Journal articles on the topic 'Italian Personal narrative'

As Italy has changed from emigration country to immigration destination, the growing body of literature by migrant and second generation writers plays an important role in connecting discourses on race and national identity with the country’s increasing diversity and its colonial past. This essay investigates the 2010 memoir La Mia Casa È Dove Sono (My Home is Where I Am) by Igiaba Scego, the daughter of Somali immigrants, as life writing that responds to these changing demographics and, more broadly, to the migration trends affecting contemporary Europe. The self Scego constructs through her narration integrates her Roman identity and Somali background as the narrative returns colonial history to Italian public discourse and public space. I argue that by narrating the personal and historical in the context of Roman monuments and neighborhoods, Scego’s memoir challenges and redefines who can be “Italian,” modeling a more inclusive Italianità. I discuss the memoir in terms of its use of collective memory and its development of a narrative “I” that claims a position within a collective identity while challenging the exclusionary tendencies of that very group. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on June 8th, 2016, and published on July 17th, 2017.

The meeting-point between memory studies and auto/biographical studies provides new perspectives on the study of the radical generation of 1968 through life-writing techniques, including oral history. A comparison between Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, published in 1986, and Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, published in 1988, suggests that belonging to this generation involves tensions between the social master narrative of 1968 and auto/biographical memories. Steedman and Passerini’s personal narratives relate in complex ways to this master narrative, and exploring these ambiguities helps us to generate further innovation in ‘generational thinking’ as well as a comparative understanding of the ‘memory studies’ of two of the most important thinkers in British and Italian contemporary history.

The efficacy of treatment for stalkers might depend on identifying peculiarities in the life stories of members of this population and their specific needs. We interviewed 14 Italian male stalkers between 27 and 78 years old ( M = 44.5 years) detained in two northwest Italian correctional facilities. We aimed to investigate two main aspects: First, we evaluated the subjects’ states of mind (SoMs) with respect to early attachment using the Adult Attachment Interview. Second, we assessed the possible recurrence of narrative clusters between the narratives of these offenders, whom we also interviewed about their persecutory acts, using the Index Offense Interview. The results indicated that the vast majority of the stalkers in our sample had a dismissing SoM with respect to their early attachment, as well as many unresolved traumas. Furthermore, by comparing their narratives, we outlined six narrative themes: (a) the perception of rejection as a main motivational factor, (b) the representation of the self as right and as a victim of others’ behaviors, (c) a lack of impulse control, (d) the idealization of attachment figures, (e) intense separation anxiety, and (f) a personal theory about stalking. Given this population’s high recurrence rates following detention, the study of which adult attachment representations are linked with the stalking phenomenon and which critical themes are present in stalkers’ narratives may improve clinical interventions for this specific population.

The article examines I ventitre giorni della città di Alba, one of Beppe Fenoglio’s early texts about the Italian resistance during the Second World War. Largely ignored at the time of its first publication, it rose to fame only in the 1960s. This is strongly linked to the fact that Fenoglio depicts the resistance as a civil war, a rather controversial issue in post-war Italy. He deheroises the partisans and shows the inadequacy of social categories by adopting a specific narrative strategy that focuses on the mundane and the ridiculous.

The purpose of this study is to explore the link between autobiographical memories and personal narratives and to assess whether the emotions present in memories are maintained or transformed when memories are narrated. In a Memory Fluency Task a total of 72 Italian undergraduates (35 males and 37 females) were asked to recall memories from their last period of life (from adolescence to present), to select one of them and to choose the emotions connected to this memory from an eleven-item list. Then, they were requested to write this memory in detail and again to select the emotions connected to the narrative from the same list of emotions. The emotions were distinguished as simple positive, simple negative, simple neutral, and complex (positive and negative). The results showed, on the whole, that participants expressed more emotions and a greater number of complex emotions in narratives than in memories. The authors interpret these results using a Vygotskyan frame of reference and considering the narratives as a form of external speech that makes memories more explicit.

The subjects of the two texts analysed in this article are two highly significant recent historical events: the death of Lady Diana in a car crash after being chased by paparazzi on 31 August 1997 and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, which are addressed by the Italian writer Beppe Sebaste and the French writer Frédéric Beigbeder, respectively. An analysis of each text shows that they not only examine the events in question through reportage, but they are also strongly personal and subjective. Both texts also put forward literary writers to help ‘read’ extensively mediated events, provoking reflection on how news travels and is mediated in increasingly immediate ways in today’s world, while also harking back to New Journalism. They could be called ‘unidentified narrative objects’, a label I borrow from the Italian writer Roberto Bui, alias Wu Ming 1, who has applied it to a corpus of recent Italian texts (including that of Sebaste), that combine modes of writing – such as journalism, history, detective fiction and life-writing – often blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, in order to more effectively draw their readers’ attention to the national and global issues they address. Here, I extend the term unidentified narrative objects beyond Italy’s borders to the work of Beigbeder and others, suggesting that such hybridity is connected to how we process the world around us today and a new iteration of literary journalism.

