Italian Town Research Articles

Homeless or refugee? Civil Society Actors and the (un)making of internal borders in an Italian frontier town

ABSTRACT Migrants’ access to the national territory is filtered through categorisation processes that entangle the legal–administrative statuses produced by immigration controls with stratified access to social and political rights, representing a form of internal bordering. Drawing upon qualitative data on Civil Society Actors (CSAs) who provide services to homeless migrants in an Italian frontier town, this article identifies two main types of practices that can be used by CSAs to reshape internal borders: either de-institutionalising internal borders through the circulation of non-state resources or engaging with institutionalised internal borders by expanding or ensuring migrants’ access to state resources through a mix of cooperation and conflict with governmental actors. The article contributes to the broader debate on the role of CSAs in drawing internal borders in frontier towns and discusses the policy implications of CSAs’ actions at the local level and beyond.

[On the origin of the name Girifalco, an Italian town in a hotspot of the autumn migration of soaring raptors]

[On the origin of the name Girifalco, an Italian town in a hotspot of the autumn migration of soaring raptors]

La comunicazione turistica plurilingue: il Progetto “Museo poliglotta"

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

Understanding Rural Migration in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Examining Dimensions of Social Change and their Effects in Cisternino, a Southern Italian Town

Abstract This article examines the migration transition in Cisternino, a rural town in Southern Italy, after the Second World War, and analyses the social changes that influenced the observed migration shifts. Based on archival research, statistics and primary data, the article presents the town and its migration patterns before and after the Second World War. It then examines the town’s main social changes over the 1950–1990 period, and shows that three processes explain the changing migration patterns: the expansion of the state, cultural transformations and the restructuring of the local economy. The article shows that, after the war, migration became an adaptation strategy in reaction to rapid societal changes, including new aspirations among local residents. Therefore, migration became of vital importance at a time of high uncertainty. The article also shows the many ways in which, at crucial moments of transition, the state affected local livelihoods and people’s decision to either adapt locally or migrate.

