We Have Liftoff

Museums facing their social and environmental responsibilities: towards an ethical and sustainable model - Cycle de débats en ligne, 2024

The Ecologist, 2023

This essay is on the great acceleration, a concept coined twenty years ago that spotlights humanity's impact on the natural environment. The concept has now reached its use-by date, with many data lines decelerating. Is this good news, as geographer Danny Dorling argues? I suggest it is not. The essay discusses alternative concepts that define the era: "systemic chaos" of world-systems theory, and "the great derangement" of Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh. It asks: What does this mean for a just transition?

Adolescentia divisa in ecloghe, 2021

La raccolta di egloghe Adolescentia è l’opera di poesia umanistica più letta in Europa tra il 1498, anno della sua prima edizione (a Mantova), e il 1600. Il suo autore, Battista Spagnoli (1447-1516), conosciuto da tutti come “il Mantovano”, carmelitano riformatore, predicatore, teologo, poeta, fu un autore assai prolifico, che si cimentò in quasi ogni genere classico. Ma la fama gli derivò soprattutto grazie a questa operetta che compose in gioventù, e che ritrovò casualmente a Bologna quando aveva ormai cinquant’anni: fatta oggetto di commento scolastico sin dal 1502, venne proposta sui banchi di scuola, in Francia e Germania, come classico moderno a molte generazioni di studenti. Lo stesso non accadde in Italia: nemo propheta in patria. La prima edizione moderna dell’opera risale a più di cento anni fa, e fu fatta in America, e all’America dobbiamo la prima traduzione in lingua moderna. Ad oggi, la presente è la prima traduzione in italiano delle dieci egloghe, che, per la vivida descrizione della vita dei contadini della pianura Padana, hanno un sapore, secondo l’autorevole giudizio di Carlo Dionisotti, prefolenghiano. Il testo critico di Andrea Severi è arricchito da un prezioso commento, che censisce le reminiscenze poetiche (classiche e italiane) dell’opera di colui che Erasmo amava chiamare «Christianus Maro», il Virgilio cristiano.

Yilmaz, Emine & Hayirsever, Hasan (eds.) Uluslararası yakutça araştirmaları. Ankara: Aralık. 109-134., 2021

This paper is an extended written version of a paper previously presented in Ankara and the recently published paper "Etymological Notes on Yakut Color Terms" (Khabtagaeva 2019). In the present paper I focus on the special color terms in Yakut: the colors of horses, and discuss them from an etymological and morphological perspective.

Water Provision in Early Islamic Cities: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Urban Water Governance, 2024

The need to supply water to the cities of early Islam, and share the collective resource between different urban users, created a fundamental relationship between rulers and citizens that required both top-down and bottom-up participation. Due to the limited nature of surviving textual and material sources of evidence, however, exploring the details of how this was achieved in early Islamic cities is a difficult task which requires the integration of both textual and archaeological data. This chapter considers key aspects of early Islamic cities, including their urban plan, social structure and organisation, to provide a holistic understanding of how water was supplied to, managed within and used by individuals in these urban settlements. While the roles of elites in planning, financing and constructing hydraulic infrastructure are paramount in the textual sources, several strands of evidence point to the roles played by both individual households and larger communities, such as tribal groups and military units, who must have co-operated to manage the water supply collectively. Though major infrastructure was predominantly planned and implemented by state authorities, often in cooperation with elites, the distribution of this water at the micro-scale frequently seems to have been mediated through communal action and private, often commercial, initiative.

Desaparecidos "Entidades criticam fim de Comissão de Desaparecidos pelo governo Bolsonaro" (Política, 19/12). As lembranças dos mortos e desaparecidos servem, no presente, para evitar a repetição do arbítrio e da violência. Quando se tenta esconder os crimes de Estado, é a sociedade como um todo a ser prejudicada. Cabe, ao contrário, revelar os abusos no passado, para alertar para os perigos da violência no presente e no futuro.

IntechOpen eBooks, 2020