Francesca Malagutti
Vice President
I was born in San Benedetto Po in 1960, and I graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in 1989. Afterwards, I specialised myself and got licensed in Foreign Languages and Civilizations at the University of Milan.
During the university years, while studying, I collaborated with the Garda Tourism Promotion Company and stayed abroad in Austria, Germany, France, England and Scotland, for the purpose of improving my knowledge and linguistic skills.
Since I was very young, I showed a deep involvement in the arts: dance, painting, history of Art, music, cinema, reading and above all, poetry. It is a personal space, a reverberation of internal echoes that accompanied my whole private life and influenced the style of my job as a teacher.
I started working with children at the nursery school, in experimental projects to teach foreign languages; at a later time I taught the English language at the primary school and, after some years, at the high school (where I still teach), while I deepened my knowledge of the English literature and of the comparative ones.
The Lyceum for Fine Arts “Giulio Romano”, the Economical Technical Institute “Alberto Pitentino” and the provincial Centre for Adults’ Education (all of them are in Mantua), gave me the possibility to apply a wide range of strategies for the different learning styles, during the language courses with italian and foreign adults. I am grateful to them for the important cultural exchange we had.
Humanistic studies and the wide variety of State Institutes, in which I taught, gave me the chance to know different areas of the linguistic expression, so that I could widen my fields of interest.
I have an eclectic, curious and restless personality, a daring spirit and the capability to daydream, I am therefore inclined to experiment different communication modes: the silence of meditation in movement, such as with T’ai Chi Chih, a discipline that doesn’t have a martial arts aspect, and for which I got licensed as a teacher in 2006, with the group of Justin Stone in Albuquerque. Along with my teacher and some colleagues, we founded the first italian group that intends to share the discipline, even among young people, so to create some opportunities for change.
Along with the passion for flowers, I cultivate the one for writing; I found myself translating an interesting work of poetry, a parallel text edition published by Terra d’Ulivi in Lecce: “Questo corpo ora”, by Dom Gabrielli.
In the past years, I created a first important library stock of literary works for the Biblioteca Popolare “Bruno Vezzani”, which was founded by Fondazione Malagutti. As Italo Calvino said, to “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”: this one has been a commitment, that was carried out along with some young volunteering female students, with whom I gathered and selected books.
Each day is rich in events and surprises, for which the activities I undertake have always been in flux, without accurately following a chronological order.
Sometimes they stop, and seem to lose their energy and then, as in a butterfly’s flight, they return alive and coloured, giving me new opportunities. And they find me exactly at the right moment!
