Italian Cities Research Articles

Former military sites and post-Covid-19 city in Italy. May their reuse mitigate the pandemic impacts?

The presence of former military settlements, along with other abandoned spaces in the Italian cities, constitutes an opportunity for developing inclusive and green cities through a good governance, especially after the 2020 pandemic outbreak. This paper develops an analytical matrix for comparing and evaluating the redevelopment projects of a number of case studies in the Italian metropolitan cities of Bologna, Milan, Rome, and Turin in the face of the challenges of the post-Covid-19 issues. Although the difficulties to evaluate still ongoing redevelopment projects, I found two main results. First, the Italian political and economic context is what most influenced the redevelopment process and not so much the intrinsic characteristics of former military sites. Second, it seems that the reuse of these urban voids will not match a couple of features of the so-called post-Covid-19 features, i.e. inclusive and good governance, though the redevelopments can seemingly develop green cities.

The shifting geographies of digital intermediation: the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on short-term rentals in Italian cities

The present paper investigates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Airbnb's market and focuses on the crisis's effects on areas affected by digital intermediation. The study's goal is to analyse Airbnb geographies by focusing on short-term rental supply and demand at the intra-urban scale. Using historical data and by adopting a quantitative and spatial data-oriented approach, the work highlights the shifting geographies of digital intermediation. Results show that while the areas that have increased their supply are limited, a large, clustered and contiguous portion of the cities seems to have reversed the exponential growth trend of recent years. Finally, the study offers a reflection on the future of short-term rentals in the post-pandemic city. The case study refers to four Italian cities: Florence, Milan, Rome, and Naples.

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios

Reviewed by: Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios Robert Henke VISUAL EXPERIENCES IN CINQUECENTO THEATRICAL SPACES. By Javier Berzal de Dios. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019; pp. 216. Javier Berzal de Dios’s excellent Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces persuasively rebuts received narratives regarding Italian Renaissance theatre architecture and design, offering a more complex, nuanced picture that includes the heterogeneous, sometimes messy experiences of actual spectators. The standard view (only slightly exaggerated): Italian Renaissance theatre designers and scenographers, such as Baldassare Peruzzi in his decisive 1514 design for a production of La Calandria, rationalized their designs with the new art of linear perspective, which created the illusion of an ideal representation whose unity aligned with neo-Aristotelian notions of the dramaturgical unities. This single, unified picture was passively received by spectators functioning as a homogenous unit, except insofar as they were aesthetically and politically subordinate to the sovereign, who was positioned at the ideal perspectival point in the audience. This new, Renaissance view of seeing in the theatre decisively broke with medieval habits and shaped a linear progression of these tendencies running the course of the sixteenth century, from Peruzzi to Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century to the Teatro Olimpico and Teatro all’antica at Sabbioneta. The old humanist paradox obtains in this narrative as elsewhere: what seemed new was really a return to classical ideas. Berzal de Dios’s short but incisive book demolishes these received notions. In his account, theories of spatial unity were not in concert but actually clashed with humanist experimentation, the desire for non-orderly aesthetic effects such as wonder and the heterogeneous experiences of actual spectators conceived more as participants in civic dialogue than as cheerfully obedient ducal subjects. Neo-classical restraint, order, and symmetry were contradicted by impulses towards excess, surplus, and saturation. The ideal of a unified visual picture, governed by the cool laws of perspective, is belied by the displacements, truncations, and distortions revealed in the surviving stage representations of Rome, Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities. The author invites us to see Peruzzi’s iconic stage design for La Calandria, touted in traditional theatre histories as the epitome of the unified scenographic vision, as downright weird. The linear perspective located in the downstage part of the drawing tells only half the story, as Berzal de Dios examines the incongruities of what is illustrated on the backdrop, or flattened space in the background. There, the Colosseum is shrunk, and the Pantheon is sandwiched in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Linear perspective emerges not as the be-all and end-all, but merely “one of many tools, all of which were at the service of the artistic process” (15). Peruzzi’s Rome, too, is one of ruins and overgrown vegetation, hardly the ideal city abstracted from some versions of art history. To see such scenographers’ impulses to elicit wonder, surprise, and even religious awe is to contest the narrative that may have begun with artist and historian Giorgio Vasari, who in touting Peruzzi and others celebrated what he perceived as a rupture between Renaissance and medieval ways of thinking about the the stage. Berzal de Dios’s challenge to Vasari’s historiography helps us make more sense of Brunelleschi’s period-defying role in Italian theatre: the master of Renaissance perspective and engineering who designed wonder-inducing machinery for fifteenth-century religious plays (sacre rappresentazioni). Chapter 2, “The Artificial City on Stage,” examines designs by Beccafumi, Salviati, and others to show how designs for Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities were characterized by “spatial dissonances, visual tensions, inquietudes, and internal inconsistencies that demonstrate the prevalence of a taste for playfulness” (37). These were [End Page 111] the work of experimental artists who played with classical ideas—not theorists and mathematicians bound by the idée fixe of consistency. Cinquecento spectators did not see through a two-dimensional window as passive viewers to a three-dimensional perspettiva but were embroiled in what the author calls the “apparato”: the entire complex of the stage, the scenography, the auditorium, and the “spectators’ act of viewing as made possible and conditioned by the space” (5...

