PERMANENT SEMINAR Giuseppe Vedovato

AFounded by Senator Prof. GIUSEPPE VEDOVATO (1912-2012)

Senator Giuseppe Vedovato, born in Greci (Avellino) on March 13, 1912, was Professor Emeritus of History of Treaties and International Politics and History and Institutions of Afro-Asian Countries at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Former Deputy and Senator of the city of Florence (1953-1976); European Parliamentarian (1953-1976); President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (1972-1975); in 1988 he was appointed Honorary President of the same “in recognition of the services rendered to the European cause”.

Deeply sensitive to the importance of promoting ethical values, which constitute the living soul not only of every political community, but of international relations, Senator Vedovato founded the Giuseppe Vedovato Seminar on Ethics in International Relations in the Faculty of Social Sciences of our University.

Senator Vedovato also donated to the Library a rich scientific heritage consisting of numerous publications, which have constituted two important funds of our Library: the Vedovato Fund (a collection of approximately 4,600 books) and the Vedovato European Library Fund (approximately 35,000 texts).

The Vedovato Award

The Vedovato Award is established to stimulate scientific research and promote the best dissertation defended at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the field of social ethics and/or international relations, with an in-depth study of one or more disciplinary dimensions, to propose possible responses to the current challenges of the Church in the world, also through a look at local issues of undoubted general interest.

The Awarded

2013. Benanti Paolo (Teologia). “The Cyborg: corpo e corporeità nell’epoca del post-umano. Prospettive antropologiche.”

2015. Ibañez Franklin (Filosofia). “Pensar la justicia social hoy. Nancy Fraser y la reconstrucción.”

2017. Nweke Paulinus C. (Scienze Sociali). “The Role of Institutional Design in the Regulation of Ethnic Conflicts.”

2020. Maigamo Bitrus Teneu (Missiologia). “Islamic Extremism and its Challenges to the Catholic Missionary.”

2021. Picchiarelli Alessandro (Teologia). “Tra profilazione e discernimento: la teologia morale nel tempo dell’algoritmo.”

2021. Turco Danilo (Scienze Sociali). “The Dublin Regulation. A legal, sociological and ethical analysis of an ongoing process.”

2023. Meza Gavilanes Diego Ignacio (Scienze Sociali). “‘Chumarse en los Andes’. Gramática política del alcohol en el resguardo indígena del Gran Cumbal – Colombia.”

Conferences of the Vedovato Seminary

23-24 May 2003: The Church and the International Order 

5-6 May 2006: Information Ethics in International Relations.

23 April 2009: Ethical values ​​and integral development of the person in the time of globalization.

24-25 November 2011. The Geopolitics of Solidarity: From Local to Global.

27-28 October 2014: The cultural challenge of migration: risks and opportunities.

24-25 November 2017: Integral Human Development: Challenges to Sustainability and Democracy

22-23 November 2019: Ethics of coexistence or ethics of conflict?

27 March 2023: Democracy for the Common Good. What kind of world do we want to build?

The Vedovato Fund

The Fund consists of the private library of Giuseppe Vedovato, a scholar of international politics and historian of legal institutions, a Member of Parliament from 1953 to 1972 and a Senator of the Republic from 1972 to 1976 with many years of experience at the Council of Europe, of which he was Honorary President, a man, in short, who for over half a century played a leading role in Italian and European culture.

A generous benefactor of the Gregoriana, in 2001 he donated to the Library his private collection of approximately 4,600 volumes and the complete collection of the Rivista di studi politici internazionali, a magazine founded in Florence in 1934 and of which Vedovato was director from 1947 to 2005.

The feature that best distinguishes the Book Collection is its international openness and the precise design that it reveals in its structure: to contribute to a better knowledge of the ideals and realities of Europe and the world in the fields of law, constitutional, diplomatic, historical, political, social and economic disciplines, without any preclusion towards different cultural orientations.

The Vedovato Collection is preserved in the Traspontina Deposit together with the other special collections of the Library and with its specializations it enriches the main Collection in the sectors of the human and social sciences. Thinking about this graft, in the presentation of the printed catalogue of the Fund, a volume published in 2005, Vedovato recalls a suggestive vision of the library taken from Robert Musil: «Entering that colossal profusion of books, I felt as if I had entered the inside of a brain; all around me nothing but shelves with their cells of books; books upon books; there was truly the smell of cerebral phosphorus, and I don’t think I’m fooling myself if I say that I had the impression of having arrived at something»; and precisely by using this powerful image, he wishes the present and future users of the Fund to investigate it and use it with the certainty of “having arrived at something”.