Italian Style Research Articles

Predicting the kinetics of Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia enterocolitica under dynamic growth/death-inducing conditions, in Italian style fresh sausage

Traditional Italian pork products can be consumed after variable drying periods, where the temporal decrease of water activity spans from optimal to inactivating values. This makes it necessary to A) consider the bias factor when applying culture-medium-based predictive models to sausage; B) apply the dynamic version (described by differential equations) of those models; C) combine growth and death models in a continuous way, including the highly uncertain growth/no growth range separating the two regions.This paper tests the applicability of published predictive models on the responses of Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia enterocolitica to dynamic conditions in traditional Italian pork sausage, where the environment changes from growth-supporting to inhibitory conditions, so the growth and death models need to be combined. The effect of indigenous lactic acid bacteria was also taken into account in the predictions.Challenge tests were carried out using such sausages, inoculated separately with L. monocytogenes and Y. enterocolitica, stored for 480h at 8, 12, 18 and 20°C. The pH was fairly constant, while the water activity changed dynamically. The effects of the environment on the specific growth and death rate of the studied organisms were predicted using previously published predictive models and parameters.Microbial kinetics in many products with a long shelf-life and dynamic internal environment, could result in both growth and inactivation, making it difficult to estimate the bacterial concentration at the time of consumption by means of commonly available predictive software tools. Our prediction of the effect of the storage environment, where the water activity gradually decreases during a drying period, is designed to overcome these difficulties. The methodology can be used generally to predict and visualise bacterial kinetics under temporal variation of environments, which is vital when assessing the safety of many similar products.

Fire safety in Italian-style historical theatres: How photoluminescent wayfinding can improve occupants’ evacuation with no architecture modifications

Abstract Architectural Heritage is often prone to fire risk especially when many significant wooden structures with a particular historic and artistic value are present. This is the case of the Italian style historical theatres. Increasing fire safety of this architectural heritage generally clashes with preserving the original building features: massive and irreversible interventions are often needed so as to respect current severe regulations. Moreover, upgrading interventions can be insufficient so as to effectively improve occupants’ safety level, especially in overcrowded spaces and when people do not know much of the building itself. Occupants’ safety depends on their behaviours and their possibility to rapidly evacuate to a safe place. One of the most effective ways to help them to achieve this aim seems to be the adoption of a good emergency evacuation wayfinding system, especially in smoke or black-out conditions. This paper analyses the effectiveness of a reversible, easy-to-remove and low-impact system for evacuation guidance based on photoluminescent materials (PLM). The proposed continuous wayfinding system (CWS) is composed by PLM tiles along evacuation paths (both corridors and stairs). The application to a case study, the Italian style historical theatre “Gentile da Fabriano”, is then provided. Tests involve more than 100 individuals in smoke and black out conditions. CWS effectiveness was compared to a traditional punctual system in terms of motion speeds (for single pedestrians) and total evacuation time (for the whole building evacuation drill). Questionnaires filled in by involved pedestrians qualitatively evaluated the individuals’ acceptance of CWS. Tests with CWS show that individual's motion speed rises up to 50% and the total evacuation time is reduced down to 25% in respect to the traditional system. Comparisons with previous studies on PLM signs are provided. CWS can be easily introduced in this kind of historical theatres so as to increase the occupants’ safety level.

Selecting the leader, Italian style

ABSTRACTThis article examines the promotion of open and direct procedures for selecting party leaders by focusing on the case of Italy. These inclusive procedures are presented as adaptive strategies adopted by political parties to deal with the deep-rooted anti-party sentiments that are spreading among citizens, and to enable them to re-connect with their own supporters, regardless of whether they are formally enrolled in the party or not. Even though these inclusive approaches serve to enhance the party’s image, their impact on the party organisation is often overlooked. In this regard, scholars have argued that the involvement of party members or external supporters in key decisions, such as candidate selection by primary elections, could lead to a weakening of the party organisation in favour of the strength of the party leader. This issue has to be carefully taken into account, especially in light of the personalisation of politics characterising Western democracies. Open approaches to selection of the party leader produce strong, direct connections between selectors and the candidates for party office, but they endanger the cohesion of the party organisation, diminish the role played by the party in central office and marginalise the party on the ground, whose voice is absorbed into a larger selectorate mainly composed of non-members. Taking the Italian Democratic Party (PD) as a case study, this article aims to understand the extent to which the introduction of such inclusive methods may affect the party organisation, by looking at the capacity of the party to mobilise supporters within and outside the party, and by looking at the relationship between the party and its members.

