Togliatti-Torino

Claudio Giunta, prófessor í ítölskum bókmenntum við Háskólann í Trento, heldur fyrirlesturinn "Togliatti-Torino" í Veröld - húsi Vigdísar þann 14 janúar. Fyrirlesturinn fer fram á ensku. 

Nánar um efni fyrirlestursins:

In summer 1966 the FIAT president Vittorio Valletta and the representatives of the Soviet Government signed the agreement that led to the building of the VAZ – Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod (also called AutoVAZ), a gigantic automobile plant set in Togliatti, about 1000 km south-east of Moscow. The Fiat-Soviet plant fostered the entrance of the Soviet Union (USSR) in the «Automotive Century» and gave place to the first massive East-West transfer of technology and knowledge in the automobile sector of the century. The factory, still in operation, belongs now to the Renault-Nissan Group, and keeps producing the Lada cars, mainly for the Asia and Eastern Europe market.

The first Lada came out of the AutoVAZ in april 1970, on the centenary of Lenin’s birth, fifty years ago. For the occasion, Claudio Giunta and the photographer Giovanna Silva went to Togliatti to collect news and images about the town and the factory: their book Togliatti-Torino will be published in March 2020 by Humboldt Books.

We will talk about the history of the factory and the town of Togliatti and about Italy in the Sixties, trying to explain what it meant ‘building an automotive industry’ in USSR fifty years ago. Plus: plenty of (wonderful) pictures.

Claudio Giunta is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Trento. He has worked mainly on Medieval literature (his last book in this field is a commentary on Dante’s Rime for the Meridiani Mondadori), but he writes also about school and university (E se non fosse la buona battaglia?, Il Mulino 2017), about wider cultural issues (Una sterminata domenica, Il Mulino) and about travels (Tutta la solitudine che meritate. Viaggio in Islanda, Humboldt Books 2013). His website is www.claudiogiunta.it

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