The awarding of a Cassamarca Lectureship to Melbourne University’s Department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies enabled the department to expand its Italian subjects. It was particularly keen to raise the profile of Italian film studies and cultural studies. The first incumbent, Dr Kerstin Pilz, achieved excellent results. Her teaching activities included the creation in 2000 of a new course on Italian cinema, called “L’Italia in primo piano”. In 2004 she also coordinated a course on contemporary Italian cinema, “European Spectacle”, which offered a thematic approach to understanding Europe through film and theatre.
Dr Andrea Rizzi took over as the department’s Cassamarca Lecturer in January 2005. He had just two weeks to adjust to the Melbourne campus before the start of semester, having arrived from Adelaide, where he had held the position of Cassamarca Lecturer at the University of South Australia. Dr Rizzi hopes to further the good work of his predecessor, as well as stimulating greater interest in his research areas – Italian renaissance history and translation theory. He brings apparently boundless energy to the position, along with a willingness to be flexible in his teaching areas. In fact, he is delighted by the need for versatility and the opportunity to teach in the field of Italian film and cultural studies which the new position presents. At the University of South Australia Dr Rizzi increased the Italian Department’s “Italian On-line” programme, an innovative language i-learning scheme. At Melbourne he will be partly responsible for continuing the activities of the university’s Study Abroad programme, which organises trips to Italy at an advanced level for students and members of the community. Dr Rizzi is working on a critical edition of the works of Matteo Maria Boiardo, the fifteenth-century courtier and poet whose best known work is the Orlando Innamorato.
Another research project is in the area of translation theories. “There were 160 translators working for the Renaissance courts and their work has never been studied,” explains Dr Rizzi, who applies contemporary translation theory to Renaissance translation practice. Translation is an area of great general interest to Dr Rizzi, who notes that in Australia, only three to four per cent of books published are translated from languages other than English. He would like to see that figure increase. Dr Rizzi was brought up in an Italo-Australian household in Milan, speaking Italian and English. He completed his degree at the University of Pavia, his doctorate at the University of Kent, and arrived in Australia in 1998 to work with Associate Professor John Melville-Jones of The University of Western Australia on the transcription and translation of the fifteenth-century Morosini Codex. This important project will come to fruition with the publication of the third volume of the Codex, which is the largest surviving manuscript of Venetian autograph writing of its time. Its author, Antonio Morosini, was a member of one of the greatest noble families of Venice. The Morosini Codex comprises a chronicle and diary of events at a critical period in Venetian history. It is rich in information about activities in the Mediterranean basin, particularly concerning the collapse of the Byzantine Empire.
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