Predicting the Behaviour of Yersinia Enterocolitica and Listeria Monocytogenes in Italian Style Fresh Sausages under Drying Period

Italian style fresh sausage is a traditional pork product that is frequently consumed raw, usually after drying. So far, the prediction of the behaviour of microorganisms in varying environments has been carried out through separate growth or death models. The aim of this study is to show how to combine these, in order to describe the kinetics of Yersinia enterocolitica and Listeria monocytogenes in sausage during the drying period.During this time, the storage temperature and the pH are fairly constant, while the water activity decreases, being the primary cause of shifting the organisms’ kinetics from growth to inactivation. The water activity takes up values from growth (RG), uncertainty (R0) and death (RD) regions. In the uncertainty region, neither growth nor death is predicted. Among the native flora, lactic acid bacteria may have significant effect on these kinetics.Here we show how to generate predictions for such scenarios, from data that are generated in constant environments. Thus the predictions in our dynamic environments are extrapolations and could be problematic if the environmental fluctuation is extreme. Our approach can be used to predict bacterial growth/death kinetics under temporal variation of storage environments, which is vital when assessing the safety of fresh sausage. We envisage similar applications to other RTE meat products, too.

The Fashion and Sartorial Documentation Section of the Davia Bargellini Museum of Bologna. History, conservation and exhibition

In recent years, the Davia Bargellini Museum of Bologna has set up the Fashion and sartorial documentation section thanks to donations from private donors and tailor shops that have closed down. To date, the core collection consists of documentary materials (fashion sketches, fabric models, patterns, photos from fashion shows, fabric samples, magazines and catalogues), lace and trimmings (finishing touches and entire products), lingerie and linen (personal undergarments and items for the house), and many outfits accompanied by complementary items and accessories (child, male and female accessories) dating from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century. This contribution, besides defining the context of the fashion and tailoring collection in a museum of applied arts, also illustrates how the section within the museum was formed (history), problems and methods of cataloguing current materials (conservation), and the contents of the first communications to the public (exhibition). The collection highlights the relationship between the designers who created fashion and the local tailors who interpreted the designs which were in vogue. The collection makes it possible to explore the social history and the production of tailor shops seen as the artisan origin of Italian style, or “Made in Italy.”

Religion Italian Style. Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country, written by Franco Garelli

Religion Italian Style. Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country, written by Franco Garelli

Ross K. Elfline. Review of "Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945" by Sonnet Stanfill.

Ross K. Elfline. Review of "Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945" by Sonnet Stanfill.

An Italian in Paris. De Amicis, the World Exposition of 1878, and the New Culture of Industrial Modernity

This essay explores the relationship between Italy and a new global culture developed in the nineteenth century through world’s fairs. It reconstructs the aspirations, reactions, and fears of a young nation on the eve of its industrialization through a report about the Paris Exposition of 1878, entitled Ricordi di Parigi (1879), by the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis. In introducing Italian readers to a new cosmopolitan culture, De Amicis’s text expresses Italy’s ambiguous position towards modernity — simultaneously striving to participate on the world stage, and to affirm its radical difference from it — and creates a narration of the 1878 event that successfully combines marginal and global points of view. By building a strong connection between Italian and French culture (notably through interviews with Hugo and Zola) and by engaging in a reflection on Paris as the alluring/deceiving symbol of a new city-world, De Amicis expands the journalistic scope of his book, turning it into an intellectual testimony to early industrialism (to be considered alongside more renowned testimonies by Marx and Baudelaire). Finally, we use social history and architecture to examine the relationship between the quest for an Italian style — reflected in the façade of national pavilions and in the design of national products — and the development of Italy’s approach to industrial modernity, conceived as a singular fusion of aesthetics, production, tradition, and innovation.

Franco Garelli, Religion Italian Style. Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country

Franco Garelli, Religion Italian Style. Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country

Accountability, Italian style: how to reply to government pressure?

The current paper addresses the complex issue of accountability by focusing on Italian public hospitals and teaching hospitals; it aims to analyze Italian health care organizations’ strategies for responding to the pressure generated by regulations. In particular, in the last few years, Italian hospitals and teaching hospitals have been obliged to implement or improve their accountability instruments in response to a new regulation (known as the Brunetta reform, Legislative Decree number 150/2009). The Legislative Decree aims to measure and assess the results of each public administration unit in terms of efficiency of the human resources, satisfaction level of the final users, and transparency of its action. Despite the initial consensus on the necessity to make the decision process in health care visible and transparent, health care organizations find it difficult to demonstrate accountability. The present paper summarizes the evidence on the degree of compliance to the reform requirements and will allow an in-depth understanding of Italian health organizations’ attitudes toward accountability. This study will help policymakers understand the degree of acceptance and application of the new reforms and assess whether the law/regulations may be effective drivers for disseminating a culture of transparency and accountability.

