A Pyrus calleryana ‘Chanticleer’ was dedicated to Alice Shanzer Galimberti

As part of the collaboration between the weTree Association and the University of Turin for the 2022 European Researchers’ Night, a ceremony was held on Friday, November 18, 2022 (from 10:30 a.m.), in Cuneo, at the Monument to the Resistance in the Park of the Resistance, to dedicate a newly-planted Pyrus calleryana “Chanticleer,” (or Callery pear tree) to Alice Shanzer Galimberti, poet, translator, literary critic and art historian.

 

The memorial plaque was placed precisely on Nov. 18, the 149th anniversary of the birth of this important figure in Italian and European culture and mother of Duccio Galimberti, hero of the Italian Resistance movement.

 

The initiative was made possible thanks to the contribution of Bia Assicurazioni and Allianz, and the collaboration of the City of Cuneo and the Galimberti House Museum.

 

The Ceremony was attended by Mayor Patrizia Manassero – Gianfranco De Michelis, Councillor for the Environment and Urban Green Policies – Cristina Clerico, Councillor for Culture and Equal Opportunities – Professor Maria Lodovica Gullino, founding partner of weTree – Paola Capozzi, Deputy Chief of Police of Cuneo – Stefania Brazzoli and Sergio Rossi of BIA Insurance – Cristina Giordano and Sandra Viada of the Galimberti House Museum, who illustrated the life and works of Alice Shanzer Galimberti and led a guided tour of the Museum at the end of the celebration.

Dedicated to

  • Alice Schanzer Galimberti (Vienna, November 18, 1873 – Cuneo, January 4, 1936) was an Italian poet, translator, literary critic and art historian.

     

    She was born in Vienna to financier Ludwig Schanzer, a friend of Italian statesman Giolitti, and Amalie Pauline Grünberg, a pianist and pupil of Liszt. Her father Ludwig was the son of Maximilian Schanzer and Johanna Hirsch.

    Her mother, Amalie Pauline, was the daughter of Leo Grünberg and Sofie Baczales and sister of conductor Eugen Grünberg.

     

    She had three brothers: Charles, future minister – Otto, musicologist and composer – Robert, engineer and mathematician.

    Her family moved to Trieste, then to Milan and finally to Rome, where Alice attended university, taking Adolfo Venturi’s art history courses in particular and graduating with a degree in Humanities.

     

    In 1901 she published the collection of verses Motivi e Canti, praised by the great Italian poet Giosuè Carducci.

    In 1902 she met and married Tancredi Galimberti, Minister for Postal and Telegraphic Communications in the Zanardelli government. The following year they moved to Cuneo where their two sons Carlo Enrico and Tancredi Duccio were born, the latter a future partisan commander.

     

    Alice wrote about art, particularly Pre-Raphaelite painting and contemporary Piedmontese painters, the history of the Italian Risorgimento (political movement for the unification of Italy), Mazzini, Fascist trade unionism and corporatism, and English literature, translating Gwilym Oswald Griffith, William Ewart Gladstone and Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King.
    In 1919 she obtained the chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Messina.

     

    She died suddenly on January 4, 1936, and in 1938 her son Duccio commissioned the publication of her study on Edmund Spenser, the “English Ariosto.”

    Papers and documents related to her intense activity are preserved in the Galimberti Family Archive in Cuneo.