The purpose of this study was to compare narrated memories of parents and friends, recounted by both males and females. A total of 177 Italian undergraduates were asked to recall and to write in detail one relevant memory regarding their relationship with either parents or friends during adolescence. Half of the participants wrote a narrative about parents and half about friends. Narratives were examined using both a content and a lexical linguistic method of analysis.The results showed that the language of memories was substantially influenced by the identity of the social partners that were part of the remembered events. In particular the ratio of negative emotion words to all words and the use of 'I' personal pronouns were higher when participants recounted memory narratives about parents rather than friends, and 'We' was used more in narratives about friends. Gender differences were found as well. The authors interpret the results as suggesting that the language of memory is affected by the type of interpersonal relationship that exists between the narrator and the other participants in the remembered events as well as by the gender of the narrator. In other words, memory narratives both reflect and are influenced by the relationships within which an individual is embedded.

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of 1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad), little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.

AbstractThe stories we tell about our identities and sexual orientations shape how we perform gendered scripts and negotiate relationships with significant others. Previous literature inquired the styles and outcomes of consensual non-monogamous (CNM) relationships, but more research is need on how CNM men resist or abide to hegemonic models of masculinity. To understand how constructions of masculinity and conceptualizations of sexual orientation are embedded in CNMs, the study analysed the stories of non-monogamous Bi+ and heterosexual men. Following a critical narrative approach, the study inquired the diverse conceptualizations of masculinity, sexual orientation and relationship practices in the narratives of 20 non-monogamous Bi+ and heterosexual identified men. The semi-structured in-depth narrative interviews (105 min on average) were analyzed via Nvivo 12 and explored their stories of desire and the sense-making process of being sexually oriented to one or more genders and to one or more partner/s. Engaging in non-monogamy was signified as a relevant insight from their personal stories and/or from adopting new concepts of desire beyond the “love as a zero-sum game.” The latter theme was also shared by many heterosexual participants that, when negotiating a non-monogamous agreement, signified their attractions to more than one person as part of their personal identity. Finally, the paper discusses how non-monogamous spaces can offer a positive and safe space for bisexuals/Bi+ people to explore and reaffirm their identities, constantly challenged by biphobia, invisibility, and erasure. Experiences and stories of Italian cisgender Bi+ and heterosexual men cannot be generalized to the whole spectrum of masculinities within CNM spaces, and the study lacks how other gendered and sexual subjectivities construct masculinity. Diverse stories and construction of sexuality and gender can lead to similar relationship preferences and understanding how we signify them can greatly improve our understanding of intimacies.

Abstract Building on the seminal scholarship of humanistic geographer, Edward Relph, this paper explores the postmodern notion of placelessness in Canadian-Italian literature. The author argues that placelessness can afford bi-cultural writers, and their literary protagonists, a degree of productive peripherality that works to deconstruct and undercut the authoritative dynamic of a culturally dominant place. Working with the concept of placelessness, the author analyzes, critically, “The Buried Tree,” a short story composed by Canadian-Italian author, Dean Serravalle, to suggest that the metaphysical state is not one of precarity and dearth but, rather, one of purposeful resistance to the traditional, often oppressive notions of cultural hybridity. While Serravalle’s text focalizes the strong senses of home and cultural rooting as fundamental markers of ethnic identity, placelessness, a space associated primarily with exclusion, can offer refuge and escape for the protagonost, Michele, who seeks both ethnic dissociation from the familial traditions into which he is born, and detachment from his innate, immigrant history. By exploring Michele’s identity crisis, Serravalle seems to challenge the traditional narrative of lifelong, oppositional pluridimensionality, and posits placelessness as a productive, and perhaps necessary, personal state to establish, rather than to reclaim, one’s cultural roots.

AbstractBased on the theory proposed in Frascarelli (2007), according to which the interpretation of null subjects depends on an Agree relation betweenproand a specific type of Topic (i.e. the A-Topic, cf. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), the first objective of this paper is to evaluate this theory from an acquisitional perspective on children from 3 to 9 years old. Furthermore, since the A-Topic is argued to be systematically associated to specific discourse, prosodic and syntactic properties, a second objective of this paper is to check whether the relevant acquisition correlates with information-structural and interface-related competences. Based on an original experiment designed to examine Topic chains in children’s narrative, evidence is provided that this productive ability is not fully acquired at the age of 9 and that its progress proceeds in three steps, involving different levels of grammar. Specifically, in a first phase children tend to assume their personal experience and discourse intentions as familiar to their interlocutors. Hence, they start their narration linking null subjects to silent A-Topics, without overt links for their interpretation (‘Emperor Strategy’). Then, at the age of 6 the creation of Topic chains seems to be part of children’s competence at a discourse-syntactic level and overt copies are progressively produced in the chains. Nevertheless, since children still assume their ‘hero’ to be a familiar entity, G[iven]-Topics are frequently realised as first link for null subjects. Finally, at around 7–7.11 the adult-like association between discourse-syntactic and prosodic properties is attested.