The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 by Philipp Ther, and: Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa by Philipp Ther

Reviewed by: The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492 by Philipp Ther, and: Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa by Philipp Ther Brent Peterson The Outsiders: Refugees in Europe since 1492. By Philipp Ther. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 342. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0691179520. Die Außenseiter. Flucht. Flüchtlinge und Integration im modernen Europa. By Philipp Ther. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. Pp. 437. Cloth €26.00. ISBN 978-3518427767. Although Philipp Ther's The Outsiders is not, strictly speaking, centered on Germany, the book is filled with information and insights that make it extremely valuable to those of us who focus our attention more narrowly. Among other things, by looking at the much longer history of refugees in Europe, including refugees who arrived in Germany long before the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, Ther explodes the myth that migration began in 1955 when the first Gastarbeiter began arriving from southern and eastern Europe to keep the Wirtschaftswunder thriving. For Germany, the crucial date might be 1685, when some 50,000 French Protestants, confronted by demands to convert or flee, ended up settling in German lands. In addition to pushing the clock back on the history of people seeking refuge in Germany, Ther notes that it was this group, the Huguenots, who gave French and English the word refugee. The book starts considerably earlier, and the English version has the date that Ther regards as the original refugee crisis in its subtitle: 1492. Americans associate this year with Columbus, who set out from Spain, reached the Americas, and launched untold horrors on the indigenous population after 1492, but his voyage was only one result of the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The Jews of Spain and Portugal faced the same demands as the Huguenots, and, rather than converting to Catholicism, hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire, including to territory that became Turkey, the Balkans, and Greece, while others ended up in Amsterdam, Hamburg, various Italian cities, and even North Africa. The loss of its Muslim and Jewish communities impoverished newly united Spain culturally and intellectually, but the expulsion allowed Jewish communities to flourish in much of the Mediterranean basin for centuries, albeit with periodic outbreaks of antisemitism. In other words, despite what we might hear today, refugees have been [End Page 169] with us for centuries, and they almost invariably enrich the countries where they settle and impoverish those they flee. In a nutshell, The Outsiders is filled with histories that remain little known, especially to the general readers who could easily profit from the book, but also to scholars who might appreciate the broader context that national histories seldom provide. Ther not only sheds light on the history of refugees to and from Europe, but he also stitches these otherwise scattered historical accounts into a coherent whole and concludes with a reasoned plea for action. Rather than presenting a chronological overview, The Outsiders divides refugees into three sometimes overlapping categories: refugees who fled religious intolerance, those who were forced out or attracted by extreme nationalism, and political or ideological refugees. Of course, since religiously motivated flight began much earlier, since nationalism only reared its ugly head in the eighteenth century and since politically motivated flight mostly began with the French Revolution and reached new heights in the twentieth century, the book contains an implicit chronology. It also links and explains movements that might otherwise seem disparate. For example, the "exchange" of Greek and Turkish populations in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, part of what Ther calls "the 'long' First World War" (2) turns out to be strikingly similar to the flight and expulsion of Russian, German, Polish, Hungarian, and other populations when Europe's borders were redrawn after World War II. And, in addition to exploring the reasons behind refugees' flight, Ther's book differentiates itself from other broad treatments by playing close attention to how well refugees integrated themselves into the communities where they found shelter, if seldom a warm welcome. Ther is well aware that integration is a concept that requires considerable unpacking and, as a...