Preface

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AIVELA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON VIBRATION MEASUREMENTS BY LASER AND NONCONTACT TECHNIQUES ANCONA, 21-23 JUNE 2023 Since October 1994 the AIVELA Conference on Vibration Measurements by Laser Techniques established itself as the international forum where research ideas and technological innovation on Laser Vibrometry were presented and exchanged. Ancona, an ancient and fascinating Italian town situated on the Adriatic coast, became the biennial destination of the international laser vibrometry community.The event was initially focused on Vibration Measurements by Laser Techniques and it immediately met large consensus among the International Research Community. In 2010 the Scientific Committee decided to widen the topics of the Conference by also including other noncontact techniques and the name of the event was changed to International Conference on Vibration Measurements by Laser and Noncontact Techniques. The Conference aims at creating an active and stimulating forum where current research results and technical advances can be exchanged and the development of new systems for laboratory use, field testing and industrial application can be promoted. For this reason, experts in vibration and acoustics, manufacturers and authorities in the field of optical and non-invasive instrumentation and industrial users of such measurement devices have come from all over the world to present their activities and innovative approaches to vibration measurements.The 2023 edition of the event (the 15th edition) was organised in collaboration with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences of Università Politecnica delle Marche and was held in Ancona, Italy.The Conference featured• the Invited lecture “High-speed camera-based structural identification beyond 1/100.000th of a pixel”, delivered by Prof. Janko Slavič, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia”;• the Invited lecture “Novel Three-dimensional Continuous Scanning Laser Vibrometry for Structures with Arbitrarily Curved Surfaces and Novel Zero-contact Rotating Structure Vibration Measurement”, delivered by Prof. Weidong Zhu, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA;• the Invited lecture “Combining LDV with flying and moving platforms for flexible measurements on large structures: Joint research of TU Clausthal and the DLR”, delivered by Prof. Christian Rembe, TU Clausthal, Germany;• the Invited lecture “The role of experimental dynamics in an era of Artificial Intelligence”, delivered by Prof. Dario Di Maio, University of Twente, The Netherlands;• 40 papers organised into 12 Technical Sessions, one of which entirely devoted to the EU funded project “H2020 Marie Sklowska Curie project ECO-DRIVE”;• a session entirely devoted to manufacturers’ presentations;• a session dedicated to the late Prof. David J. Ewins.The papers presented were all of high scientific quality and dealt with different measurement techniques, including Continuous Scanning LDV, Digital Image Correlation, Three-dimensional Digital Image Correlation, Laser Doppler Interferometry, Laser Vibrometry, Optical Sensors, Vision Based Techniques, to cite a few.An Exhibition was also organised in conjunction with the Conference, to offer leading manufacturers of laser vibrometer systems, non-contact instrumentation, systems for vibroacoustic testing, etc., the opportunity to bring their products directly to the attention of a selected audience.Most presentations were plenary. However, two parallel sessions were organised. The Invited lectures and tutorials were assigned a time slot of about 40-50 minutes each, including possible discussion and Q&As at the end of the presentations, whereas the speakers had 15 mins each for their presentations followed by 5 mins for possible discussion and Q&As.65 participants attended the event, 26 from Italy, 16 from Germany, 7 from Belgium, 4 from the USA, 2 from Slovenia, 1 from Australia, 1 from China, 1 from Cyprus, 1 from the Czech Republic, 1 from France, 1 from Lithuania, 1 from the Netherlands, 1 from Poland, 1 from Sweden and 1 from the UK.The official language of the Meeting was English.No particular technical difficulty was encountered.This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the Conference. The detailed Programme, together with other interesting information on the event, may be found online at: https://www.aivela.org/15th_conference/.I wish to thank each and every participant for their valuable contribution to the successful outcome of the event.I wish to thank particularly Prof. Christian Rembe, Clausthal University of Technology, Germany, and Prof. Lei Shao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, for developing the session on “HIGH-FREQUENCY LDV”, and Prof. C. Niezrecki, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA, for developing the session on VISION BASED TECHNIQUES.

Urban mobility sustainable plans: Tools and transport policies

This paper provides indications on how to develop a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) in small and medium-sized cities, bringing the case study of an Italian town located in southern Italy, Brindisi. The guidelines are part of the output of the SuMo (Sustainable Mobility in the Port Cities of the Southern Adriatic) project with the aim of specifically improving the sustainability of transport in Brindisi and, in particular, in the port area. The drafting of this paper is based on the dimensional element of the city which allows adopting a path adhering to the needs of the generators and users of a medium-sized city such as Brindisi in order to make the implementation action effective the adoption of the plan follows. The time frame is short-medium term, however, once the sustainability objectives have been pursued, the repercussions are also long-term. The paper anticipates possible solutions and interventions for the Brindisi port area to provide useful ideas in the subsequent phase of drafting and implementing the SUMP itself. In general terms it will be necessary: to improve accessibility for all, regardless of income and social status; to improve the quality of life and the attractiveness of the urban environment; to improve road safety and public health; to reduce air and noise pollution, greenhouse gases, emissions, and energy consumption by limiting individual motorized mobility; to ensure social equity.

Aging in place and elderly mobility habits: Evidence from Italian national surveys

The aim of the paper is to provide an empirical framework of the ageing process in Italy, with a focus on aging in place and mobility behaviour of the elderly, as emerging from two national surveys: the “Aspects of Daily Life” survey by ISTAT and the ISFORT mobility survey. Results show that the Italian cities and towns are sufficiently age-friendly, with some improvement opportunities to be implemented. Loneliness and isolation represent a warning sign, hindering the aging in place. Finally, the study confirms that the Italian older adults use public transport only a few times, in favour of private cars.

