Short Bio
Luca Bacchini is an Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature at Sapienza, University of Rome.
Before joining Sapienza, he taught Brazilian Literature and Music at Stanford University and University of Bologna. He is the co-founder and co-director of the EcoLogosLab (with Vincent Barletta, Stanford University). In Brazil, Luca is a CNPq Researcher with the Projeto República: núcleo de pesquisa, documentação e memória at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Currently, he co-directs the research projects Mapping Resistance. 1945-2025. Literature and Memory in Translation (with Daniele Biffanti, Northwestern University), Canzone/Canção: Musical Dialogues between Brazil and Italy (with Christopher Dunn, Tulane University), and Oficinas de tradução: Nelson Rodrigues (with Anita Mosca, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais).
He is the author of the study Nudi come Adamo. L’immaginario biblico nelle cronache dal Nuovo Mondo (Mimesis, 2018); the editor of the volumes Maestro Soberano. Ensaios sobre Antonio Carlos Jobim (Editora UFMG, 2017) and, with Victoria Saramago, of Literature Beyond the Human. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge 2023). His research covers the connections between Brazilian and Italian culture, especially in music and literature; Brazilian popular music; ecocriticism, fictional soundscapes, and environmental ethics; autobiographical and autofictional writing; and memory and postmemory.
Project for the Network
In January 1969, singer and composer Chico Buarque, together with his wife, actress Marieta Severo, left Brazil for a short promotional tour in France and Italy. What was supposed to be a two-week stay turned into a 14-month impromptu self-exile in Rome, a city where Chico had already lived for a few years in the early 1950s when his father, the historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, took the chair of Brazilian Studies at La Sapienza, University of Rome. In the cultural relations between Italy and Brazil, Chico’s Roman self-exile marked the beginning of a phase, perhaps unrepeatable, of deep closeness that produced artistic and affective ties that have survived time and distance. Based on Chico's literary and musical output, the aim of the project is to reconstruct the formation and life of a Roman-Brazilian community that has greatly contributed to the cultures of both countries.