Effects of the Spread of COVID-19 on Public Health of Polluted Cities: Results of the First Wave for Explaining the Dejà Vu in the Second Wave of COVID-19

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is generating a high number of deaths worldwide. One of the current questions in the field of environmental science is to explain how air pollution can affect the impact of COVID-19 on public health. The research here focuses on a case study of Italy. Results suggest that the diffusion of COVID-19 in cities with high levels of air pollution is generating higher numbers of COVID-19 related infected individuals and deaths. In particular, results reveal that, among Italian cities, the number of infected people was higher in cities with more than 100 days per year exceeding limits set for PM10 or ozone, cities located in hinterland zones (i.e. away from the coast), cities having a low average speed of wind and cities with a lower average temperature. In hinterland cities (mostly those bordering large urban conurbations) having a high level of air pollution, coupled with low wind speed, the average number of infected people in April 2020during the first wave of the COVID-19 is more than tripled compared to cities that low levels of air pollution. In addition, results show that more than 75% of infected individuals and about 81% of deaths of the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy are in industrialized regions with high levels of air pollution. Although these vital results of the first wave of the COVID-19 from February to August 2020, policymakers have had a low organizational capacity to plan effective policy responses for crisis management to cope with recurring COVID-19 pandemic that is generating a new wave with again negative effects, déjà vu, on public health and of course economic systems.

Partial Order Algorithms for the Assessment of Italian Cities Sustainability

In this paper, we introduce some recent non-aggregative algorithms, for the construction of synthetic indicators on multi-indicators systems, and exemplify them on data pertaining to the sustainability of main Italian cities. The procedure employs tools from Partial Order Theory and computes the final synthetic scores, without the compensation effects of classical composite indicators, so better preserving the nuances of city sustainability. Since turning multi-indicator systems into single synthetic indicators is unavoidably forcing, the procedure provides also ways to assess the degrees of “rankability” of statistical units, so to help researchers evaluating the soundness of the synthesis process. The algorithms introduced in the paper can be easily implemented, using the package Parsec, freely available in the R ecosystem.

Detecting time-changes in $ PM_{10} $ during Covid pandemic by means of an Ornstein Uhlenbeck type process.

Particulate matter with 10 micrometers or less in diameter ($ PM_{10} $) from several italian cities is modeled by means of a non homogeneous Ornstein Uhlenbeck process. Such model includes two deterministic time dependent functions in the infinitesimal moments to describe the presence of exogeneous terms in the typical dynamics of the phenomenon. An iterative estimating procedure combining the maximum likelihood estimation and a generalized method of moments is provided. A Quandt Likelihood Ratio test for detecting structural breaks in $ PM_{10} $ data, in the period from 1st January 2020 to 8th July 2020 which includes the first lockdown due to Covid pandemic, confirms the presence of time-changes. These results show that the lockdown made the air once again cleaner. It is then shown that our model and the associated estimation procedure, while not explicitly contemplating the presence of structural breaks in the time series, implicitly incorporates them in the time dependence of the functions in the infinitesimal moments of the underlying process.