Historical Memory as an Effective and Useful Tool for Proper Land Use Planning: Lessons Learnt from Some Italian Cases

Many Italian cities and towns have been affected by geological or geohydrological processes. However, due to the loss of historical memory, lessons of the past have been ignored; new urbanized areas have expanded into the same zones where damage and casualties occurred in the past. Despite current practices, researchers are showing how historical data can be among the most valid tools for identifying the most affected and hazardous areas. When the completeness and quality of historical sources are sufficiently high, we can make useful statistical inferences regarding the spatiotemporal variations of natural processes. This information is of great importance for land use planning, as it makes us able to rely not only on the current state of the investigated areas but also on their dynamic evolutionary framework over time. In this article, we present a chronological review of past Italian works describing the occurrence of natural extreme events making use of historical data. Then, we present some Italian case studies in which the awareness of hazards gained by paying attention to past information would have ensured better management of the risk for the benefit of public safety. Finally, the authors stress the need to safeguard, manage, and enhance the large collection of historical data that constitutes Italy’s heritage.

Beyond Rome: Brescia and the Difficult Heritage of Italian Fascism

Physical reminders of Fascist rule in Italy can be found in virtually every Italian town and city. To date, though, studies of how Italians have dealt with this ‘difficult heritage’ have focused overwhelmingly on Rome, where Fascism's copious remains are treated and admired as aesthetic objects, unmoored from their political–historical origins. Implied, assumed or articulated in these studies is the idea of Rome as an exemplar of the nation: that what is true of the capital is true of the country. In fact, the idea that Rome's approach to its Fascist heritage is representative of Italy's has yet to be properly tested. This article argues for the need to go ‘beyond Rome’ in order to gain a deeper, richer, and more nuanced understanding of the ways in which Italians have negotiated the difficult heritage of Fascism. Focusing on the provincial Lombard city of Brescia, the article reveals the complex interplay between time, place, use, memory, aesthetics, and politics in shaping how bresciani have negotiated three surviving ‘faces’ of Fascism: Marcello Piacentini's monumental piazza della Vittoria; Arturo Dazzi's colossal statue ‘L’Era Fascista’, popularly known as the ‘Bigio’; and Oscar Prati's monument-ossuary to the fallen of the Great War.

Safety of Monkeypox Vaccine Using Active Surveillance, Two-Center Observational Study in Italy.

In August 2022, Italy launched a vaccination campaign to combat the spread of the monkeypox virus, which the WHO has designated as a public health emergency. Priority targets for the campaign included laboratory personnel and men who have sex with men with specific risk criteria. Primary immunization involved two doses of the Imvanex/Jynneos vaccine, followed by a single booster dose. We conducted a study in two Italian towns, Bologna and Forlì, in October and November 2022 to investigate adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) of the monkeypox vaccine through participant-based active surveillance. Participants who received the vaccine and were aged 18 and over were invited to complete an e-questionnaire by scanning a QR code during their second vaccine appointment or by email one month after the booster dose. A descriptive analysis of AEFI incidences was conducted, with the results stratified by type and severity of symptoms. A total of 135 first-dose, 50 second-dose, and 6 single-dose recipients were included, with a mean age of 36.4 ± 8.7 years. Systemic reactions after the first and second doses were reported by 39.3% and 26.0% of participants, respectively, with asthenia being the most common symptom. Local site reactions were reported by 97.0% and 100.0% of participants, respectively, with redness, swelling, and itching being the most common local AEFIs. Grade 3 or 4 AEFIs were reported for local AEFIs only by 16.8% and 14.0% of participants after the first and second doses, respectively. Our findings suggest that the monkeypox vaccine has a high tolerability profile in terms of short-term common systemic AEFIs. However, the high incidence and severity of local AEFIs highlight the need to monitor their persistence following intradermal administration of the vaccine.

