The Italian Cultural Institute of Dublin pays a tribute to the figure and work of Dino Buzzati with a conference, Sept. 7, on the theme of the female figure in the writer’s work.

The conference is part of a wider network of worldwide events dedicated to the author on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death and aims to reconsider literary, pictorial and theatrical representations of femininity and to re-evaluate their importance within Buzzati’s masculine world, so as to stimulate new approaches of critical and theoretical research.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Dino Buzzati International Association and the University College Dublin.

It will be followed by a performance of two one-act plays by Dino Buzzati in the Pavilion Hall of the Italian Cultural Institute of Dublin: ‘La telefonista’ (1964) and ‘Sola in casa’ (1958), with Antonella Morassutti and Rossella Raimondi.

The one-act play ‘La telefonista’ (1964), starring Antonella Morassutti, is one of four that Dino Buzzati dedicated to women, and recounts with an exquisitely ironic, but also ruthless and realistic vein, the life of a Grand Hotel switchboard operator and her sentimental dynamics.

‘Sola in casa’ (1958), acted by Rossella Raimondi, is an intense and surreal two-voice monologue by Madama Iris, a ‘graduate fortune-teller’ who in the grayness of a rainy evening is terrorized by a mysterious maniacal serial killer.