Walka z czarną śmiercią w świetle wybranych pism i traktatów z XIV w.

Combatting the Black Death in the light of selected writings and treatises from the XIVth century This article analyzes texts that show attempts to resist the plague epidemic in Europe in the second half of the XIVth century. Much information on this subject has survived in writings by Italian authors, including Giovanni Boccaccio, Matteo Villani, and Francesco Petrarch. In Italian cities, the sickness led to demographic disaster, permanently changing the social order and the daily life of their inhabitants. Using the above mentioned texts, the author reflects on the triumphal march of the plague, searching for answers to the question as to the extent to which contemporary doctors were responsible for the state of affairs. When they encountered the first attack of the plague, they were helpless, not possessing either appropriate knowledge of medicines. Authors of chronicles noted that when examining the sick, doctors only took simple steps such as measuring temperature and analyzing body fluids, and the drew on philosophy and astrology when doing so. Sharper and sharper criticism fell on their heads as a result, and accusations not just of ignorance but also of cowardice. This was because many medical persons fled from territories affected by plague. Francesco Petrarch was one of the fiercest critics of doctors at this time. In the course of the epidemic, he lost Laura, the love of his life, and his beloved son. Petrarch wrote of the plague and the death that accompanied it in several tracts and poetic pieces. In those, he showed the fear and terror that haunted people when the world they had hitherto known lay in ruins.

Saint Bernardino of Siena and Art: Preaching and Baptism in Tuscany

This paper deals with the views of the Franciscan preacher Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) on baptism and civic peace and the associations he created between art and baptism and preaching. The widespread building and decoration of baptisteries in Italy points to the civic importance of that ritual in Italian cities. There was a close connection between baptism and the sense of civitas: the sacrament of Christian initiation also served to introduce an individual into the Christian society of the city. Bernardino’s emphasis on the relationship between baptism and civic peace followed a long-standing tradition in mendicant preaching. The present study has two major sections: it introduces Bernardino’s views on the arts and then suggests correlations between his ideas on baptism and the artistic program of the fifteenth-century baptismal font in the Siena baptistery created by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, and others. The central issues concern the way Bernardino referred to works of art as a way of making his sermons more approachable and graphic for his illiterate listeners and how his sermons may have influenced the decorative program for the baptismal font in the Sienese baptistery.

Energy, environmental and economic analysis of electric vapour compression and gas driven absorption heat pumps for single-family houses

The aim of this paper is to compare energy consumptions, CO2 emissions, and operative costs of condensing boilers, electric vapour compression heat pumps and gas driven absorption heat pumps to provide space heating and domestic hot water. The analysis is performed for 140 m2 single-family houses in five different Italian cities whose envelope features depend on the location. For each location, two different envelope conditions are considered. The first one is a non-insulated building, while the second one is the same building, but an external thermal insulation is added on vertical walls and roof. To avoid internal renovation, radiators are maintained as emission system. Combined dynamic simulations are performed to appreciate building and system interactions. A 6 second time step is set to evaluate properly interactions and the DHW profile demand. In addition, the GHP dynamic model is a grey box model experimentally validated. The results show that electric vapour compression heat pumps reach the highest non-renewable primary energy savings (>32%) compared to condensing boilers, but their operative costs are higher due to the higher specific cost of electricity in Italy. Gas driven absorption heat pumps achieve a lower consumption reduction than electric heat pumps (>22%), but they have also the minimum operative cost among the three technologies.

Who Speaks through the Mouths of Babes? Children and Religious Violence in France. Review of: Crouzet, D. (2020). Les enfants bourreaux au temps des guerres de Religion. Paris: Albin Michel. 336 p. Izvestiya Uralskogo federalnogo universiteta. Seriya 2: Gumanitarnye nauki, 23(1), 293–306.