Beauty Italian Style: Gendered Imaginings of, and Responses to, Stage Divas in Early Post-Unification Literary Culture

In this article I argue that Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ — a major articulation of capitalist patriarchy which seeks to glorify the female body, yet covertly depreciates it — gained momentum in Italian culture at the end of the nineteenth century through the emergence of the cosmetic industry and divas’ advertising of beauty products in women’s magazines. Through a close reading of the literary culture (reviews of divas’ performances in women’s and theatre journals, as well as realist fiction), I show that the discursive construction of the Italian diva in this period was gendered: though women writers demonstrate an awareness of, and take pleasure in the diva’s ‘beauty’, but above all celebrate her skills and talents as a performing artist, male writers — without exception — pass comment on the diva’s appearance over and above a critique of her performing skills. This would suggest that ‘the beauty myth’ — the idea that a woman’s value is determined by her appearance — was an integral component of divadom in late nineteenth-century Italy, and, for male journalists and writers, an even more important attribute than the diva’s acting or singing abilities.

ENTREPRENEURIAL DISCOVERY PROCESS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WINE INDUSTRY IN GREECE: UNDERSTANDING INDUSTRY NEEDS TOWARDS THE JRC’S INNOVATIVE APPROACH

ENTREPRENEURIAL DISCOVERY PROCESS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WINE INDUSTRY IN GREECE: UNDERSTANDING INDUSTRY NEEDS TOWARDS THE JRC’S INNOVATIVE APPROACH

French chamber music

In promoting his cherished réunion des goûts, François Couperin never sought to denigrate the native French musical tradition but rather to enrich it with elements imported from Italy in an attempt to achieve ‘the perfection of music’. The present batch of recordings, consisting mainly of chamber music composed between the 1690s and the 1740s, illustrates the varying degree to which French composers of the period came to terms with Italian styles and techniques or, in some cases, ignored them completely. Elements of the two national traditions are nicely juxtaposed on a disc entitled Italy versus France: Lully, Corelli, d’Anglebert, Rebel, Muffat, Couperin (Hyphen Press Music hpm004, rec 2010, 79′), part of an enterprising series in which The Bach Players approach French music from various different perspectives. At one extreme in the present programme is a group of items representing the unalloyed style français—the overture and chaconne from Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, together with two theorbo pieces by Robert de Visée and d’Anglebert’s Tombeau de M. Chambonnières, a tribute to the founder of the French clavecin school. At the other is Corelli’s trio sonata on the ciaccona, op.12 no.12, plus a keyboard toccata by Pasquini and the G minor sonata from Georg Muffat’s homage to Corelli, Armonico tributo. Between these are two further works in that archetypal French genre, the tombeau, which nevertheless adopt the medium of the Italian trio sonata: Jean-Féry Rebel’s Tombeau de M. de Lully and Couperin’s Le Parnasse, ou L’Apothéose de Corelli. This imaginative programming creates an anthology which amounts to far more than the sum of its parts. All the music is first rate, and The Bach Players, directed by Nicolette Moonen, do it full justice, whether in Muffat’s sublime contrapuntal edifices, or in the dignified but poignant tombeaux by d’Anglebert and Rebel, or in Couperin’s evocation of Corelli’s ‘enthousiasme’. Uplifting and hugely enjoyable.

Katalog der Textilreste

In this contribution Mycenaean clay figurines are examined in the light of their Mediterranean, and especially their central Mediterranean distributions. In Italy a recent find from Fondo Paviani (Verona) adds to the small group of figurines already known from Lipari, Scoglio del Tonno and possibly Broglio di Trebisacce. Following the prevailing view which associates figurines with the palaces of the Argolis and their ideological discourse, the few examples from Italy may be used to confirm that exchange relationships between the Mycenaeans and the Italian communities were unofficial and unsystematic. The contexts of the figurines – mostly from sites to which Mycenaean pottery was exclusively or mainly imported - may however indirectly testify to a concrete function in trade activities. More generally, Mycenaean figurines may have conveyed an important meaning in sanctioning transactions at various levels – from the personal and private to the official and public – and in various activities, religious as well as purely mundane. As for long-distance exchange, an important link between figurines and trade agents is also indicated. Wherever Mycenaean pottery is mainly attested by local production, implying the transfer of people or technologies – as in Italy or Anatolia - figurines seem to be under-represented, whereas they are more numerous where pottery is clearly an outcome of trade, as in the Levant. Finally, a role in exchange activities is also suggested for the rough locallymade Italian figurines, which are mainly distributed along the Adriatic coast, at several sites engaged in industrial production and trade during the Italian Final Bronze Age, when Italian style seems to gain importance in the Aegean.

