Diminuzioni E Accrescimenti

This book offers a collection of South African university students’ written responses to the Commedia and scholars’ commentary on them. The students’ collection includes writings of all genres and subjects: prose, poetry, personal reflection, dialogue, non-fiction based on the first two cantiche of the Commedia. Some are autobiographical and others are fictional stories, but they all have in common a very personal (and South African) approach to Dante’s text. The scholarly essays of the second part are concerned with the unusual way in which Dante is appreciated by our youth: not as a remote figure only encountered in the hallways of the literature department, but as an intimate presence, a guide, a friend whose language is familiar and invites a response.

This book is the result of a research project designed and carried out at the Department of Architecture, University of Florence. This research was based on the transfer of knowledge from members of the Albanian Diaspora in Italy (university students, young architects and researchers) to their home country. This unique process blazed a trail in the Albania-related studies by creating a methodology, which could be replicated not only in Albanian rural contexts, but also elsewhere. The book constitutes a structured tool for generating sustainable and socially inclusive territorial development processes in five lesser-known Albanian cultural sites. Their tangible and intangible cultural heritage was seen as a driving factor for triggering development processes aimed at improving the inhabitants’ quality of life and strengthening local identity and social networks. Through concrete proposals and strategies, the book offers scenarios and solutions capable of enhancing the potential of each village and, at the same time, counteracting the effects of land abandonment that so often characterise them.

This book aims to build a solid and proper contribution to the contemporary global debate on the experience of democracy and its possibilities as the most effective mediator of a series of challenges, a debate that is necessarily rooted in the critical reassessment of its Greek cultural heritage. The book is articulated around the identification of a concrete problem: the need for studies that critically discuss Athenian democracy, seen as a daily problem and practice, based on its staseis (crises) and metabolai (changes), and whose solutions and strategies may still contribute to the reflection on the social, intellectual and ethical-political challenges of contemporary democracy.

Food issues 食事. Interdisciplinary Studies on Food in Modern and Contemporary East Asiaconcentrates on the relationship among food, culture, literature, and language in a comparative, transcultural, or literary perspective. The contributions investigate these aspects from different approaches: historical, sociological, anthropological, religious, linguistic, and want to deepen issues such as the symbolic value of food; food as an essential element for the construction of individual identity and a sign of belonging to a community; food as an intercultural medium; food as language and the language of food. The articles included in the volume are organized in a Japanese and a Chinese section and use different approaches within humanities disciplines to explore topics ranging from classical and contemporary East Asian literature to present-day issues, focusing on Food Culture and its declinations.

Pichi Sermolli’s work with his more than 2750 collections of plants from nearly 150 localities on the Lake Tana expedition in Ethiopia in 1937 was interrupted by World War II, but completed in 1947 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum (Natural History), UK. It resulted in preliminary accounts of the vegetation published 1938-40 and a taxonomically arranged account in 1951, all in Italian. Pichi Sermolli’s observations are difficult to locate due to the imperfect maps of the time, but in this book the authors have reconstructed the sequence of the collections, georeferenced the localities, and updated the identifications of the species. By reconstructing Pichi Sermolli’s observations, it is possible to draw conclusions about the vegetation and compare with a recent model of the vegetation of Ethiopia. According to this, the vegetation of the Lake Tana Basin was a complex mosaic of woodland, scrub, forest, farmland and lake shore vegetation now difficult to interpret in detail. Pichi Sermolli’s study of the vegetation in the Semien Mountains demonstrated for the first time the zonation of Ericaceous woodland and Afroalpine vegetation, within which he distinguished Carex monostachya bogs, Afroalpine grasslands with Lobelia rhynchopetalum, and stony and rocky Afroalpine vegetation. This book interprets Pichi Sermolli’s observations in English and compares them with modern knowledge of the region, partly obtained by the present authors’ own field work. It demonstrates how Pichi Sermolli’s studies form a valuable contribution to the understanding of the Ethiopian flora and vegetation.

In this book, Giovanni Molteni Tagliabue asserts that the realization of the values and the implementation of the objectives as indicated in democratic constitutions (political, social rights and the people’s welfare) are hindered by structural defects of the legislative/government architecture and processes. Expertise and science have scarce say in politics and policy. The author suggests an innovative view through the ‘REDemo Project’. 1. Rationalization: the insertion of public scientists into legislative/executive mechanisms, with the creation in each democracy of a National Scientific Assembly – parallel to the extant partypolitical Chamber of Representatives – consisting of academic experts and researchers (legal scholars, political analysts, economists, sociologists, land/urban planners, industry/infrastructure designers, biotechnologists, agronomists, ecologists, educationists, specialists on public health, on cultural heritage, etc.) elected by universal suffrage; 2. Extension: the broadening of the institutions of direct democracy and reinforcement of the electorate as decision-maker of last resort. So the main themes and objectives of the book are an examination of the major flaws in today’s democracies (pars destruens) and a proposal for a renewed institutional framework (pars construens).

The book meticulously analyses the history of the critical reception of avantguard art through the interpretations received by one of its greatest emblems, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso, 1907. Since Les Demoiselles has been considered over this century the true paradigm of Modern Art, this book is, fundamentally, a sort of synthesis of the discourses about Modernism from formalism, iconology, Leo Steinberg's 'Other Criteria’, sociological, the biographical and psychoanalytical theses, cultural and historicist and lastly, the impact of post-structuralism and the feminist, post-colonialist and transnational interpretations. The final chapter deals with the artistic versions of Les Demoiselles d'Avignonmade by artists. It is an essay on the different versions and identities of Modern Art and Modernism that have been produced throughout the last century.