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Emergency management through information crowdsourcing

This article proposes a new framework to model a scenario in which First Responders, citizens, smart devices, or robots explore the environment in an emergency situation, i.e., after an earthquake, assessing damages and searching for people needing assistance. While moving, the agents observe events and exchange the information collected with other agents encountered: to this end, they use messaging systems purposely adapted to use point-to-point network connections to allow local data exchange between agents even when global network connections are not available. As is common in Delay Tolerant Networks, exchanged messages are locally stored: when a global network is available, the agents can upload all the information collected by themselves and other agents they encountered to a Control Room or a database in the Cloud. Differently from traditional DTN algorithms such as Epidemic and Spray&Wait, we propose a solution that keeps track of agents that shared information along the path and assess the quality of the information collected by multiple agents through a reputation-based mechanism that is safer than majority voting. A simulator compatible with OpenStreetMap is presented, as well as simulated experiments in two Italian towns to validate the feasibility of the approach.

Rome vehicle accidents analysis and city riskiness prediction by Artificial Intelligence

Rome municipality publishes geo-referenced vehicle accidents reports and detailed road traffic counters that, in conjunction with Open Street Map roads details, enable deep analyses of the tragic phenomenon. This study focuses on the full year 2021, during which a total of 62,081 vehicles casualties were registered by Rome traffic authorities. The broad Rome territory, overcoming a bunch of Italian chief towns, the wide and capillary set of arteries and the municipality roads extension greater with respect to many European capitals, enhance the statistical relevance of the analyzed data. Artificial intelligence method takes into account three potential accidents predictors as the level of road traffic, the event timing, and the driving complexity of the different zones. The proposed method has the capability of linking time/traffic/complexity indexes of a specific zone of a city with the accident riskiness, moreover, is applicable to whatever urban complex scenario and takes care of the result format in order to facilitate road safety decision makers in smoothing the tragic sequence of accidents. Further possible improvements directions are discussed.

Co-Creating GIS-Based Dashboards to Democratize Knowledge on Urban Resilience Strategies: Experience with Camerino Municipality

Natural hazards are increasingly threatening our communities; hence it is imperative to provide communities with reliable information on possible impacts of such disasters, and on resilience measures that can be adopted to recover from disasters. To increase the engagement of various stakeholders in decision-making processes related to resilience to natural hazards, problem-specific information needs to be presented to them in a language understandable to non-experts in the field. To this end, this paper illustrates experimentation with low-code platforms for fast digitalization of resilience reports, incorporating the perspectives of various stakeholders in the analysis, thus making informed decision-making practicable. We present a co-creation-based approach to develop GIS-based user-friendly dashboards in support to the identification of resilience strategies against natural hazards; this approach has been developed within the framework of the European project ARCH. Urban areas are regarded as complex social-ecological systems whose various dimensions should be considered in this resilience endeavor, during all phases of the Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation cycle. The work presented in this paper specifically targets the possible impacts and risks that might affect the cultural heritage subsystems of our cities, generally underrepresented in the international literature related to urban resilience assessment. We describe how we applied our approach to the Camerino municipality, a historic Italian town exposed to seismic risk, which was struck by a severe earthquake sequence in 2016–2017 and discuss the results of our experience.

Two years of COVID restrictions: A lesson from water demand data

Abstract The long period of great fragility experienced by the lockdown has strained entire countries. In response to COVID-19, Italy performed stay-at-home orders to attenuate disease spread, provoking drastic changes in all aspects of users' behaviour, particularly affecting water demand. A dataset of hourly water demand for 2019, 2020, and 2021, related to five Italian towns permitted to observe water consumption changes. Trends highlight a general decrease in water consumption, linked to the strict restrictions imposed and a morning peak shift. At the end of the strict quarantine regulations, water consumption did not return to pre-pandemic values because COVID-19 has led to a change in lifestyle.

