On September 5-8, 2018, the 23rd Symposium of the International Italian Teachers Association (AIPI) was held at the University of Siena, Italy, with 325 scholars from 34 countries. Associate Professor Yang Lin, the Italian Major Manager of the College of Foreign Languages of Nan Kai University, and the teacher, Letizia Vallini, attended the meeting and gave speeches. Our school is the only Chinese university to attend the symposium.
The theme of the symposium was “The Road to Italian: Merchants, Travelers, Immigrants, Online Visitors (and Others) – Possible Courses and Convergence of Literature, Language, Art, and Civilization”. The symposium is divided into 13 sub-meeting venues. The theme of the 12th session where Yang Lin and Le Xiaoyue participated was “Italian writers and intellectuals on the road in the twentieth century”. The 32 speakers at this venue were Italian linguists from Italy, China, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, Albania, Egypt, France, Austria, Britain, Spain and many other countries.
On the afternoon of September 7, two teachers made speeches, which aroused the great interest of the audience. The title of Yang Lin’s speech was “The Chinese Images in the Travels of Six Italian Writers in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century—Taking C. Cassola and F. Fortini as Examples” and Le Xiaoyue’ s was “'We' and 'They': The Concessions in Tianjin in the letters of Giuseppe Messerotti Benvenuti”. Ms. Silvia Calamandrei, Ms. Maria Rita Masci and Professor Anna Di Toro, all of them are famous Italian sinologists, were present, listening to the speeches, raising questions and making comments on their speeches and the atmosphere was heated. Cassila and Fortini, studied by Yang Lin, were writers of the Italian delegation to China in 1955, and the head of the delegation was the famous Italian jurist Piero Calamandrei-the grandfather of Ms. Silvia Karamandrei, so the background information added by Ms. Silvia Karamandrei in the discussion was very valuable.
Through this seminar, the two teachers have shared and understood the latest scientific research results in related fields, which will broaden their thinking for further research, and promote academic exchanges and cultural exchanges between our university and foreign universities.