Much has been written about the Our Father (also referred to as the Lord’s Prayer) as it represents a personal and public dialogue with God in daily prayer and liturgy. While its theological and spiritual aspects have been thoroughly investigated, their cultural implications for different speech communities have been disregarded. This study aims to compare the English, Italian, and French versions of the Lord’s Prayer in the Catholic Church in an attempt to examine the role that culture is bound to play in shaping religious response and tracing a preferential interpretive pathway through a sacred text. This comparative analysis is focused on lexical choice and metaphorical imagery and integrated by an examination of the wider co-text, the Bible. The analysis has shown that the versions of the Lord’s Prayer present distinctive features possibly reflective of deeply-ingrained cultural attitudes such as the appeal for elevation in the English prayer, the dual tension between deference and solidarity in the Italian prayer, and the inclination for a grand narrative of heroes and anti-heroes in the French prayer. The study concludes that renewed attention to Christian sources could help bridge the gap between religion and culture, and reconcile our spiritual and social identities in post-secular societies.

Both the novel and the film Benzina think of the literary and the visual as contesting sites for women. In revisiting the fields of space within a capitalist society and the struggle for representation of sexual identity, these two works successfully deploy strategies where the visual narrative — literary and cinematic — confirms its ability to be a place in which subjects try out distinct possibilities of their existential corporeality. Rather than presenting crystallized subjectivities, these works analyze the attempts a lesbian couple makes at finding their place within a social system still fraught by stereotypization of gender roles. This article examines how Benzina's cinematic adaptation convincingly extricates representations of the protagonists' struggle in Italian society. The idea of a feminist geometry, a triangle whose theorem is of a problematic nature, at once social and personal of arduous solution was prompted by my memory of American painter Ed Ruscha's diagonal compositions entitled Gas Stations.

The article is devoted to interpretation of historical facts in Umberto Eco's novel " Baudolino ". The subject of interpretation in the novel is medieval history, in particular, the reign of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Eco uses the typical for the historical novel method, which is the combination of facts from chronicles and fictional elements; the events are shown by the eyes of an invented character Baudolino. Emphasizing the connection between history and modernity, Eco proposes to revise the stereotypes associated with the mentioned historical period. The portraits of historical figures are borrowed from the chronicles, however in the novel they get more emotional in the perception of the protagonist, typical cliches are replaced by individuality. The opposition of italian communes to the government of Frederick also becomes a part of Baudolino's personal history. The interpretation of many events is based on legendary sources, including local tales of the italian city Alessandria, the legends of Grail and of Prester John. The legendary material fills in the gaps in medieval history. Many events (in particular, the participation of Barbarossa in the Third Crusade) correspond to the chronicles in the descriptive part, however they acquire a fictional motivation. The mystery of the emperor's death is solved in a detective key. The novel presents various doctrines elaborated in the imperial office of Frederick, their authorship is attributed to Baudolino. In the novel «Baudolino» Umberto Eco not only interprets creatively certain facts of the past, but he also practices the postmodern concept of history, according to which the past is unknowable as objective and ultimate truth and therefore it exists only in the form of a narrative. The past and the present have no fundamental difference, the history is always interpreted from the perspective of the present.

Background:Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease characterized by severe alterations in the microvasculature and progressive fibrosis of the skin and internal organs [1]. Management of SSc is not easy, for both patients and physicians [2]. Symptoms are manifold and have a significant impact on patient’s daily autonomy and psychological well-being.Objectives:SScEntry (SSc data Entry tool; Figure 1) is a solution conceived to assist SSc patients in monitoring their disease, as a kind of “sentry”. The core idea is to provide patients with a personal diary to annotate and track the onset, evolution and resolution of symptoms as well as any changes in their general health condition, through an app for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.Figure 1.SScEntry logo.Methods:SScEntry is a smartphone/tablet app designed by rheumatology and computer science engineering specialists in close partnership [3]. A carefully designed user interface (UI), inspired to a social network wall, allows annotating the evolution of symptoms by means of standard clinical investigation methods such as scientifically validated questionnaires. The UI facilitates data collection through speech-based interaction as well as touch and gestures optimized for patients with finger skin lesions and joints impairments. User engagement over the course of time is fostered by: follow-up reminders to update information on the evolution of past events and periodic questionnaires for general health assessment; the integration of symptom photos taken with on-device camera and health data collected from wearable devices; gamification features. Privacy and security have been a primary design concern, with app access protection and full on-device data encryption; no personal data transmission occurs without explicit user consent. SScEntry generates a disease activity summary report, for displaying to the physician during visit or emailing/printing.Results:SScEntry is ready for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. All planned features have been implemented (Figure 2). Currently supported languages are English and Italian. Areas of interest include vascular, cutaneous, articular, visceral (gastro-intestinal and cardio-pulmonary) as well as relationship, sexual and working life.Figure 2.SScEntry features.Conclusion:Novel Narrative-based Medicine approaches are getting increasing attention to enhance the mutual understanding between patient and physician, reinforcing the therapeutic adherence at the core of healthcare. This is particularly important with chronic and disabling diseases like SSc. Involving patients in disease management with SScEntry will increase their compliance and confidence, with benefits on psychological well-being. Expected benefits for rheumatologists include better evaluation of target therapy and outcomes, as no data on disease activity is lost during the patient clinical history.References:[1]J. Varga et al. (2017) Pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis: recent insights of molecular and cellular mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities. J Scleroderma Relat Disord 2:137–52.[2]L. Mouthon et al. (2017) Patients’ views and needs about systemic sclerosis and its management: a qualitative interview study. BMC Musculoskelet Disord 18(1):230.[3]M. Bradway et al. (2015) Mobile Health: empowering patients and driving change. Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism, 26(3):114-117.Disclosure of Interests:Emanuela Praino: None declared, Floriano Scioscia: None declared, Crescenzio Scioscia: None declared, Giuseppe Loseto: None declared, Filippo Gramegna: None declared, Saverio Ieva: None declared, Agnese Pinto: None declared, Michele Ruta: None declared, Eugenio Di Sciascio: None declared, Giovanni Lapadula: None declared, Florenzo Iannone Consultant of: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, UCB, MSD, Speakers bureau: Speaker and consulting fees from AbbVie, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, UCB, MSD