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire by Eugenia Paulicelli (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire by Eugenia Paulicelli Tracey Griffiths Paulicelli, Eugenia, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 278; 8 colour, 48 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781472411709. Eugenia Paulicelli has pursued her interest in the history of Italian style through a series of books and edited collections that focus on fashion in Italian literature and film, addressing both the contemporary scene and earlier epochs. Her new book is a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advice literature, costume books, and satirical attacks and defences of fashion. In her opening chapter, Paulicelli revisits a topic she has previously explored with the collection Moda e moderno: dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Meltemi, 2006), and similarly names this chapter ‘Moda and Moderno’. The chapter introduces themes such as discipline and imitation that will be developed in the remainder of the book. Paulicelli positions fashion as a form of discipline that superseded sumptuary legislation during the early modern period, presenting it as a relatively recent development in an ongoing civilising process that can be traced back as far as the codes of behaviour set out in monastic rules. In discussing imitation, she notes that innovations did not always spread down the social hierarchy, offering the counter-example of slashed clothes, which originated with Swiss mercenaries, later spreading to camp followers, and eventually, aristocrats. The book is divided into three parts, with the first consisting of this initial chapter and another on Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. In the second part, Paulicelli discusses the costume books of Cesare Vecellio and Giacomo Franco, devoting a chapter to each of these entrepreneurial Venetian authors and image-makers. Finally, she considers approaches to fashion in satires and anti-satires, with a chapter on the works of Archangela Tarabotti, forced to take the veil against her will, and another on those of a Benedictine monk, Agostino Lampugnani, both writers associated with the Academy of the Incogniti in Venice. Paulicelli explores the way that identity politics, particularly those of gender and nation, play out in these texts, which were written in an era when the Italian peninsula was politically fragmented and often subject to foreign occupation. The texts repeatedly frame political subjugation as the consequence of an earlier sartorial submission. However, the city from which most of the texts issued, Venice, not only retained its sovereignty throughout this period, but was an important centre for both fashion and printing. Surprisingly, Paulicelli seems to ignore this, along with the enormous influence that Italian culture had in seventeenth-century France, as she laments that nation’s success in snatching the crown of fashion from Italy. The historical emergence of fashion, in the sense that we now know it, constitutes the chief concern of the book. Paulicelli begins with [End Page 266] ‘[t]he etymological trajectories of both la moda and fashion’ (p. 5), and their cognates in other European languages. She supplements this, in the second part of the book, with a fascinating discussion of framing, distortion, and mirroring, applied particularly to the images in the costume books. Finally, she identifies a key development in mid-seventeenth-century Italy, the advent of the modanti or foggiani, groups labelled using ‘neologisms … difficult to render into English: “fashionistas” or “fashion victims” do not completely render the nuances’ (p. 209). Paulicelli contends that writings can teach new ways of seeing the world, arguing for ‘the potential of words and language to exceed and transform the world, now seen through a new lens: fashion’ (p. 221). The book as a whole is aimed at a specialist, academic audience. It studies fashion as a mentality, paying relatively little attention to specific styles, and assumes a general knowledge of the broad developments in the early modern Italian and European fashion and textile trades. Its opening chapter provides an introduction to fashion in early modern Italy, helpfully integrating the English and Italian historiography on this topic. The book also serves to draw attention, in the context of English-language discussions of European fashion, to the importance of the as-yet-untranslated texts...

Seduced by Rhetoric: Resuscitating Boscán's “Leandro”

Rhetoric had its glory days during the High Renaissance, and Juan Boscan was its most significant champion in Spain. Justly recognized for his embrace of Italianate style, with its new rhymes and rhythms and its return to classical poets and rhetoricians—perhaps particularly, for Boscan, Quintilian, who promoted a poetics as emotional as didactic—Boscan as a poet has been unfairly neglected and even denigrated. But Leandro , his minor epic, is in fact a major poetic triumph. It greatly expands its major source, Musaeus’ fifth-century AD poem, brilliantly using rhetoric to enhance the lyricism, the eroticism and the pathos of this love that, in his day, was “in every mans mouth.”

