ucrezia libertine and poisoner, complicit instrument of the Borgia family in the ruthless exercise of power, or woman-angel, against the background of a discordant Renaissance, with exquisite refinements and perfect crimes, from the rarefied world of artists to the horrors of battlefields, from medieval inheritances to the first lights of modernity: these are the clichéd ways of thinking which have produced a widely consumed 'mythology'. The project "Lucrezia. Letteratura, mito, culture", proposed by Facoltà di Lettere dell'Università degli Studi di Ferrara intends to restore the original colours of the portrait, combining the scientific aspect with a more popular one, by means of a wide variety of international conferences, study days and higher-level, specialist talks.
Study days are devoted to different themes: Literature in the Courtly Age; the History of Science from neo-platonic ideas to magical and astrological practices; the eighteenth century reception of the Lucrezia myth from Hugo to Donizetti; geography and social history with particular attention to the condition of women, and to the practices of contempt and public dishonour of which Lucrezia Borgia was a target.
Of the two international conferences, one is devoted to the education of princes in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and the other to the spread in Italy and Europe of Spanish poetry of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, favoured by the Borgia family, and to the collections possessed by Lucrezia Borgia In addition, concerts of Lucrezia Borgia's favourite renaissance pieces of music will be held.
These initiatives will be accompanied by around fifteen talks and by shows focusing on the image of Lucrezia from literature to cinema, arriving at an investigation of the reliquary - fetishism which has built up around her.

Università degli Studi
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia
Via Savonarola 27
44100 Ferrara
Tel: 0532 - 293434
michele.bordin@libero.it