Italian Story Research Articles

Audit society, organisational response and (de-)coupling: an Italian story

Audit society, organisational response and (de-)coupling: an Italian story

Health risks due to the presence of asbestos in cosmetic talcs. An Italian story

The presence of asbestos in cosmetic talc has been reported in the United States since the 1970s. The present article first retraces the Italian case, then focuses on technical features as well as the relevant laws, rules, and regulations, ending with a precautionary evidence-based approach. Research was mainly aimed at retrieving official Italian Health Authority papers on the tests carried out several decades ago, to identify the presence of any asbestos in talc of products for sale. Results show that, in Italy, National Institute of Health (the technical agency of the Ministry of Health) and the Italian Pharmacopoeia (1985) used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to ascertain the absence of asbestos fibres, following positive identification in several samples they had analysed. In 2008, Italy adopted the EU Pharmacopoeia according to which light microscopy (LM) was sufficient for analysis. Such a technical downgrading clearly went - and goes - against the standard principle of precaution to prevent harm to users' health.Unfortunately, documents on the above-mentioned SEM research that would have contextualized observations were not recovered from the Italian State Archive. Observations and results indicate that in practice levels of attention on the issue underwent a considerable (negative) decline, so much that effective planning of the necessary controls was not possible, which is unfortunately true to this day. Final comments deal with the principle of precaution and possible practical operational solutions.

Why Didn’t Anyone Understand? Why Didn’t Anyone Ever Stand in the Way? Detecting Child Abuse in Out-of-Home care Setting: The Role of Safeguard and Protection Systems and Social Workers

Abstract The issue of institutional abuse (IA) in out-of-home care services is a difficult one, which we struggle to think about and which is slow to find attention and recognition: the victims are those children who, after experiencing maltreatment and abuse in the family, still suffer violence in the residential care services that should protect them. It represents the failure of the public system in protecting children, and it is often the result of institutions and professionals who allow, collude, cover, justify and minimise violence against children. Starting from a recent and paradigmatic Italian story and from the contribution of experience and thought of those who, as the first author, survived it, as well as from the analysis of the existing literature, this article examines the specific characteristics and dynamics of IA that motivate the extreme difficulty of its emergence. This article aims to improve professionals’ awareness concerning the phenomenon and their responsibilities in the prevention and early detection. For professionals and services to see institutional maltreatment implies questioning themselves, their own methodological tools and their own professional practices, as well as opening themselves to the concrete possibility of being able—at least—to make serious mistakes.

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

Review Essay—Jhumpa Lahiri: Between Longing and Belonging

The Heavy Burden of “Dependent Children”: An Italian Story

This paper analyses multidimensional fuzzy monetary and non-monetary deprivation in households with children by using two different definitions: households with children under 14 years old, and the EU definition of households with dependent children. Eight dimensions of non-monetary deprivation were found using 34 items from the EU-SILC 2016 survey. Dealing with subpopulations, it is essential to compute standard errors for the presented estimators. Thus, a relevant added value of the paper is fuzzy poverty measures and associated standard errors, which were also computed. Moreover, a comparison was made between the measures obtained concerning the two subpopulations across countries. With a focus on Italy, an Italian macro-region is presented.

The Italian story of HEMS: the HEMS Association

Mountain HEMS Association was born, with a notarial deed of incorporation, in April 2008 following the initiative of 7 autonomous Region /Provinces of the Alps and Apennines: in 2005, Dr. Enrico Visetti, Anesthetist Doctor of the Aosta hospital, organized a helicopter rescue training course aimed at new doctors to be included in the local helicopter rescue. In December 2006, access to the course was offered to all the other operational bases in the Alps. The invitation was extended to the various figures operating within the Service, therefore doctors, nurses, and subsequently the CNSAS Helicopter Rescue Technicians: with the participation of new external experiences, the course objective was also modified. In 2007, 90% of the participants in the training course were Doctors and Nurses who already had experience and actively operated in the helicopter rescue in the bases of origin: the participants themselves had to bring their own ideas and experiences and simultaneously cover the role of speakers. Until now, the main objective, concentrated in the training addressed to new doctors, became, thanks to the support of the various experiences, an exchange of opinions and a training ground for discussion between the various actors. The technical mountaineering part was managed thanks to the support of the mountain rescue, always present in the external activities alongside the staff. In the theoretical part, various lines of common behavior were discussed to be adopted in the interventions of Helicopter Rescue, while in the context of the scientific discussion, the total lack of a database of helicopter rescue services in which to obtain useful information was recognized. During the Courmayer course, in the spring of 2007, the idea of creating a website was born with the aim of developing a data acquisition system from the various operational bases of the Alpine and Apennine arc: from this initiative, the establishment of the Association.