AbstractAlmost 5,000 Italians were interned in Australia during World War II, a high proportion of them Queensland residents. Internment was a pivotal experience for the Italian community, both locally and nationally, complicating Italian Australians’ sense of belonging to their adopted country. Through an examination of two migrant autobiographical narratives of internment, Osvaldo Bonutto's A Migrant's Story and Peter Dalseno's Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, this article explores the impact of internment on the experience and articulation of cultural and civic belonging to Australian society. It finds that internment was a ‘trial’ or ‘transitional’ phase for these internees’ personal and civic identities, and that the articulation of these identities and sense of belonging is historically contingent, influenced by the shift from assimilation to multiculturalism in settlement ideology, as well as Italian Australians’ changing place in Australian society throughout the twentieth century.

German pianist Clara Wieck Schumann and Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi were both tutored by their fathers from an early age and made their mark as great European artists. Their art took them both across the continent, where they met many other famous historical persons. Their lives have not only been recorded in biographies but have also been retold in several novels, or ‘fictionalised biographies’. The fictionalised biography is an interesting hybrid genre, placed somewhat uncomfortably between historiography and the art of fiction, which permits it to disregard certain expectations raised by so-called ‘factual’ biographies (e.g. that authors should strive for ‘objectivity’ or ‘truthfulness’). The relationship between fact and fiction can thus be re-negotiated, following the author’s ideological inclinations and their imaginative closure of historiographical gaps. Beginning with some general remarks on fictionalised biographies of ‘exemplary women’, this paper then examines Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002) and Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia (2002), focusing on the complex father-daughter relationships that Clara Wieck Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi undoubtedly experienced, and which offered the authors ample ground for a critique of historical gender relations and hierarchies. The analyses will concentrate on the heroines’ journeys in Europe. The paper examines the ways in which the two fictional rewritings of historical women artists’ lives foreground gender aspects and make use of the narrative privileges of fictionalised biography to project contemporary feminist ideas onto historical characters and events, and explores the function of the featured European locales with regard to the protagonists’ personal development in the novels.The heroines’ ventures into foreign lands are revealed to function as an impulse towards a changing perception of their fathers as well as themselves.

The article discusses the role of online food practices and narratives in the formation of transnational identities and communities. Data has been collected in the framework of a doctoral research project undertaken by the author between 2009 and 2012 with a follow-up in 2014. The working hypothesis of this article is that the way Italians talk about food online and offline, the importance they give to ‘authentic’ food, and the way they share their love for Italian food with other members of the same diaspora reveal original insights into migrants’ personal and collective identities, their sense of belonging to the transnational community and processes of adjustment to a new place. Findings suggest that online culinary narratives and practices shape the Italian diaspora in unique ways, through the development of forms of virtual commensality and online mealtime socialization on Skype and by affecting intra and out-group relationships, thus working as elements of cultural identification and differentiation.

Summary In 1670, the new ballet comedy The middle-class gentleman (Le bourgeoisgentilhomme) premiered at the theatre of the French palace before “theSun King” Louis XIV, on a text by Molière with music by Lully, hispermanent collaborator. Both were acting on stage. Since then, no one hasraised the question who is the real punching bag of the play’s aggression.The present author decided to research towards understanding it, in orderto compose new music responsibly for a performance at the MunicipalRegional Theatre of Crete, an island paradoxically connected directly withthe initial impetus behind the play’s composition. By studying historicalsources, events, linking the circumstances and analyzing in depth the textfrom a fresh viewpoint with emphasis on certain scenes, he concludedthat the target of the playwright’s merciless hard satire was the originalcomposer of the music for the play, because the two of them had entereda period of deep clash for personal, financial and legal differences. Theresearch, with its conclusions regarding the Molièresque attack on Lully,moves on the axes of his humble Italian origins, his greed, the forgery ofhis family history through the construction of a fake past of nobility, as wellas his widely conspicuous effeminacy and open homosexuality, by probinginto detailed historical, linguistic, etymological, political and sociologicalreferences. The compound historical study of events that took place in thepalace and motivated the writing of this play is combined with a socialstudy of the palatine conditions and habits, with juicy references to thecustoms and etiquette of the wider royal family and the Court, enhancedwith anecdotal facts and spicy commentary. The general attempt of thisnovel multifaceted theatrological viewing is the documentation througha narrative rich in authentic facts about the play, the author, the associatecreators and the era, largely unknown to the general public.

