A lecture by Fabrizio Ricciardelli
Machiavelli. The Man brings into focus the figure behind the scandalous reputation: not “Machiavellianism” as a doctrine, but Niccolò Machiavelli as a working intellectual, civil servant, and acute observer of human behavior under pressure. This lecture reconstructs Machiavelli’s life across the worlds he inhabited—Florentine republican government, diplomatic travel, factional violence, and the abrupt fall from office that forced him into a new kind of authorship. We will see how daily experience—negotiation, defeat, boredom, ambition, fear—feeds the tone and method of his thought: empirical, unsentimental, and often darkly comic.
Machiavelli emerges as neither monster nor saint, but as a human being with a fierce attachment to Florence, shaped by exile, longing for usefulness.
If you are in Florence and would like to attend the lecture in person at the British Institute Library, please register here or send an email to bif@britishinstitute.it
The registration fee is 15 Euro per person.
To join this lecture online, simply click on this link to register and receive the Zoom meeting invitation: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/bTMLZ8AlQhi_AeN2mJNfTw The virtual doors will open at 18:00 Italian time on Wednesday 4th March.
The recording of the virtual lecture will be available for registered participants only. Clicking on the link above, you authorise the British Institute of Florence to use your image, name and comments.
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