WRITER ALEXANDER STILLE TO SPEAK ON BERLUSCONI'S ITALY
AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- Author Alexander Stille, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and La Repubblica, one of Italy's most influential and widely read newspapers, will speak on "The Culture of Berlusconi's Italy" on Wednesday, April 17, at 6:30 PM, in the art building's Gamble Auditorium. The talk, the College's annual Italian lecture, is free and open to the public, and the auditorium is wheelchair accessible.

"If you combined the political roles of Republican front-runner George W. Bush and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, the media power of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, the money of Ross Perot and Steve Forbes, and the real estate and personal arrogance of Donald Trump, you would begin to get an idea of how long a shadow Silvio Berlusconi casts over Italian public life," Stille wrote in the January 24, 2000 issue of the Nation.

Stille has been called "a writer to watch" by the New York Times and "a lovely storyteller" by Publishers Weekly. He is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (Simon & Schuster, 1991), Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (Pantheon 1995), and the recently published The Future of the Past (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). He also writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Review of Books. The Future of the Past examines the complicated connections between technology and our relationship to the past. Portions of this book have appeared in the New Yorker, including "Library Privileges," which explores the modernization of the Vatican Library, "The Museum of Obsolete Technology," which discusses information overload at the National Archives in Washington, and "Head Found on Fifth Avenue," which details the looting of Sicilian antiquities. Stille will sign copies of the book after his talk.

The event is sponsored by MHC¯s Department of Spanish and Italian with the support of the Purington Fund and the Departments of Art, History, Politics, and Sociology and Anthropology.