybius on the first page of its history. Can the European “conquest” of the Americas be explained in the same terms? Which model offered Rome and Alexander the Great to the Spaniards of Cortes? Can one read the modern colonialism in the light of the old colonialism? To all these questions will respond Bossina, who has published more than 100 articles and conference proceedings in the fields of Greek philology and ancient Christian literature. The event is part of a rich program of conferences proposed up to year-end by the Italian Institute of Culture in Montreal, in order to turn the spotlight on the excellence of Italian knowledge of Roman civilization, the historical and archaeological heritage and Latin documentary and on restoration and recovery projects of new areas of Pompeii. (Red)
