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Dear Members of the Board of Directors,

I want to thank you profusely for choosing me as a recipient of the Albert J. Casola Prize. As someone who grew up in Italy and has built my life's work around its culture, being recognized by an association devoted to keeping that culture alive abroad means to me more than I can easily put into words.

I am a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate in piano performance at UCLA, where I also teach in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and serve as President of the UCLA Italian Club. My research follows a thread I find incredibly compelling: how Dante's Divine Comedy shaped the structure and philosophy of Richard Wagner's operas. Several of Wagner's most celebrated innovations, I believe, are Dantean at their core — a connection scholarship has largely missed!

Thanks to the Casola Prize, I will be able to travel to the library of Wagner's house in Bayreuth, where editions of the Comedy bear his own handwritten annotations. Sitting with those pages myself, tracing the ideas he drew from Dante, is something I have hoped to do for a long time, and this support makes it possible.

And even more, this prize is an investment in something I care about deeply: keeping the Italian humanistic tradition alive and relevant, through my research, teaching, and the collaborations I hope to build between musical and literary institutions. Thank you again for believing in this project.

With warm regards,

Filippo Lugnan