The aim of the research presented in the article is to study the directions and mechanisms of action of museums in innovative practice. The modern museum as a cultural center is more focused on the individual, takes on the functions of organizing the leisure of citizens, responding to the social order, lifestyle. The study of the experience of museums in this context is focused on considering innovation at the local level - the museums of the city of Florence (center of Tuscany), which are a vivid example of the communicative model of the museum. This model of the museum is especially in demand today against the background of the problem of attracting (and retaining) visitors existing in museums around the world and in Kazakhstan. The study of valuable experience and innovative approaches in the communication activities of the best museums in the world can give impetus to the development of museums in Kazakhstan. The situation with the COVID–19 Pandemic has made its own adjustments in the relationship between visitors and museums. Both Florentine and Kazakhstani museums reacted to the situation with interesting projects. It is concluded that the introduction and development of information systems in museums in Italy made it possible to significantly optimize their work, and this, in turn, allowed them to reach a qualitatively new level of presentation of their services and collections. There are ample opportunities for the world museum community to access the Italian heritage.A great help in this study was the master's thesis by Irene di Pietro, which was written in the city of Bologna in 2017. An important source was the personal observations of E.I. Kubasheva in direct acquaintance with the museums of Florence. The research was carried out using narrative and historical-genetic methods.

AbstractDespite the attention given to the transnational circulation of Andean music, its reception and adoption by European musicians have been rarely researched. This article focuses on the specific case of Italy, where the Andean music boom blended with that of the New Chilean Song in exile (1973–89) and where, in addition, repertoires and practices of both musics were adopted by dozens of local groups formed by young Italians. Those Italian groups – with their performative strategies and their choices of repertoires – provide a privileged lookout about how different representations of the andeaneity (the Nueva Canción Chilena with its ethical and political connotations, the musique des Andes of the French matrix, the autóctonas indigenist currents) interacted in creating an Italian imagery of the Andes. They also suggest how the adoption of ‘someone else's music’ can act, with its transcultural complexity, in the elaboration of personal narratives of identity.

Título: THIERRY SALMON, DEMIURGO E PEDAGOGO – uma introdução para um público brasileiro Resumo: Através da narração de sua experiência pessoal com o encenador e pedagogo do teatro Thierry Salmon, o diretor, dramaturgista e roteirista Mauricio Paroni de Castro traz o percurso de um aprendizado teatral que transformou e formou radicalmente sua estética, até seus primeiros espetáculos italianos. Tal percurso serve para apresentar técnicas do diretor enquanto meio expressivo e não como o esteticismo virtuosístico que se insidia-se incipientemente na realização de alguns workshops sobre atuação – por exemplo, o círculo neutro. Paroni utiliza seu percurso pessoal para compor uma visão, entre apaixonada e racional, do modo de trabalhar de Thierry enquanto apresentação ao público brasileiro. Palavras-chave: Círculo neutro; Pedagogia teatral; Dramaturgia de cena; Personagem; Narração. Titolo: THIERRY SALMON, DEMIURGO E PEDAGOGO – una introduzione per un pubblico brasiliano. Riassunto: Attraverso il racconto della sua esperienza personale con il regista e pedagogo teatrale Thierry Salmon, il regista, drammaturgo e sceneggiatore Maurício Paroni de Castro traccia il percorso di un apprendimento teatrale che ha trasformato e plasmato radicalmente la sua estetica, fino dai suoi primi spettacoli italiani. Tale percorso serve a presentare le tecniche del regista come mezzo espressivo e non come l’estetismo virtuosistico che è insidiosamente proposto nell'esecuzione di alcuni workshop sulla recitazione - per esempio, il cerchio neutro. Paroni usa il suo personale percorso per comporre una visione, tra appassionata e razionale, del modo di lavorare di Thierry e allo stesso tempo lo presenta al pubblico brasiliano. Parole chiave: Cerchio neutro; Pedagogia teatrale; Drammaturgia scenica; Personaggio; Narrazione. Title: THIERRY SALMON, DEMIURGE AND EDUCATOR – an introduction for a Brazilian audience Abstract: Through the narration of his personal experience with the director and pedagogue of Thierry Salmon Theater, the director, dramaturgist and screenwriter Mauricio Paroni de Castro brings the course of a theatrical learning that transformed and radically shaped his aesthetic, until his first Italian spectacles. This course serves to present techniques of the director as an expressive medium and not as a virtuosic aestheticism that is insidiously incipient in the performance of some workshops on acting - for example, the neutral circle. Paroni uses his personal path to compose a vision, between passionate and rational, of the way of working of Thierry while presenting to the Brazilian public. Keywords: Neutral circle; Theatrical pedagogy; Scene dramaturgy; Character; Narration.