Renaissance and ‘Made in Italy’: marketing Italian fashion through history (1949–1952)

Until 1950, Italian fashion did not exist: there were able tailors and creative designers, but they were known only as individuals and not as part of a wider movement that identified with a specific Italian style. Despite the existence of advanced skills, with the potential to realize an Italian fashion in its own right, there was neither a cultural identity to bind them together nor an international legitimization that would allow the new form to compete with the dominant haute couture of Paris. The revival of the Renaissance and its invention as an intangible asset was fundamental in resolving this ‘dual’ absence, and it therefore became a key factor in the international success of Italian fashion. From the 1950s to today – the period of increasing international success of the ‘Made in Italy’ label – in the rhetoric of entrepreneurs, managers and marketing experts, the Renaissance has become almost an integral part of the DNA of Italian fashion, itself at times represented as the direct descendant and legitimate heir of the excellence of Renaissance taste. This is a link, now taken for granted, for which a term has even been coined: the ‘Renaissance effect’. The fundamental argument that supports this so-called Renaissance effect is in fact that of the continuity between the craftsmanship of the Renaissance age and today's fashion houses; a continuity, however, that has been elaborated through ‘manipulations’ of history which are in part simplistic and in part distorted.

Fashion: The Cultural Economy of Made in Italy

The article examines the concept of Made in Italy in the context of the long history of Italian fashion and Italian nation building. It wishes to pose some methodological questions: it argues for a more sophisticated understanding of Made in Italy, suggesting that it must be considered in relation to the complexity of the formation of an Italian style that harks back to early modernity when a prolific literature and culture came to the fore and elaborated an Italian taste or sprezzatura that was then exported to the rest of Europe. Second, the article argues that today's Made in Italy must be examined in the context of both a multilayered identity and a plurality of fashion cities and capitals. Lastly, the article argues that, as is the case with sprezzatura, a study of Made in Italy must be attentive to how Italian style has been, over the years, translated and exported beyond the spatial confines of the nation and the temporal confines of history.

Racial Masquerade Italian Style? Whiteface and Blackface in Zeudi Araya’s 1970s Comedies

This article analyzes the performances of Eritrean actress Zeudi Araya in her middlebrow comedies from the late 1970s. I interpret her popularity in parallel with the incipient and coterminous immigration of women to Italy, from the former colonies of the Horn of Africa as well as from other developing countries, who provided informal welfare for the modernizing Italian family and partially substituted for Italian women’s double presence inside and outside the home. Il signor Robinson (Corbucci 1976) and Tesoromio (Paradisi 1979), in which Araya plays a domestic worker, include performances of whiteface, blackface, and mistaken identities between Italian and foreign characters. This racial masquerade inscribes the black immigrant woman within adulterous romances in which Araya’s exotic and submissive characters substitute for the emancipated white woman in the Italian family.The substitution simultaneously works to recall the colonial figure of the docile Black Venus while also restoring the sexual potency of the male inetto, a stock character from the Italian comic tradition. Further, these romances are framed within a geographical dichotomy of inclusion in private spaces and exclusion from public spaces. Araya’s characters either are entrapped within the intimate space of the Italian home or, when they appear in public, are located outside Italian national borders, in an escapist elsewhere such as the Caribbean or the imaginary island of Balicù. As this elsewhere is detached from any immediate references to the history of Italian colonialism, Araya’s comedies can draw from the colonial repertoire of images and visual tropes while disavowing any ideological engagement with that legacy.

1950s made in Brisbane: Italian tailors and the continental suit

Abstract During the 1950s and 1960s, when the French couturiers Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy and Chanel dominated the fashion industry, the Italian community in Brisbane, Australia, was very active in the local industry through retail, dress-making and tailoring. Australia is geographically at the margins of the developed countries and has been dependent on European trends and taste. In the 1950s, communication was based on magazines and especially newsreels and film; each ethnic group dressed as they liked and according to their custom. Moreover, ‘Made in Italy’ was not yet the prestigious concept that revolutionized ready-to-wear design from the 1970s. However, Italian tailors and demi-couturiers brought to Brisbane their trans-national sense of elegance (the Italian style) and the taste in fashion that influenced new generations in England and elsewhere in Europe from the 1950s. They brought quality and workmanship, offering excellence through the use of quality fabrics from prestigious English and Italian brands. These tailors and dress-makers also contributed towards the local industry through passing on the skills that they brought from Italy. This article is based on a project that seeks to understand the connection between fashion, history and place. The area under examination is the Valley, short for Fortitude Valley, an area adjacent to the Brisbane CBD. Fundamental to this connection between place and fashion was the presence of many Italian migrants in the area. Through archival research and oral history, the aim of this ethnographic project is to bring to the fore an untold story about the economic and aesthetic contribution of Italian migrants to Queensland. Central to the understanding of this aesthetic change is the Italian suit. This research is innovative in that it opens a new area of study in Australian fashion history, connected to the history of migrants and their identity.