The Italian Culture Institute of Naples (ICI ONLUS) has lived since 1990 and is at present directed by Roberto Pasanisi.
From the beginning, in no suspicious times yet, the Institute has conceived culture in its broader sense, encouraged by deep and social implications: it has denounced, during the programme of its academic year and through its review “Nuove Lettere”, the corruption and inefficiency of the Establishment, the shadiness and secret arrangement among politicians, members of the Mafia and Camorra, the client-management of power; emphasizing again, in the meantime, the strong need for a return to lawfulness and a political and social life based on the solemn values of ethics, culture, justice.
As a matter of fact, one of the causes of what has happened and is happening depends upon the gap which is progressively produced between culture (seen in its broader meaning, and consequently ethically, too) and politics: in this way politics has become a plain technique and from there it has become the most wicked business of all. The fight for the future politics shall be played on culture.
The Institute, during its working, has put on more and more, a civil role (as well as literary and cultural), as a meeting place of what people call now ‘civil society’; a political lab, in its ethimological term ( that is ‘citizen’s learning’) but always above super partes.
In fact, the Institute works, contrary to other prestigious city structures, in direct contact with the town, people, looking for an answer, from a cultural point of view, to their demands and needs for civil and social reference points. For this reason, it works in a mutual and profitable collaboration with other associations and cultural-social organizations.
The Institute, based on democratic principles and ideologically very close to the Frankfurt Philosophy School (Adorno, Marcuse, Löwenthal, Fromm, Horkheimer), is characterized by the most indiscriminate opening, against all ideological bars, but two: intellectual and moral honesty and goodwill.
The Italian Culture Institute in Naples, sometimes in collaboration with other cultural associations, arranges for, during the course of the year, inside its own academic one, a constant and very qualitative cultural activity, such as meetings, conferences, lectures, introductions to and about political and cultural subjects; a course in Neapolitan Language and Literature and a Standing Lab on Contemporary Poetry; it publishes the international poetry and literature Review “Nuove Lettere” and three garlands (poetry, fiction, essay); it sets up an International Poetry and Literature Award “Nuove Lettere”. The ICI ONLUS comprises the CISAT (Italian Art-Therapy Study Centre) which organinizes a theoretic-practical course in Psychology (Art-Therapy and Autogenous Training) and the Foreigners’ Free University “Francesco De Sanctis” (LIUPS).
The Scientific Committee of this Institute is composed of: Constantin Frosin (Professor of French Language and Literature at State University “Dunarea de Jos” at Galati; writer), Antonio Illiano (Full Professor of Italian Language and Literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Roberto Pasanisi (Professor of Italian Language and Literature at State University of International Relations MGIMO, Moscow; Head of the Italian Culture Institute in Naples and of “Nuove Lettere”; writer), Vittorio Pellegrino (already Chairman of Naples Tourist Authority; neuropsychiatrist, Head of Mental Health Department and Professor at Naples University “Federico II”), Násos Vaghenás (Full Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at Athens University; one of the most famous contemporary Greek poets) and Nguyen Van Hoan (Professor of Italian and Vietnamese Literature at Hanoi University). Besides, other two members have worked here till their untimely death the writers Dario Bellezza, Franco Fortini (already Full Professor of History of Criticism at Siena University) and Giorgio Saviane. Assistant Professor: opening. Assistant Manager: Maria Peruzzini. Secretary: Ernesto L’Arab, Maria Peruzzini (Office Head).