Silvia Ronchey
Silvia Ronchey (born March 13, 1958) is an Italian essayist and Byzantinist. A former associate professor at the University of Siena, she is now full professor of Byzantine Civilization in the Department of Humanistic Studies at Roma Tre University. She also collaborates with the daily newspaper La Repubblica.
Biography
Silvia Ronchey was born in Rome, the daughter of writer Vittoria Aliberti and Alberto Ronchey, a journalist, writer and Minister for Cultural Assets. She attended the Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio in Turin in the 1970s and then the Ennio Quirino Visconti Liceo Ginnasio in Rome. It was during her high school years that Ronchey developed her interest in Byzantine civilization.
In 1976 she began her paleographic internship on the manuscripts of the Monastery of St. John the Theologian in Patmos. In 1981 she graduated in ancient literature in Pisa with a thesis in Byzantine Philology, supervisor Franco Montanari. In the following years, in addition to Patmos, she worked at the Library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Alexandria, Egypt, at the Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation du Monde Byzantin at the Collège de France in Paris and, with a fellowship, became a Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Institute for Byzantine Studies in Washington, D.C., where she began working with one of the greatest Byzantinists of the twentieth century, Alexander Kazhdan.
His early scholarly works include studies on the Chronographia of Michael Psellos, of which he published the first Italian translation, on Eustathius of Thessalonica, on the Byzantine life of the Buddha (Barlaam and Josaphat), on the ancient Acts of the Martyrs, and early essays on Hypatia and Bessarion. With Kazhdan he co-wrote The Byzantine Aristocracy. Since the late 1990s he has produced monographs on the culture of Byzantium, including The Byzantine State, and on the fortunes of Byzantium in the modern and contemporary ages. To the last decade belong studies on Constantinople, Mystras, the decline and fall of Byzantium, the Byzantine cultural roots of the European Renaissance, and the historical legacy of the imperial title of the Second Rome after Islamic expansion.
In addition to a hundred or so specialized essays, she has written books translated into several languages, such as The Enigma of Piero, which won the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize in 2006, The Turtle Shell, The Novel of Constantinople, The Sunken Cathedral and Hypatia. The True Story, a critically acclaimed work.
After a 20-year collaboration with La Stampa and its supplement Tuttolibri, she began writing regularly for La Repubblica. Her radio programs include 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, and the series Contaminations of the Sacred, Buddhism and the West and These Living Souls: Animals, Soul, World (RadioRaiTre).
Together with writer and university lecturer Giuseppe Scaraffia she was an author and host of programs for RAI, working with RaiSat, Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3: among them L'altra edicola, a cultural program aired on Rai 2 and, later on RaiSat 1 from 1994 to 1999. Also together with Scaraffia, he also conducted a series of interviews with big names in culture such as Ernst Jünger, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, David Lodge, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.
The meeting with the American psychoanalyst, essayist and philosopher James Hillman, in particular, gave rise to a lasting collaboration that was expressed, as well as in television interviews, in the two dialogue-books The Soul of the World and The Pleasure of Thinking, lasting until Hillman's death, whose last book Silvia Ronchey edited in 2021 for posthumous publication, entitled The Last Image, a work that won the Viareggio Prize in the non-fiction section the following year.
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