This essay contains reflections on a new book by renowned historian Denis Crouzet on children’s violence, and, more broadly, on the image of children during the French Wars of Religion. In the book under review, the novelty lies in the fact that the images of ‘innocent infants’ make part of a separate plot. Just as novel are Denis Crouzet’s reflections on the ‘sources of inspiration’ of the young French persecutors of heretics. The author indicates the anthropological correspondences inherent in the culture of both Italian and French cities, such as the carnivalesque inversion of the ‘world inside out’ and the social function of youth associations taking part in the ‘charivari’ rites. Denis Crouzet pays attention to sources that are novel to him, like children’s Christmas chants, mystery plays, and ‘miracles’. While impersonating the Innocents persecuted by Herod but also angels carrying retaliation to this villain, urban children learnt what and how to do in the face of a carnival challenge. The ways to leave the eschatological activism are of particular interest. After 1572, the gangs of executioners-children left the scene. Only the murder of the Guises on Christmas Day, 1588, threw crowds of children into the streets of Paris. Now they were described differently, however, — as a disciplined mass, occupied not with outrages but with prayers. The author speaks of ‘Catholic consciousness’, but that was already a different reformed Catholicism, departing further and further from the old ‘corporate Catholicism’. The religious political activity of children would become a thing of the past, however. The image of an innocent child would once more be in demand only after the Revolution, when, this time in a desacralised context, children became the embodiment of the French nation.

Особливості перекладу італійських топонімів українською мовою

This article systematizes the methods and problems of translating Italian toponyms into the Ukrainian language. It was determined that toponyms can be reproduced in different languages, basing on certain similarities in the sounds or graphics. It’s appropriate to convey sound similarities by transcription or reproducing the sound form by using letters. Graphic similarities should be transliterated by letters. It’s possible to apply the method of modification, which adapts the toponym to the grammatical system of the translation language. There are cases of using of the traditional name when it comes to historical traditions and the international importance of the place-name. It’s appropriate to reproduce Italian toponyms (oikonyms) by transcoding, using transcription, which will provide the adequate perception of toponyms. The resources of the Ukrainian language fully allow transmitting the sounds of Italian toponyms. Some geographical names of Italian cities and regions are translated according to agreed tradition. For example, Firenze – Флопенція, Napoli – Неаполь, Roma – Рим, Sicilia – Сицилія, Sardegna – Сардинія, Puglia – Апулія. The article also identifies the features of the formation and use of Italian place-names. It’s revealed that toponyms are at the crossroads of history, culture and language. Within translation studies, toponyms should be analyzed taking into account the significations they convey. Toponyms can be important evidence about the type of settlement or the presence of certain animals or plants in certain territory. Toponyms can also indicate historical events and social changes in a particular area. The article determines that Italian toponyms take origin from the pre-Latin language and testify to the influences of the Celtic language in northern Italy and the Greek language caused by the colonization in southern Italy, Sicily and parts of Sardinia. Toponyms document the influences of different peoples who came to Italy and were present on its territory. The naming of geographical objects, like any other reality, is due to the ability to read the linguistic nominative code. When giving a name, a person belonging to a certain language community will refer to the words and traditions of his native language.