Overview of the bus network characteristics in the Italian medium size urban areas

Public transport services represent one of the main solutions for promoting a more sustainable urban mobility system but, in many Italian urban areas, there are still many critical issues about the level and quality of offered services. Starting from such issues, amplified by the pandemic condition, the present paper deals with the systematic analysis of the bus network characteristics and riderships in many Italian cities and towns, characterized by a supply of public transport services mainly based on buses. The database built for the study is related to 54 municipalities, with a population from 80,000 to 360,000 inhabitants, and it is composed by a large set of indicators about supply and demand of the bus services network and of the territorial characteristics of the municipalities. The results of the analysis permit to underline the existence of very different condition about level of provided services, impacting on the level of demand using the public transport. These differences are not only related to the territorial characteristics but are also due to completely different characteristics of the supply. The urban areas of Northern Italy, seem to present, in almost all of the analyzes carried out, both a quantity and quality level of the supply provided, as well as the level of demand satisfied, clearly superior to both urban areas of Central and Southern Italy. Finally, the study proposes a new method for the estimation of the overall annual level of bus services, for overcoming the limits of the existing models, hardly dependent on the historical expenditure criterion. The new method is based on the identification of the effective transport needs and the robustness and availability of the input data.

The Forensic Tradition in Milan’s Civic Mortality Registers

From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan’s uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality.

Name of Saints Between Byzantium and Europe

The text, which is an excerpt from a book about the city of Amalfi in the Middle Ages, examines the spread of the cultural practice of giving the name of the Mother of God in the Middle Ages from Byzantium to Europe and the development of the socalled " Marian group" of names around the names Mary (Maria) and Anna. The naming after the name of John the Baptist, which became the most popular male name was also related to the Mother of God and had its origins in Byzantium. The spread of Saints’ names was connected also with the cultural processes following icon veneration over iconoclasm in the middle of the 9th century. An important role in this spread during the Middle Ages was played by the Italian towns in Campania region, and especially Amalfi and Naples and their communications with Byzantium.

Weathering the Ill Wind: The Affective and Embodied Dimensions of Anti‐Immigrant Political Discourses on Young African Men in Italy

AbstractUsing the election of the far‐right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti‐Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.

Advanced control techniques for CHP-DH systems: A critical comparison of Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning

• MPC and RL are modeled to control a real CHP-DH plant located in Central Italy. • Reductions in thermal losses up to 3.9% and 6.5% are estimated with MPC and RL respectively. • MPC and RL achieve optimization by implementing different control actions. • MPC allows optimal solutions but is very dependent on the reliability of the model. • RL is model-free but has a formulation and validation more computationally complex. District heating (DH) network is a key infrastructure to decarbonize the heating sector through the centralized production of heat distributed to final users. The implementation of advanced control techniques is increasingly common in the field of energy optimization since they can provide a more efficient way of minimizing energy demand by appropriate scheduling of the control variables. The aim of this work is to present the application of two control strategies, i.e., Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), to a system based on a DH network supplied by a Combined Heat and Power plant (CHP-DH plant). The analyzed case study is a real CHP-DH plant operating in the small Italian town of Osimo (central Italy). The DH network currently connects more than 1200 users, generating peak heat demand of about 9.7 MW th . The heat generator is composed of a natural gas fueled internal combustion engine coupled with natural gas boilers. The work provides a comparison between the current control strategy (deduced from measured data) and the performance of the CHP-DH plant controlled with an MPC and an RL control. The results showed the effectiveness of the two controls in satisfying the thermal demand of the users, while minimizing the thermal losses towards the ground. Both MPC and RL allow to implement control strategies different from the current control in terms of supply temperature and flow rate circulating in the network. Referring to the winter months, in which the current operation of the system tends to prefer high supply temperatures, the advanced controls made it possible to reduce the thermal heat supply by reducing the thermal losses of about 3.9 % with the MPC and 6.54 % with the RL, corresponding to emission avoidances up to 23.3 tCO 2 and 12.6 tCO 2 , respectively. The paper, as well as showing the application of the controls, contains a critical discussion of all the positive aspects and weaknesses found in the application of the MPC and the RL control to the case study.