In September 2022, Prometheus Foundation awarded a grant to the Bruno Leoni Institute (BLI) in Milan, Italy. The institute’s CEO and president, Alberto Mingardi, is creating content to promote awareness, appreciation, and knowledge of Ayn Rand and her ideas. He points out that, despite the early translation of AR’s novels in Italy, her ideas in the spheres of ethics and politics are not well known in that country and have been relegated to the periphery. Indeed, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal were not translated until 2008 and 2022, with the latter being sponsored by BLI.
The institute will focus on two initiatives: one aimed at high school students and a second aimed at a broader outreach to university students and professors who are already familiar with and interested in philosophy.
Toward reaching high school students, BLI is developing a new lecture to be added to its portfolio of free lecture offerings. BLI will conduct and record high school lectures to be used as source material for an hour-long online lecture presenting Ayn Rand’s life and works for IBL nelle scuole (“BLI in schools”), presenting her as a literary giant who should be read alongside George Orwell or Evgenij Zamjatin by those who want to properly understand the nature of totalitarianism. Mingardi will solicit teachers who are interested in Objectivism and plans to distribute to students DVDs of We the Living and The Fountainhead, and paperback copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, The Virtue of Selfishness, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
For broader public outreach, BLI will create a six-episode podcast series that integrates Ayn Rand’s ideas with other philosophical thinkers. The target audience will be university students, and they will collaborate on promoting the podcast series with libertarian and classical liberal student groups who are already interested in philosophical ideas. The podcasts will cover Rand’s literary achievements, her political philosophy, her personality, and her role in public debate during her lifetime. The series will include interviews with scholars who have studied Ayn Rand in Italian, providing a general introduction to her thought and life, particularly her contributions to classical liberalism.
Mingardi is targeting an audience of 300 high school students initially and 5,000 podcast downloads. However this is a modest goal, as his existing channel has more than 233K downloads already, with 4,000 new downloads each week. Podcast content is also available on other platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spreaker, Amazon Music, and YouTube for WebCasts.
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