Mineralogical, petrological and planetological heritage. The (Italian) story so far

The goal of this work is to further increase the use, by all the stakeholders, of well-established and official cataloguing methods for the preservation, valorisation and study of naturalistic heritage. The work describes the standards of the Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation (ICCD) for cataloguing the Italian mineralogical, petrological and planetological heritage to the community of scientists, curators and museum practitioners. This work then provides an overview of the geoscientific heritage already catalogued through these standards and freely available for study and research purposes on the SIGECweb online database. Finally, the importance of a standardized cataloguing—in the comprehension of the historical, cultural and ethical aspects relative to the conservation and valorisation of the geoscientific heritage—will also be highlighted.

Boston’s North End: An Italian American Story

Boston’s North End: An Italian American Story

Anglophonic Influence in the Use of Sound Symbolism in Italian Disney Comics: A Corpus-based Analysis

AbstractThis article will explore the linguistic implications of employing and creating sound symbolism (ideophones, onomatopoeia and interjections) in Italian Disney comics. It will endeavour to investigate the way sound symbolic forms in both imported Disney US comics and original Italian stories have profoundly influenced the development of Italian sound symbolism in the last century. The diachronic analysis is carried out thanks to the creation of a corpus of ideophones and interjections from 210 Disney stories published between 1932 and 2013. The corpus will allow the author to investigate how these forms have changed diachronically throughout the eighty years under investigation with the final aim of highlighting changes and patterns in both original and translated Italian stories. The unique status of ideophones, confirmed by language, sociological and neurological studies, has led to interesting experimentations but also to complicated dynamics. Certain linguistic settings seem to foster a better affinity towards the device- particularly if compared to Romance languages, such as Italian and Spanish, that often have to rely on Anglophone renditions. Anglicisation has indeed overshadowed previous original attempts. Nevertheless, recent creations, particularly from cartoonists, bear witness to a willingness to stretch language again in order to enhance language iconicity.

Serratia marcescens: an Italian story.

Serratia marcescens: an Italian story.

Protagonists' and Adoptive Process Representations in Italian Children's Books About International Adoption: A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study aims at identifying the main representations of the international adoption process through a comparative analysis of 62 Italian stories about international adoption. Content analysis involves the use of thematic analysis as well as computer-assisted text analysis. Results show that adoption is represented varying from a polarization in which “the positive” is situated in the “adoptive world” while “the negative” pertains to the world of the origins, to a more integrated representation in which both the adoptive context and the origins entail positive aspects.

The Limitation Period of Crimes: Same Old Italian Story, New Intriguing European Answers: Case Note on C-105/14, Taricco

Following a request for a preliminary ruling from an Italian judge, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued a groundbreaking decision in the Taricco case (C-105/14). In this judgment, the Court states that domestic judges are entitled, or even obliged, to disapply national legislation on the prescription of crimes, when such legislation impairs an effective fight against frauds to the detriment of EU finances. This case note offers an overview of the most problematic aspects of this decision, as well as its implications at the EU level. Moreover, the effects of the Taricco judgment on the Italian system are briefly discussed, especially from the perspective of the possible violations of the principle of legality.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE UGANDAN BUSH

A conversation in a car in Northern Uganda wanders off to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Then the old Italian love story leads to a discussion about feudal fights and reconciliation. A decade after the raids by the Lord's Resistance Army on the villages we pass, people are still struggling with the aftermath of that war. Victims and perpetrators are living together and try to pick up ordinary life. Traditional ways of forgiving and reconciliation have become urgent concerns today. The next day I reread Shakespeare's play and discover that it teaches the same lesson: the need for reconciliation.

Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott

Early in 1868, two critics were speculating about origin of Alfred Tennyson's already classic Lady of Shalott. Here Frederick James Furnivall writing to William Michael Rossetti with an answer from horse's mouth: As you kindly took trouble about The Lady of Shalott for me, you are entitled to copy of Tennyson's own account:-'I met story first in some Italian novelle: mirror, island, etc., were own.' (1) A notebook from Tennyson's days at Trinity College records, Legends. / The Lady of Scalot. Novelle Antiche, apparently confirming that he had found inspiration in thirteenth-century collection of tales called Cento novelle antiche (One hundred ancient tales). (2) The collection was known in nineteenth century for having inspired many of stories in Boccaccio's 1353 Decameron. Among hundred ancient tales is, indeed, brief novella about damigella di who diet! for love of Lancelot. But no amount of explanation or evidence satisfied scholars, who have doggedly sought additional sources for Tennyson's 1832 ballad. Without discounting connections to novella, they have argued for range of other influences, from Malory romance Tennyson claimed not to have used to Sappho, Spenser, and Shelley. (3) Even avowed Italian source yielded more questions than answers: Was Tennyson working from an Italian-language edition of Cento novelle antiche available to nineteenth-century readers of Italian, or was he working from an English translation of novella in Thomas Roscoe's 1825 The Italian Novelists? What use did he make of two contemporaneous poems by Louisa Stuart Costello and Letitia Elizabeth Landon also derived from novella? (4) And why Italian story missing so many of Tennyson's crucial details: web, mirror, island, etc. that he claimed as my own? (5) These discrepancies led Isobel Armstrong to agnostic conclusion that poem has no source, and in fact conflation of number of mythic structures-but same mismatches have tantalized many other source-hungry critics with prospect of further discoveries. (6) Why did Victorians care so much about origin of this poem, and why do we still care? Perhaps vertigo reader experiences on first learning that this consummately English ballad about England's mythic past so embroiled in Italian literary history. I myself have spent countless hours tracking source of Tennyson's source. On tip from Victorian translator Thomas Roscoe, who suggested that novella was first recorded by Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini, I have searched Latini's work for references to Lady of Shalott-or to variants Scalot and Scalotta-and I have searched for information about Arthurian romance that Latini was thought to own a beautiful copy of. (7) I was hoping to find in poem's shadowy prehistory some clue to form of Lady of Shalott, to learn something more about Tennyson's particular variety of lyrical ballad. But poem's source problems are only replicated in literary history of tale. In choosing story of Lady of Shalott-by whatever means he found it-Tennyson was engaging with source question as much as source. In 1814 History of Fiction, work that Roscoe drew on for his introduction to The Italian Novelists, John Colin Dunlop characterizes Cento novelle antiche as both an origin point and collection of enigmatic histories. It constitutes the first regular work of class [of short fiction] in Europe, and laid foundation of most splendid efforts of human genius. At same time it was not new and original production, compilation of stories already current in world. The diverse tales, from diverse literary cultures, may have been recorded by one author or many, but who these authors were, Dunlop announces, is still problem in literary annals of Italy (my emphasis). …

Texan Italian Stories

Texan Italian Stories

Posthumous love: eros and the afterlife in Renaissance England

For Dante and Petrarch, posthumous love was a powerful conviction. Like many of their contemporaries, both poets envisioned their encounters with their beloved in heaven-Dante with Beatrice, Petrarch with Laura. But as Ramie Targoff reveals in this elegant study, English love poetry of the Renaissance brought a startling reversal of this tradition: human love became definitively mortal. Exploring the boundaries that Renaissance English poets drew between earthly and heavenly existence, Targoff seeks to understand this shift and its consequences for English poetry. Targoff shows that medieval notions of the somewhat flexible boundaries between love in this world and in the next were hardened by Protestant reformers, who envisioned a total break between the two. Tracing the narrative of this rupture, she focuses on central episodes in poetic history in which poets developed rich and compelling compensations for the lack of posthumous love - from Thomas Wyatt's translations of Petrarch's love sonnets and the Elizabethan sonnet series of Shakespeare and Spencer to the carpe diem poems of the seventeenth century. Targoff's centerpiece is Romeo and Juliet, where she considers how Shakespeare's reworking of the Italian story stripped away any expectation that the doomed teenagers would reunite in heaven. This book ultimately demonstrates that the negation of posthumous love brought forth a new mode of poetics that derived its emotional and aesthetic power from its insistence upon love's mortal limits.

