“La nascita dell’Istituto italiano di cultura di Buenos Aires”

The interwar period represented a particularly problematic moment in the reception of Italian culture in Argentina, due to the peculiar forms taken by the circulation patterns of intellectuals and leading personalities of the Italian and Argentine cultural and political world. More clearly than in the past, those pattern were connected to political and cultural models and proposals which were in turn linked to projects of economic and political expansion. In 1937, to carry out the coordination of the cultural propaganda action in Argentina, it was decided to focus on the establishment of the Centro studi italiani (future Italian cultural institute). The present article, based on the examination of a diversified set of sources, which includes unpublished documentation kept in Argentine and Italian archives, daily newspapers, periodicals and publications of the time, aims to reconstruct and analyze the dynamics that led to creation of the Center, also focusing on the early stages of the new institute's activity and on the relations it had with the Italian diplomatic corps and with the Argentine intellectual and political world.