Demonic Possession & Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Reviewed by: Demonic Possession & Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa Claire Trenery Carrothers Middle Ages, demonic possession, demoniacs, lived religion, gender and possession, blasphemy, intercourse with demons, Fourth Lateran Council sari katajala-peltomaa. Demonic Possession & Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 211. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa's latest monograph investigates some of the most intriguing phenomena of the Middle Ages: the presence of demons in everyday life and their possession of humans. Whilst Katajala-Peltomaa identifies demonic possession as a "spiritual phenomenon" (1), the book is concerned with its physical, mental and—perhaps most particularly—social ramifications. She defines "lived religion" as "a social process, a way to live, interact, and participate in one's community" (2), and she uses this framework to explore demonic possession in terms of the interactions—rather than the polarity—between "individual and collective religious participation" (27). The book's chronological scope runs from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (at which the Devil and demons were defined as creations of God, turned evil by their own doing and capable of tempting humans into sin) to the fifteenth century (when ideas previously associated with demonic possession were increasingly co- opted into the concept of maleficium). Geographically, Katajala- Peltomaa sets up an interesting comparison between northern and southern Europe, which serves to illustrate regional distinctions in understandings of demonic possession. She focuses on Swedish and Italian sources, in which cases of demonic possession are "especially numerous" (24). Beyond being a "theoretical framework" (18) for analysis, the concept of "lived religion" is, for Katajala- Peltomaa, the "methodological tool" (19) that guides her reading of the sources. Each document is a reflection not only of widely held cultural understandings of demonic possession but of the specific community that brought about its creation: both monastic or clerical communities that constructed the written records and lay communities that witnessed the actions of demons and testified to their effects. Thus, "careful contextualization" (24) of the source material is crucial. Katajala- Peltomaa's main source base is records made at canonization hearings for prospective saints of miracles they were believed to have performed. Her close attention to context does not mean that she is unable to observe patterns across her sources, but she uses her analysis of the nuances to call for a "critical evaluation of the concept of 'medieval Europe' [as a] single, coherent entity" (27). The chapters are organised thematically based on stages of communal interaction with demons: from causes of demonic interference; to identification of the possessed; to communal responses to demoniacs; and finally, to wider societal and cultural discussions. The first chapter (Chapter 2, since Chapter 1 is an introduction) deals with perceived reasons for demonic possession, with a focus on whether or not the possessed were held responsible [End Page 432] for their affliction. Though not unanimous, the consensus in this period was that sufferers of demonic possession were victims of unfortunate—and often not blameworthy—circumstances. Katajala- Peltomaa sees the "accidental nature of demonic possession" (45) as related to collective but regionally specific anxieties. She illustrates this through a comparison of the environmental conditions associated with demonic possession in northern and southern accounts. For example, in the densely populated Italian city states, the threat of wilderness and forests was connected with demonic activity, whereas, in Nordic accounts, forests, which were a mundane component of daily life for many people, posed only physical threats (such as getting lost or being attacked by wild animals). Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the victims of demonic possession, particularly addressing whether women were seen as both physically and spiritually more vulnerable to demonic attacks than men. Katajala- Peltomaa reads in the accounts of female demoniacs "personal and social anxieties concerning the signposts of physical growth and social maturing" (menstruation, marriage, pregnancy, etc.) (47), but she notes that connections between the female lifecycle and vulnerability to demonic possession were not inevitable and largely came into play "when something went wrong" (47). Demonic possession represented something beyond the norm and necessitated extreme responses from communities, which could include physical restraint. These responses seem to have been practical solutions to the threat...

Resistance Today

Following decades of neglect, the work of the German Jewish philosopher, literary author, cultural critic, and poet Günther Anders (1902–1992) is gaining increasing recognition in the English-speaking world. This translation of “Résistance heute” (Resistance Today) makes one of Anders’s most programmatic and polemical short texts available. Published at the height of his anti-nuclear activism, “Resistance Today” is the written version of a speech Anders delivered in November 1962 upon acceptance of the northwest Italian city of Omegna’s Resistance Prize (other notable recipients included Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon). It first appeared in print in the West German left-wing journal Das Argument in November 1963. Clearly written for the occasion, the text condenses (and often further radicalizes) key premises about the end of history, the amoral character of work, and the continuity between Nazi totalitarianism, the nuclear age and the world of consumerism that are developed in great nuance across a range of books that Anders had recently published. Key co-ordinates include: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1 (The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1, 1956), his groundbreaking critique of technology; Der Mann auf der Brücke (The Man on the Bridge, 1959), a philosophical travel diary occasioned by Anders’s 1958 visit to Japan and his participation at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Tokyo; Burning Conscience (1961), a correspondence with the American reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, who scouted the target area before the Enola Gay went on to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. It seems likely that Burning Conscience, which turned into an international bestseller, occasioned the award of the prize.

