On May 28, 2019 Ambassador Jayatilleka and Madame Sanja Jayatilleka, attended the opening ceremony of the rare exhibition dedicated to life and personality of Antonio Gramsci, the eminent figure of international communism, and more generally, of political science and political theory, and author of the famous ‘Prison Notebooks’.
Ambassador of Italy H.E. Pasquale Terracciano welcomed the gathering and greeted Ambassador Jayatilleka in his opening remarks. He emphasized that it was for the second time ever that the original manuscripts of ‘Prison Notebooks’ were exhibited outside of Italy. The first time the Italian Ambassador organized the exhibition displaying the ‘Prison Notebooks’ at the Italian Institute of Culture in London in 2017. Ambassador thanked the Italian Institute of Culture in Moscow and Gramsci Foundation in Rome, who helped provide a distinct opportunity to view the original ‘Quaderni’ in the capital of Russia, in partnership with the Russian State Archives of the Social and Political History and State Museum of the History of Russian Literature.
Director of the Italian Institute of Culture, Olga Strada, mentioned that the most important original letters in Italian and Russian, unique documents and books including the famous book titled ‘the Prince’ by Niccolò Machiavelli, which became one of the sources of inspiration for Gramsci’s ‘Prison Notebooks’, were on display. She ended her speech quoting Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Antonio Gramsci Jr., who was named after his grandfather, addressed the audience and explained that this exhibition was a family story, which reveals the personality of his grandfather through personal photos and letters from the family collection, and invited the guests to enjoy the exhibition.
Ambassador Jayatilleka is the author of the article titled ‘The Great Gramsci: Imagining an Alt-Left Project’ that was published in the Global Dynamics Journal, University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017. (The link to the article: https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/march-2017/great-gramsci-imagining-alt-left-project ).