The article examines the main theses of the New Italian Epic Memorandum (2009) written by an Italian literary group “Wu Ming” as well as response of critics and literary theorists to its publication. The paper discusses the notion of the author’s voice and author’s persona in the context of the modern literary process, as well as other theoretical postulates of the group. The underlying idea of the Memorandum is the concept of the New Italian Epic (NIE), a body of relevant modern works written after 2000 and sharing common features. The main idea of the NIE concerns the development of narrative crossroads between literature, journalism, movies, animation, and documentary, with the use of visual effects, allegoric figures, simplified stylistics, and hyperrealism. The Memorandum also calls to abandon traditional literary forms and style. Instead of the term “novel,” the authors suggest an alternative definition: “indefinite narrative object.” Between 2009 and 2019, Wu Ming 1 (Roberto Bui) gives detailed answers to critical comments and continues to develop their theory that can no longer be ignored by Italian literary scholars.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the moral dilemmas faced by a principal. A well-functioning school depends on many factors. Among these factors, the competence of the principal plays an important role. Often this competence, defined as leadership, is understood in a technical way because it is often interpreted as the acquisition of legal and management skills. In contrast, a good school requires strong humanistic competence and, in particular, ethical knowledge. The narratives of the principals reveal the sense of the inadequacy of their role: the administrators declared that they do not have a suitable and complete preparation to manage the complexity of the system. Their primary concerns relate to the evaluation and disciplinary aspects of the students, as well as the sense of responsibility aimed at the training of the entire person, not only his personal education. Keywords: Ethical leadership, Italian principals, moral dilemmas.

AbstractPrevious studies on projective techniques have investigated the effects of variation in stimulus features on individuals’ response behavior. In particular, the influence of chromatic colors and form definition on the images elicited by the stimuli has been tested. Most studies have focused on the Rorschach and TAT and have examined effects in terms of variables such as reality testing and reactions to perceptual details. This is the first study to examine the effects of variation in visual stimuli as represented in features of the Object Relations Technique (ORT) cards on linguistic indicators of connection to emotional experience using measures of the referential process. The ORT was administered to 207 Italian non-clinical participants to explore effects of color, form and content variation on language style. The sample was stratified by age, gender, marital status and education to be representative of the Italian population. The stories told in response to the card images were rated using computerized linguistic measures, including the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary—Italian version (IWRAD) which indicates the degree to which language is connected to nonverbal experience, and the Weighted Reflection/Reorganization List—Italian version (IWRRL) which detects a linguistic style of personal re-elaboration of emotional experience. The results provide support for the color-affect and form-reality testing hypotheses. Cards with better form definition, including color definition, and with fewer silhouettes of people elicited responses that were higher in IWRAD and lower in IWRRL, and also higher in the degree to which the two measures varied together. Implications of the results for use of ORT in clinical assessment and intervention are discussed.

Interdisciplinary concepts of the “New historical science” led to interest in documents of personal origin, which caused demand for the appeared publishing series “Documents of the Soviet era”, “Narration in documents”. The microhistoric approach proposed by German and Italian scientists brought documents created by small people to the forefront of research. Thanks to the change in the angle of view, the forefront of the history of political repression has spoken with many voices, previously unknown people. The sources of analysis of the memories of victims of political terror were archival and investigative materials deposited in departmental archives.

El libro La identidad del intérprete profesional. Cómo se construyen las identidades profesionales en el aula es fruto de la tesis doctoral en lingüística educativa de Alan James Runcieman. Este libro presenta un trabajo de interés para formadores y estudiantes de interpretación, así como para investigadores tanto en formación de intérpretes como en narrativa. En general, se trata de una investigación dedicada a la formación profesional de los intérpretes llevada a cabo Departamento de Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad de Bolonia, Italia. Y, en particular, se trata de un estudio aplicado a un grupo de estudiantes de primer año de carrera. Se basó en un enfoque etnográfico mediante la realización de entrevistas individuales y grupales semiestructuradas durante el primer año académico al igual que en observaciones detalladas sobre el terreno durante idéntico periodo de tiempo. El análisis de las entrevistas se enfocó en las narrativas de los estudiantes acerca de sus experiencias, recurriendo a un área relativamente nueva de la investigación narrativa conocida como investigación de “pequeños relatos”, es decir, aquellos relatos que emergen en un “diálogo interactivo”, que a menudo son de naturaleza fragmentaria y, a veces, co-construidos por personas con experiencias compartidas. En otras palabras, el foco se dio entonces en aquellos pequeños relatos que surgieron de las entrevistas a los estudiantes y cómo ellos revelaron su relación con la institución, su concepción de ideas acerca de convertirse en intérpretes y sus identidades sociales cambiantes en ese ambiente.

In recent years, online media have offered to trans people helpful resources to create new political, cultural and personal representations of their biographies. However, the role of these media in the construction of their social and personal identities has seldom been addressed. Drawing on the theoretical standpoint of positioning theory and diatextual discourse analysis, this paper discusses the results of a research project about weblogs created by Italian trans women. In particular, the aim of this study was to describe the ways online resources are used to express different definitions and interpretation of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender transitioning. We identified four main positioning strategies: “Transgender”, “Transsexual before being a woman”, “A woman who was born male” and “Just a normal woman”. We conclude with the political implications of the pluralization of narratives about gender non-conformity. Specifically, we will highlight how aspects of neoliberal discourses have been appropriated and rearticulated in the construction of gendered subjectivities.

