Professor Silvia Ronchey

We are delighted to annouce that Silvia Ronchey will be the OCBR's Visiting Professor, 2021-22.

Professor Ronchey is Professor of Byzantine Civilisation at Roma Tre University, Rome. A historian, philologist and Byzantine academic, she is the author of several specialist essays and translations from Byzantine Greek, such as that of Michele Psello's Cronografia (Lorenzo Valla Foundation, 1984).  Her major works include "L'aristocrazia bizantina" (Sellerio, 1998, 19992), with Alexander Kazhdan; «Lo Stato bizantino» (Einaudi, 2002); "L'enigma di Piero" (Rizzoli, 2006); "Il guscio della tartaruga" (Nottetempo, 2009); "Il romanzo di Costantinopoli" (Einaudi, 2010), with Tommaso Braccini; "Ipazia. La vera storia" (Rizzoli, 2010); "Storia di Barlaam e Ioasaf. La vita bizantina del Buddha" (Einaudi, 2012); the critical edition of Eustace of Thessalonica's commentary on the iambic canon on Pentecost (De Gruyter 2014) and "La cattedrale sommersa. Alla ricerca del sacro perduto" (Rizzoli, 2017). She regularly collaborates with the Italian national newspaper "La Repubblica".

She has been writing on the cultural sections of Italian newspapers since 1989. For more than twenty years she regularly collaborated with La Stampa and its supplement Tuttolibri. She was the author and host of television programs for Rai, including L'altra edicola (RaiDue, 1994-1999) and Fino alla fine del mondo (RaiDue, 1999). She conducted interviews with important figures of the 20th century such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, Ernst Jünger, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Elémire Zolla.

The meeting with James Hillman in particular led to a long lasting collaboration which found shape in television interviews and the two dialogue books "L'anima del mondo" (Rizzoli, 1999) and "Il piacere di pensare" (Rizzoli, 2001), continuing until Hillman's death. Their latest book-dialogue (" The Last Image ", Rizzoli 2021) was released posthumously on the tenth anniversary of his death.  Among her radio programmes a mention goes to the cycle on the fall of Constantinople in "Alle 8 della Sera (RadioRaiDue), the series on ancient, medieval and Byzantine melodrama in "Di tanti palpiti" (RadioRaiTre) and the series "Contaminazioni del sacro, Il buddhismo e l'occidente" and "Queste anime viventi: animali, anima, mondo" (RadioRaiTre).