TeatrOrtaet Cultural Association presents:
Animated tour of the Villa Cesarotti park “MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI from the salon to the forest”
(from Venetian salons to the “Selvagiano” hermitage) with Alessandra Brocadello and Carlo Bertinelli
Saturday, October 4, 2025, 4:00 PM – Villa Cesarotti Park in Selvazzano Dentro (PD)
Melchiorre Cesarotti, a distinguished eighteenth-century Paduan intellectual, is celebrated in literary history for his translation of the Poems of Ossian, the collection written by James Macpherson, which greatly contributed to the spread of pre-Romantic aesthetics and sensibility throughout Europe, influencing Alfieri, Foscolo, Pindemonte, Leopardi, and even Napoleon. Cesarotti, however, was more than this; he was also an excellent theoretician of the Italian language, a proponent of astute acceptance of foreign words (at that time, especially French), a farsighted theater critic, as well as a translator of Voltaire’s tragedies, an original scholar of Greek and Roman antiquities, a sympathetic university teacher, and an intellectual grappling with a European political world undergoing rapid and contradictory change (from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic storm with the fall of the centuries-old Republic of Venice).
To attempt to capture, at least briefly, all these aspects of a complex intellectual figure, teatrOrtaet, in its animated tour of Villa Cesarotti in Selvazzano, has chosen to revisit the most emblematic (and unfortunately only partially preserved) places in the park of the villa that the Paduan inherited from his brother and which he transformed into a comforting refuge in his later years, when the burdens of fame and social life became more burdensome to bear.
Free admission – For information: https://www.teatrortaet.it/