Riassunto Nel marzo 1847, Papa Pio IX emanò l’Enciclica „Praedecessores Nostros“, un appello rivolto ai prelati di tutto il mondo affinché organizzassero tre giorni di preghiere e di raccolta di offerte a favore dell’Irlanda colpita dalla carestia. Negli stati italiani, le parole del Papa furono comunicate ai fedeli dai vescovi, che emanarono appelli locali. L’invito era di seguire l’esempio del Papa, il cui contributo personale, risalente ai mesi precedenti, aveva avuto vasta eco sui quotidiani della penisola. Con l’ausilio di un corpus di venticinque appelli scritti dai vescovi sull’impulso dell’Enciclica, l’articolo analizza la riproduzione di un appello umanitario globale negli stati italiani. L’articolo contestualizza la distribuzione della „Praedecessores Nostros“ e degli appelli dei vescovi nella storia politica e culturale nei territori italiani e mappa l’impatto della censura su questa iniziativa caritatevole. In secondo luogo, un’analisi testuale mostra gli elementi narrativi, le risorse metadiscorsive, le parole chiave e i riferimenti biblici e patristici che costituivano la specifica economia morale attraverso la quale i vescovi invitavano a donare a livello locale.

Georgian and Russian modernisms engaged in a conversation that was by no means one-way and in which the chronological development and aesthetic premises of Russian symbolism became curiously inverted. Piecing together this forgotten dialogue allows us to recover a neglected crosscultural and properly Eurasian dimension of the Silver Age. Russians and Georgians alike invoked the mask as a theatrical form and myth as a narrative structure to articulate problems of individual, collective, and national identity. Mask and myth shared two distinct and somewhat incompatible genealogies, the one deriving from the Italian commedia dell'arte and the other from Friedrich Nietzsche's reading of Greek tragedy, both of which corresponded in turn to a typically Russian tension between the “decadent” and “mythopoetic” redactions of symbolism. These genealogies were critically adapted by the Georgians in an attempt to address the perceived needs of Georgian national culture. Aesthetic and philosophical problems concerning the semiotics of the name, the nature of the poetic persona, and the structure of myth came to be related to wider questions proper to an era of crisis and transition: modernity and historical belatedness, the dynamics of cultural importation, the gendered nature of nationhood, and the vexed relationship between popular culture and modernism as an elite cultural formation.

O romance contemporâneo Fruta podrida (2008), da escritora chilena Lina Meruane, narra a história de duas irmãs que vivem no campo: María- a mais velha-, especialista em pesticidas, e Zoila – irmã mais nova-, diagnosticada com diabete. Chama a atenção o fato de a narrativa girar em torno do corpo doente de Zoila o qual, sem estar sob o controle do “sujeito da consciência” da personagem, acaba por ser subjugado pela medicina que, legitimada pelo saber científico, detém o monopólio sobre o corpo enfermo. Tendo isso em vista, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar de que modo o romance, ao pôr em foco o corpo doente- seus sofrimentos e suas potencialidades-, problematiza a categoria de ‘pessoa’ ou de ‘sujeito da consciência/de direito’, como única forma possível/reconhecível do ser. A categoria de pessoa pensada para este trabalho é a que está presente em discursos jurídicos, filosóficos e políticos e que sustenta as reivindicações dos direitos humanos, contraditoriamente, tão em voga na contemporaneidade, conforme teorizou o filósofo italiano Roberto Esposito, em seus livros Tercera persona (2009) e Dispositivo de la persona (2011). Dessa forma, será pertinente investigar também como a dissolução da hierarquia binária mente/corpo, no romance de Meruane, pode – como ato político- permear o sensível (RANCIÈRE, 1995), desestabilizar os dispositivos de controle da biopolítica (FOUCAULT, 2004, 2011 ) e instigar por novas formas de liberar e pensar a vida para além da -exclusiva e excludente- categoria de pessoa.

ABSTRACTObjective:This was a study of positive psychological traits in a group of rural Italians aged 90 to 101 years, and their children or other family members.Design:Mixed-methods quantitative (standardized rating scales) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews) study.Setting:Study participants’ homes in nine villages in the Cilento region of southern Italy.Participants:Twenty-nine nonagenarians and centenarians and 51 family members aged 51–75 years, selected by their general practitioners as a part of a larger study called CIAO (Cilento Initiative on Aging Outcomes).Methods:We used published rating scales of mental and physical well-being, resilience, optimism, anxiety, depression, and perceived stress. Qualitative interviews gathered personal narratives of the oldest-old individuals, including migrations, traumatic events, and beliefs. Family members described their impressions about the personality traits of their older relative.Results:Participants age ≥90 years had worse physical health but better mental well-being than their younger family members. Mental well-being correlated negatively with levels of depression and anxiety in both the groups. The main themes that emerged from qualitative interviews included positivity (resilience and optimism), working hard, and bond with family and religion, as described in previously published studies of the oldest old, but also a need for control and love of the land, which appeared to be unique features of this rural population.Conclusions:Exceptional longevity was characterized by a balance between acceptance of and grit to overcome adversities along with a positive attitude and close ties to family, religion, and land, providing purpose in life.

