Once again this autumn, “I Venerdì della Biblioteca” returns: the well-established series of free lectures hosted by teachers and researchers, historians, art historians and local professionals who share a cultural and personal connection with the Biblioteca di Busseto. Don’t miss the seven meetings scheduled.

All events will take place at the Biblioteca di Busseto, Via Roma 38, at 9:00 p.m.
Free admission until seats are filled.
Info: biblioteca.busseto@fondazionecrp.it

Healthy longevity or unhealthy longevity?

Biblioteca di Busseto – 2 October 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Caterina Camorali

What do we mean by longevity? How can we play an active role in building a healthy longevity, starting from its key pillars: nutrition, physical activity, supplementation and psychological wellbeing? How modern 4P medicine helps us along the path towards increasingly conscious and personalised choices.

Iron and gold. A brief history of love and hate between human beings and metals

Biblioteca di Busseto – 9 October 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Lorenzo Verderi

In the same years when platinum was introduced as an anticancer drug, lead was banned as an anti-knock agent in petrol. Chromium can be harmless, produced by the tonne for a thousand different applications and become essentially irreplaceable for our society; yet when oxidised it becomes one of the most lethal carcinogens of all. Iron has killed millions of people over the centuries from Caesar to the present day, and yet it is the main reason why our quality of life has grown exponentially over the same period.

Metals have accompanied human life for five thousand years: they have been and still are extremely important both in their biological functions and in their applications, while also having darker sides that deserve attention.

In this evening we will talk about what metals are, how they are made and why they behave in certain ways, why they are sometimes very dangerous and at other times of vital importance.

Investigation into a Harvard manuscript

Biblioteca di Busseto – 16 October 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Dario Donetti

The architect and illustrator Jacques Androuet du Cerceau played a decisive role in spreading the innovations of the Renaissance in sixteenth-century France. One of the tools through which he pursued this goal was the production of sumptuous albums of drawings from the antique, highly appreciated by the elite of the time; only a handful of examples survive, scattered between Europe and North America. A recent discovery in the collections of the Houghton Library at Harvard provides a significant addition to this small but precious catalogue, revealing the origin of du Cerceau’s intellectual project.

Giuseppe Verdi, great philanthropist

Biblioteca di Busseto – 6 November 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Biancamaria Longoni. In collaboration with Associazione Amici di Verdi

All over the world Giuseppe Verdi is known as an extraordinary composer, but only very few people know of his deep generosity and sensitive attention towards those in need. If his artistic talent and passionate nature made him one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century Italian music and history, his constant and concrete civic and social commitment elevates him to a universal model of authentic philanthropy.

Plants talk to us. Let’s learn to listen to them

Biblioteca di Busseto – 13 November 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Mattia Barezzi

Plants do not have a voice, yet they continuously communicate their state of health. Every water stress, nutritional deficiency or environmental change leaves traces that technology is now able to detect. In this talk we will discover how sensors and artificial intelligence allow us to “listen” to plants, anticipating problems and making agriculture more efficient, sustainable and aware.

The artistic stained-glass windows of Giuseppe Moroni: a heritage of decorative art to be enhanced in our territory

Biblioteca di Busseto – 27 November 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Maurizia Bonatti Bacchini

Giuseppe Moroni (Cremona 1888 – Rome 1959) was not only a painter of easel pictures and mural decorations for monumental buildings of the early twentieth century, from the Terme Berzieri in Salsomaggiore to the Terme Tettuccio in Montecatini, from the Vittoriano to the headquarters of the Bank of Italy in Rome. An important phase of his artistic creativity was devoted to the preparation of artistic stained-glass windows in his workshop in Pieveottoville. For the most part he produced sacred subjects, but he did not neglect secular ones, as shown by the large composition “Le vie del sogno” commissioned for Villa Corbellini.

Michelangelo Anselmi’s “epigraphic design” in the Collegiate Church of Busseto

Biblioteca di Busseto – 11 December 2026, 9:00 p.m. – by Fausto Cremona. In collaboration with the Parish of S. Bartolomeo Apostolo of Busseto

This “reading” aims to reconstruct the epigraphic corpus, largely deteriorated by the ravages of time, that accompanies Michelangelo Anselmi’s pictorial cycle in the Chapel of the Conception of the Collegiate Church of S. Bartolomeo in Busseto (Parma), between theological debate, patronage and visual perception.