Rachel CuskSecond Place

BOOKS IN REVIEW who has translated many of his works into English. He brings his usual deft touch to the renderings of these tales, all of which read easily, settling into the reader’s consciousness where their aftereffects linger pleasingly. This is the first work to appear since 2017’s Men Without Women (see WLT, Nov. 2017), a collection I found wanting. The current work, by contrast, is gently satisfying. I was particularly taken by three. “With the Beatles” explores nostalgia, serendipity , and the complex interactions of unrequited desire with the inexorable progression of time. “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” and the titular “First Person Singular” harken back to the Murakami we know. The former revels in its surrealistic exploration of the knowable and the self, while the latter throws the protagonist into a fantastic encounter of self-reflection that then aggressively withholds resolution. In aggregate these stories offer up a fresh collection to remind us, once again, of Murakami’s singular appeal as the contemporary Japanese author best known internationally. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Jhumpa Lahiri Whereabouts Trans. Jhumpa Lahiri. New York. Knopf. 2021. 176 pages. WHEREABOUTS is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian and translated into English by herself. It is also her first novel since The Lowland in 2014, which she completed in Rome. Whereabouts presents the culmination of her deliberate and complete immersion into a language and culture different from her Indian and American heritage and its impact on her development as a novelist. The result is a novel unlike any she has ever written, which focuses on the inner life of a middle-aged woman, an academic, who inhabits various public and private spaces in an unnamed Italian city. The novel is structured as vignettes with chapter titles referring to various locations like “In the Bookstore” or “At My House.” Through these vignettes we are offered glimpses of this protagonist’s complex emotional life, her deep loneliness in the city, and her attempts at tenuous connections . The chapter “In the Bookstore” is a chance encounter with her former partner (“the only significant one”), which brings back painful memories of her eagerness to please him and take care of the sundry details of his life, culminating in the shocking revelation of his betrayal. The end of the relationship finally offers her a sense of liberation. The protagonist’s life is imbued with a pervasive sense of loss. There are painful memories of the sudden death of her father, the trauma from which she and her mother have never healed. The loss of the narrator’s father happens at a time when she and her father were going to a different town to see a play, one of their few shared pleasures. Later in the novel, she visits her mother, who is absorbed in her own numerous physical ailments and does not ask the protagonist any questions about her life but focuses on the loss of an address book and brooch. In contrast to the emotional vacuum in her relationship with her mother, her visit to her father’s crypt is filled with emotional intensity. Bookended as the novel is against these primal relationships and losses, there are many passing friendships and even attractions in the narrator’s solitary life. She visits friends with young children, lashes out at a younger woman at a dinner party, witnesses an intimate fight played out on the street between her male friend and his wife. It seems at times that she is a voyeur as well as a flâneur in the city, witnessing scenes of intimacy that somehow evade her. In the final sequence she witnesses a group of foreigners on the train who are enjoying one another’s company and simple foods with boisterous abandon. They offer their snacks to the narrator, but she is unable to accept. In a way, she is reminiscent of an aging, albeit female, Prufrock who is unable to accept the possibilities of life and is resigned to liminal presence in the city. Even when she accepts the opportunity of spending a year in a different country, it seems unlikely that her habits of introspection and isolation will change. Whereabouts...

Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy by Guy Geltner

Through case studies of the Italian cities of Lucca, Bologna, and Pinerolo, Geltner shows how road officials were delegated responsibilities that we today would lump under health and sanitation: keeping waste off the streets and gutters flowing, ensuring clean marketplaces and food for sale, and maintaining latrines and water supplies. Medieval public health was “a dynamic and historically contingent set of legal prohibitions, disciplining practices, and subtle insinuations designed to improve health outcomes at the population level” (p. 12). While Foucault had understood biopower as an eighteenth-century development, Geltner pushes the idea back to medieval city-states whose “governments’ and other agents’ quest for authority and control meant aligning their prerogatives with certain forms of health promotion” (p. 17).

