This is a page with several short pieces about various Italian villages, towns, and cities – word-crafted maps that linger on unexpected details.
Roberto Bolaño, a key figure in literature straddling the 20th and 21st centuries, wrote this short story, Sensini, wich I strongly recommend. As in many of the Chilean author's works, the protagonists are men and women who live for literature, and Bolaño's admiration for the heroic quality that defines them shines through.
Sensini appears in the collection Last Evenings on Earth, published in 2007 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. For speakers of Spanish, here you find the original version of the short story.
In this article for Il Post, Christian Raimo raises concerns about the second draft of the Indicazioni Nazionali for the curriculum aimed at early childhood and primary education in Italy. He offers interesting reflections both on the strongly Hegelian view of history presented in the document and on historicism – the intellectual burden (both Hegelian and Crocean) that Italy still carries, which continues to shape the humanities curriculum in Italian schools.
This article for Doppiozero also addresses education in Italy, focusing specifically on the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools. Alberto Voltolini, a professor at the University of Turin, reflects on the ongoing debate between teaching philosophy through a historical approach versus a thematic approach, offering what I believe is a balanced perspective.
In this piece, Maria Giovanna Sessa, research manager at EU DisinfoLab, examines examples of gendered disinformation circulating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although some time has passed since the article was published in 2020, it remains a valuable resource today for reflecting on the general issue of gendered disinformation, a topic Sessa analyses thoughtfully here and in other works. Also, she and Raquel Miguel Serrano recently contributed to the drafting of this practical guide for detecting identity-based disinformation.
This article for The New Yorker offers a great overview of the work and poetics of one of the most important Italian novelists of the last century, Italo Calvino. The piece takes a rather original approach: it argues – persuasively – that although Calvino is often considered a figure of postmodernism, his literary sensibility is deeply rooted in literature that predates the modern era. Calvino engages in a dialogue with writers such as Ariosto, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Balzac.
For those interested, Calvino discusses these authors (in a delightful and knowledgeable way) in various short essays collected in Perché leggere i classici, which also has an English edition published by Penguin.
I'd like to share this well-written piece by Marco Facchin-Clerici (Antwerp) on how to write better referee reports. I fully agree with both its content and the pressing need to improve our peer review practices.
One point the author raises –which I hadn't seriously considered before – concerns the ethics of submitting and reviewing. He proposes a simple but powerful heuristic: aim to review three papers for every manuscript you submit. Of course, he acknowledges that even with the best intentions, you might not receive enough invitations to meet that ratio. Still, I find the principle fair and worth striving for. I'd be glad to continue the conversation on how such a model could be implemented.
This article by linguist Daniel W. Hieber traces the history of the Modern English word "one" all the way back to its great-great-great...grandparent in Proto-Indo-European, 6,000 years ago. It's an instructive read: a compelling example of the kind of detailed work that underlies etymology. And it is also quite fun – especially for people like me, who are fascinated by linguistic creatures and their almost autonomous lives.
(Why almost autonomous? We often hear that "language belongs to its speakers". In one sense, this is trivially true: without people speaking a language, there would be no language at all. But in another, deeper sense, it's misleading. Language change is, to a large extent, independent of speakers' intentions. It follows patterns and trajectories that only specialists can fully trace and understand a posteriori.)
In 1978, at the North Carolina University, philosopher Richard Cartwright delivered a lecture to an audience consisting mainly of non-philosophers. In this lecture, he discusses a logical problem pertaining to the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, reaching the conclusion that "either we divide the substance, or we counfound the [divine] Persons". This is a slightly revised version of the lecture. The style is still appropriate for a non-philosophical audience, which makes for a fun and thought-provoking reading.
Il sessismo nella lingua italiana ("Sexism in the Italian Language") is a seminal work by linguist Alma Sabatini, first published in 1987 under the auspices of Italy's Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the National Commission for Equality between Men and Women. Co-authored with Marcella Mariani and supported by contributors Edda Billi and Alda Santangelo, the study ignited significant academic and public debate. I believe it is a work worth reading and reflecting upon. The reactions at the time were especially interesting – one day, I will share some of them here.
In this article (published in the New York Times on June 6, 1993), one of my literary heroes, Thomas Pynchon, explores the capital sin of Sloth, starting with Aquinas and tracing its history. Pynchon focuses on the American chapter of the sin's life, anchored between the different manifestations of Sloth between the two poles represented by Franklin's Poor Richard and Melville's Bartleby. The piece also features an imaginary "medieval death row" chat between two sinners asking each other about their mortal sins. I found brilliant Pynchon's quick reference to the big success of Sloth in Hamlet.
Art historian Aby Warburg was one of the great benefactors of the humanities at the turn of the 20th century. I've long been fascinated by his visionary project – fully realised – of transforming his personal collection into a library. This piece retraces that remarkable story, from the library's founding in 1886 to 1943, a moment when the its future – having been relocated to London in 1933 – was hanging in the balance. What captivates me most is Warburg's concern with how a library's books should be classified. He devised a unique interdisciplinary system, memorably described by his assistant Gertrud Bing:
The manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing.
The article I'm sharing here was written by Fritz Saxl in 1943-44 and first published by Ernst Gombrich as an appendix to his Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970).