Culture clash - Italian style

It was like that heaving opera house scene in Where Angels Fear to Tread, the film of the EM Forster novel about middle-class England's obsession with Italy. The main room was packed and the overflow blocked the tall thin hallway, flooding up the grand staircase. For latecomers there was hangingfrom-the-chandeliers room only. They listened - Anglo-Saxons, Italians, a smattering of Asians - in something like devotional silence as two leading novelists, Hanif Kureishi and Alessandro Baricco, compared notes on the solitary business of writing.

It never used to be like this at the Italian Cultural Institute. But then they never used to invite people such as Kureishi to come and talk there. Or indeed Baricco, whose novels are best sellers in Italy and well reviewed here. For any Londoner fixated on Italian culture, this has always been a port of call. The only problem was the place was ever so slightly desiccated. You couldn't move for middle-aged ladies in pearls, or for parties thrown to celebrate the publication of the third volume of the academic edition of the drawings of Parmigianino (yours for £200). But of news from the front line of contemporary Italian culture there was precious little. The ICI was no ICA.

Even as high up as the Italian Foreign Ministry, there seems to have been a realisation that drastic action was required. A few months ago a new young(ish) director of the Italian Cultural Institute was appointed. Mario Fortunato, 42, is a Roman novelist. In a short space of time he has turned the place upside down.

Teeming events are now a regularity. The pearls are still there, but now they are augmented by the odd voice of bovver-booted dissent. Ken Loach was heckled from the floor last month for failing the working classes.

Fortunato's first idea was to get more English voices into the building. The Kureishi/Baricco event was one of a series of talks yoking British and Italian artists onto one bill. So along with the top Italian novelists such as Baricco, Daniele Del Giudice and Andrea De Carlo, recent guests have included Ian McEwan, Mavis Cheek and Michelle Roberts (Nick Hornby cancelled, sadly). Colin Firth reading from Pirandello and Sciascia was a big draw.

The idea, presumably, is to use the familiar as a stool pigeon to promote the unfamiliar. "Yes, but one of my ideas for the institute is to cross over with local culture," says Fortunato. "I want to present Italian culture of today, but I want to cross it with the local culture and create a dialogue. We are in Europe. We are so close."

The institute is in a big old barn of a place in Belgrave Square, with no designated performance space and, unlike stand at the edges. Fortunato has spruced up the basement by installing a genuine Italian café, but his long-term instinct is to flog the place and move to the more vibrant Islington or Soho. He had the building valued at £12 million. An equivalent in north London would cost half that.

His forward thinking doesn't chime with the Italian Foreign Ministry's oldfashioned concept of bella figura. "They laughed. I think the ministry thought it was a Dadaist suggestion. But the ICI came here in 1950. In these 50 years we've changed a lot. Now it would be more interesting to have a more industrial, less formal kind of space."

He points out that the British Council promotes British culture on four times the budget and five times the staff of its Italian equivalent. "With the profit you could organise fantastic things. You could live without money from Rome. You could be autonomous. It's a fantasy for now, unfortunately."

The other problem for the institute is the English reluctance to be told anything new about Italy: whereas Italy laps up The Full Monty and Ian McEwan, for us it's either the mafia or Michelangelo; the only films we buy into are sentimental myths like Il Postino and Cinema Paradiso. Tomorrow, the Genius of Rome exhibition opens at the Royal Academy. "It's very strange," says Fortu-nato. "English people are so interested in Italy and they know nothing, in a way. They know just a dead Italy of the past. They do love Italian fashion and Italian food. But I think in Italy we have a lot of interesting literature and cinema too. The arts scene is very interesting."