Out of Sight, out of Mind: Italian Lazzaretti and Collective Trauma in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italian Cities

Out of Sight, out of Mind: Italian Lazzaretti and Collective Trauma in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italian Cities

Anne Derbes, Ritual, Gender and Narrative in Late Medieval Italy: Fina Buzzacarini and the Baptistery of Padua. Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020, 384 pp., 189 ill.

Abstract: Visitors to the northern Italian city of Padua often marvel at the city’s medieval pictorial artworks which adorn the interiors of its ancient buildings. Most queue to be admitted into the environmentally regulated Scrovegni Chapel to view Giotto’s stupendous works completed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Those who venture further into Padua’s historic center will never forget the experience of stepping into the city’s baptistery. Admitted through a small wooden door nonchalantly by a proud but often helpful Paduan, the viewer ‐ as soon as his/her eyes adjust to the soft light ‐ is embraced by the splendor of the baptistery’s ceilings and walls. Although the city’s adjoining cathedral was gradually transformed from its late medieval form during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the baptistery has retained both its facade and interior frozen in the late fourteenth century. Perhaps the only significant change occurred early in the fifteenth century when the sarcophagi of the city’s penultimate lord Francesco Il Vecchio da Carrara (1325–1393) and his consort Fina Buzzacarini (1328–1378) were removed.

To the History of International Law: the Property Rights of the Citizens of Local Centres of Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries in Foreign Territory

This paper considers what the archival material of the 14th and 15th centuries can tell us about this question: how and to what extent the rights of the inhabitants of certain northern Italian cities (Ferrara, Cremona, Padua and Venice) were protected if their property was located in foreign territory and/or their property interests could be restricted by the power structures of another Italian centre. The first problem concerned the property of the Church. A study of the documentary material shows that one way of preserving the property of the Church on foreign territory, despite the increasing tendency of secular rulers to seize church lands, was to place it in possession of the local population on a secure basis - emphyteusis, livelles, or other type of long-term use. The second problem was enforcing the contracts, i.e. suing the party which had not fulfilled or improperly fulfilled their terms if the infringer was on foreign soil. The records show that this was most probably enshrined in agreements between the Italian city-states and was incorporated by means of a special formula in the treaties. The third problem was related to the property rights of the inhabitants of medieval Italy, whose real estate, together with the territory in which it was situated, passed under the jurisdiction of another ruler. A study of the lettere ducali shows that such legal relations were based on treaties between the rulers of Italian territorial states and became the subject of diplomatic correspondence

The City as a Commons Reloaded: from the Urban Commons to Co-Cities Empirical Evidence on the Bologna Regulation

The City of Bologna is widely recognized for an innovative regulatory framework to enable urban commons. The “Regulation on public collaboration for the Urban Commons” produced more than 400 pacts of collaboration and was adopted by more than 180 Italian cities so far. The chapter presents an empirical assessment of 280 pacts (2014-2016). The analytical approach is rooted in political economy (Polany 1944; Ahn & Ostrom 2003) and quality of democracy analysis (Diamond & Morlino, 2005). It investigates whether a model of co-governance applied to urban assets as commons impacts on the democratic qualities of equality and rule of law at the urban level. The findings suggest suggests that legal recognition of the urban commons is not sufficient if not coupled with an experimentalist policymaking approach to institutionally redesign the City as a platform enabling collective action of multi-stakeholder partnerships that should be entrusted with the task to trigger neighborhood-based sustainable development. Neighborhood scale investments that aim to seed community economic ventures emerge as a possible way to overcome the shortcomings of the first policy experiments. They also suggest the need for more investigation by scholars on the inclusiveness and diversity facets related to the implementation of urban commons policies.