Two months already passed since Thursday 21st April and we would like to resume in this article the events that took place in Italy to celebrate the first of the four Brontë- bicentenaries. Of course the Italian representative for 
the Brontë Society in Italy, Professor Maddalena De Leo, was very active. She was asked to take part in two radio broadcasts- Rai Radio2 (Ovunque6) and Rai Radio3 (Farhenheit)- where she talked about Charlotte and the strong “feminism” in her works.
In Bronte, Sicily, a meeting was organized in which teachers, students and reporters, took part and read some pages from Brontë’s prose. Professor De Leo was present via skype and read a message from the Brontë Society to the Mayor of Bronte.That was a really pleasant occasion to start building a bridge between England and Italy.
On that afternoon the most important Italian event was organized by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the National Library of Naples and the Brontë Society. It took place at the National Library in Naples and the speakers were Professor De Leo and Caterina Lerro; there was a very active audience.
Professor De Leo read her interesting report about Charlotte’s heroines of both the Juvenilia and the novels, underlining the main differences among them; Professor Lerro, instead, talked about Jane Eyre, 
and analyzed three of the most important pages of the novel (the incipit, the meeting with Rochester, and “Reader, I married him”), and some of her students read and interpreted some pieces as well.
The fifth anthology published for the De Leo- Brontë Prize 2016 was a very special edition entirely dedicated to Charlotte- the competitors were all women, and the works were poems and letters (the winners are Selene Chilla and Maria Rosaria Surico). Another event dedicated to the Brontës and to Charlotte took place in Rome (the one held by the girls of The Sisters’ Room: A Brontë inspired blog), but also in Viterbo and Reggio Emilia, as well as in local schools where lots of initiatives were organized. Moreover lots of Italian publishing houses reprinted Charlotte’s works and published new books about her in March and April. Finally, some more new and unpublished works will be published during the next months.
The Brontë Society in Italy
