Giovanni "John" Ruffini: A Quiet Intellectual in the Maelstrom of the Italian Risorgimento - Talk at Museo Italiano by Patrizia Burley-Lombardi

GIOVANNI “JOHN” RUFFINI, A QUIET INTELLECTUAL IN THE MAELSTROM OF THE ITALIAN RISORGIMENTO

TALK BY DOTTORESSA PATRIZIA BURLEY-LOMBARDI

MUSEO ITALIANO, CO.AS.IT., 199 FARADAY STREET, CARLTON

TUESDAY 27 OCTOBER, 6.30PM

FREE EVENT - RSVP: [email protected]

Giovanni Ruffini, a close friend of Giuseppe Mazzini, was the only male in his family to have survived – jail, a death sentence and exile. His vocation was to be a writer, but he became an exile and refused to write in his native Italian. He chose English and became well-known in England. Charles Dickens was one of his admirers.

Not far inland from Sanremo in the Ligurian Region, the little town of Taggia dominates the entry to the Valle Argentina. It doesn’t look very important now, especially since many of its inhabitants have left for the big cities, where employment used to be easier to find. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Taggia was a prominent commercial and religious centre with close connections to Rome, France and Piedmont. The town was almost entirely owned by half a dozen families and the Ruffinis were among them.

Giovanni Ruffini, one of the family’s 13 offspring, was educated in Genova, where he pursued his friendship with the eminent patriot and intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini used to call Giovanni’s mother his second mother, and the whole family worked with the Risorgimento patriots to free Italy from the domination and influence of foreign powers.

His story and his passion are the subject of a series of books he wrote in English and which were enormously successful in England. This talk will tell the story of his passionate life and losses during the Risorgimento and his adventures as a patriot and a writer.

Patrizia Burley-Lombardi arrived in Melbourne in 1969 as a young graduate in English and American Literature from The University of Rome. In Italy she had married an Australian academic in the same year, and followed her husband to Melbourne where he had started work at the newly formed La Trobe University.

After years of part time work in several universities, while raising her family, in 1984 she began to work full time as a lecturer in the Interpreting and Translating Department at Victoria College, where she ran the Italian strand. In 1987 she was awarded an MA from Melbourne University. In 1991 she moved to Phillip Institute, Coburg, on a tenured lectureship in the Department of Multicultural Studies. In 1996, when the Department was relocated to Bundoora, she chose to retire and follow a wider range of interests, including freelance employment.

Patrizia has worked with SBS Italian Radio Program and at Rete Italia on her own program, she has taught at Xavier College where she was instrumental in creating a school of excellence in Italian Studies. In 2000, with her children fully grown, she moved back to Italy and taught at a prestigious graduate school for interpreters and translators in Milan, while working as a freelance interpreter and translator and teaching Italian and English. This was a positive experience but after three years she had to return to Melbourne to look after the family elders.

Since then she has continued to travel between Australia and Europe spending long periods in Italy where she undertakes small research jobs for pleasure, occasionally writes poetry and generally enjoys the simple pleasures of her Ligurian heritage in Sanremo.