Review: Italy: Modern Architectures in History, by Diane Ghirardo

Diane Ghirardo Italy: Modern Architectures in History London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 336 pp., 207 b/w illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781861898647 When we think of the history of modern architecture the story might revolve around the Germans and the Bauhaus, but Diane Ghirardo’s Italy: Modern Architectures in History might give us pause, since it reminds us of a more fundamental driver of “the modern,” namely, the rise of the nation-state. This was a significant aspect for the Prussians during the Enlightenment, and indeed some have argued that Friedrich Schinkel was, in a sense, the first modern for the Germans. But the German unification as such took place only in 1871, and though there are many parallels, the Italian situation was considerably more stressed, for they not only had to build a nation-state after 1861 out of the chaos of unification but also had to do so in the vortex of modern industrialization. Timing was everything; the Greeks won their independence in 1830, but the Greeks never accepted—or perhaps one can say embraced— “the crisis of modernity” in quite the same way as the Italians. The task of creating Italy’s image fell, of course, to the architects, city designers, and artists whose accomplishments gave visible definition to the question of what a national architecture should look like, especially in comparison with the architecture of countries far ahead in the modernization enterprise. The Italians were not alone in that general ambition. The Americas were equally concerned with developing a national style, as were many of the other European nations in the era of Romantic nationalism. But the Italian story remains unique, given the tension between that nation’s deep history and its now-nationalized civilizational ambitions. Unique to the Italian perspective was the situation that the country was not a colonial power with access to far-flung resources. In 1861, it was largely a rural nation. The scale of the transformation should, therefore, not be underestimated. …

Двоемирие и метаморфозы в итальянской новелле Д.С. Мережковского «Превращение»

Двоемирие и метаморфозы в итальянской новелле Д.С. Мережковского «Превращение»

Echoes of tradition: Liang Qichao’s reflections on the Italian Risorgimento and the construction of Chinese nationalism

This paper examines how Liang Qichao viewed the Italian Risorgimento, with the focus on his reflections on its meanings in the historical contexts of Chinese politics and tradition. It will identify and analyze the many forces and ideas that influenced Liang as he formulated his reflections, especially the timing around the turn of the twentieth century and the discourses of nascent nationalism in Japan where Liang lived in exile. The way Liang created – or recreated – the Italian story demonstrated that the Chinese had finally begun to realize a crucial point about the building of a modern nation. While Britain, the United States, and France were able to build a modern nation by starting from the grass roots and more closely observing Enlightenment ideals, China did not have the luxury or the time to follow the same path. In the age of high imperialism, the weak would simply be weeded out quickly. Without national salvation, there could be no modern nation. National salvation, as exemplified by the Risorgimento, involved maintaining and glorifying the country’s own traditions and core values, which would in turn unify different social segments. Liang and his fellow reformers realized the importance of having simultaneously a national cause, a single political party, and a single leader, instead of having to take separate steps toward awakening. Liang’s awakening paved the way for the unfolding of the great Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, led first by the Kuomintang and then by the Communists. Following Liang’s track of thinking, they both strived to build – or rebuild – a political centralism.

Names and Identities in the Italian Detective Story

Detective stories were established in Italy at the end of the nine- teenth century in imitation of the 'noir' and the French and English serial novels. The Italian detective story over time has grown also with some of our better writers and it is to stories written by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Fruttero/Franco Lucentini, Carlo Fruttero and Andrea Vitali that this paper is dedicated to investigating. In addition, all these authors reveal with linguistic reflections that they appreciate the inherent power of Proper Names. The de- tective novel is especially appropriate on the relation between proper names and identity. Indeed, normally at the beginning of events both in the real world and in detective fiction the personalities present in the good and bad texture of events have not yet been identified. These authors of Italian detective stories look for an ally in the nominatio to help them define the identity of their characters and the backdrop of their story.