Italian Consul General Gianluca Rubagotti, who will soon leave Calcutta at the end of his term, said on Friday that his goal remains popular diplomacy.
Gianluca Rubagotti, who began his tenure as Consul General of Italy in Kolkata during the COVID-19 pandemic, told IBNS: “My efforts as Consul General of Italy in this part of India have been to publicize my country and help the people Popular diplomacy.
“This is a very creative city with lots of creative people here. So, the challenge was to keep up with the expectation of people,” Rubagotti said.
During his tenure, there were several spaces of cooperation between the Italian Consulate in Kolkata and the city’s teams in terms of seminars, debates, workshops and other socio-cultural and business events that have taken place over the last three years.
There were the Italo-Kolkatan Heritage Conversations with scholars from Italy who came to Kolkata to discuss the artistic links between the city and Italy.
For example, Isabella Nardi spoke of the Italian artists active in the city and Chiara Rostagno spoke of the twelve marble busts found in the gardens of the Victoria Memorial. All of those events took place at heritage sites such as the Victoria Memorial and Tagore Palace.
To highlight the Italian connection with Rabindranath Tagore, a permanent exhibition was inaugurated at the Rabindra Bharati Museum to celebrate the connection between Tagore and Italy.
The exhibition presents the travels and occasions surrounding Tagore’s three visits to Italy and a comprehensive review of places and times (through images and quotes), the connection between Italian artists and the Tagore University/UBI/VishwaBharati family.
Another initiative to involve and bring the young people of Kolkata closer and show them Italy in a different way.
The Italian Consulate had a series of comic strips designed by Upal Sengupta (the famous singer and cartoonist) on The Adventures of Puchki and Cookie in Italy, where a young Bengali teenager, Puchki, visits Italy with her dog Cookie and embarks on a journey to cities like Florence and Naples, seeing them from a teenage perspective.
To commemorate and celebrate the Christmas period, the Consulate organized 4 Christmas concerts in which choirs composed of young people from other backgrounds, in addition to those from schools for the blind, learned to sing songs in several other languages, including English, Hindi and Bengali. Italian and even Latin matrix.
Highlighting the cultural affinity between Italy and Kolkata, the consulate has contributed to the realization of several photo exhibitions entitled “From Calcutta to Italy”. The exhibitions took place at the National Library, at the bakery and on the Lalit trams.