ABSTRACTThe great wave of immigrants to the United States during the late 1800s brought many talented individuals who enriched American culture and society. Notable among them stands the Italian-born artist, Albert L. Operti (1852–1927), a versatile painter, illustrator and sculptor. For much of his professional career, Operti served as a scenic artist for the Metropolitan Opera House and later as an exhibit artist for the American Museum of Natural History. However, he maintained an avid personal interest in polar explorers and the history of polar exploration, ultimately turning his artistic skills to the subject. Operti served as official artist for Robert E. Peary during his Arctic expeditions of 1896 and 1897, producing paintings, drawings and even plaster casts of the Inuit from the expedition. Over the course of his lifetime he painted a number of ‘great’ pictures depicting, in a factually accurate manner, important incidents in Arctic history along with numerous smaller paintings, sketches, illustrations and studies. The quality of his work never rivaled his more talented contemporaries in the field of ‘great’ paintings, such as the prominent artists William Bradford and Frederic Church. Nonetheless, Operti achieved some recognition in his time as a painter of historical Arctic scenes, but the full extent of his contributions are little known and have been largely unexamined. Unlike the explorers themselves whose legacy rests upon geographic or scientific accomplishments and written narratives, Operti's legacy stands upon the body of distinctive artwork that served to convey, in realistic and graphic terms, the hardships and accomplishments of those explorers. This article recounts the life of Operti and his role as an historian in disseminating knowledge of the polar regions and its explorers to the public.

This paper reports on a study into the inter-relationships amongst foreign language pronunciation, mimicry ability and a range of personality and attitudinal factors. It will begin with a brief review of studies into affective influences on pronunciation ability (Arnold 1999, Hu & Reiterer 2009) and research into the importance of mimicry talent (Jilka 2009; Piske, MacKay & Flege 2001). This will be followed by a short description of a pilot study carried out prior to the main experiment. In the main study, a group of Polish learners of English completed a number of mimicry tasks in three languages: Italian, Dutch and Chinese, as well as a narration task in English. Mimicry performance and English pronunciation were then assessed by native speakers and compared. Participants also completed a questionnaire concerning their feelings about the languages they were to mimic and a second questionnaire designed to detect affective factors such as language learning anxiety, as well as attitudes towards the pronunciation of Polish and English. The pilot study suggested that the perceived attractiveness of the foreign language to be mimicked did not affect the performance of most participants, and that mimicry skill was fairly constant across languages. However, those who were particularly concerned about their personal appearance showed greater fluctuation in their ability to mimic and their performance appeared to be influenced by their attitude towards the language. This is referred to by the author as the Cecily effect. That study also confirmed the results of my previous experimental work showing that mimicry skill is correlated to some degree with English language pronunciation and that both pronunciation and mimicry are negatively affected by high levels of anxiety. The main study sets out to investigate whether or not these conclusions hold true for a larger sample population and also seeks to determine the effect of confidence and willingness to take risks on scores for both foreign language pronunciation and mimicry exercises.

En la actualidad, el festival literario Centroamérica Cuenta tiene en su haber seis ediciones realizadas desde 2013. Esta iniciativa internacional, coordinada por el escritor nicaragüense Sergio Ramírez, año con año ha forjado un espacio de intercambio y reflexión para la narrativa centroamericana, proyectando las identidades, literaturas y realidades de la región a diversas zonas del orbe. Desde su inicio, el festival ha contado con la participación de más de 500 escritores del istmo, entre los cuales se encuentran la salvadoreña Vanessa Núñez y el nicaragüense Alberto Sánchez Argüello, representantes de una nueva generación centroamericana de narradores. En el caso de la escritora Vanesa Núñez (1973, San Salvador), también abogada, docente y editora, incluimos un cuento inédito; “La familia”, de carácter amargo y afilado en su desenlace, como las vidas de muchas personas centroamericanas. Núñez ha publicado los libros: Los locos mueren de viejos (FyG Editores, 2008 y La Pereza, 2015), Dios tenía miedo (FyG Editores, 2011 y Editorial Piedrasanta, 2016), La caja de cuentos (libro objeto) (Alas de Barrilete, 2015), Espejos (Uruk Editores, 2015), Animales Interiores (en coautoría con Frida Larios, 2015), así como varios relatos en diversas antologías y revistas de España, Francia, Alemania, Suiza, Estados Unidos, Colombia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala y México. Su obra ha sido igualmente traducida al francés, alemán e inglés. En cuanto al narrador Alberto Sánchez Argüello (1976, Managua), también psicólogo, ilustrador y reconocido tuitero (de la aplicación Twitter), quien ha creado varios libros de micro-relatos a partir de tuits entrelazados (Parafernalia Ediciones Digitales), publicamos el micro-cuento “La estatua”. El relato se encuentra en diálogo con el cuento de Núñez, a partir de una visión cruda de los mandatos patriarcales imperantes en nuestras sociedades. Sánchez se ha enfocado en literatura juvenil e infantil, con la publicación de las siguientes obras: La casa del agua (Fondo Editorial Libros para niños, 2003), Mi amigo el dragón (Fondo Editorial Libros para niños, 2014), Los Monstruos bajo la cama (Loqueleo Santillana, 2016), Chico Largo y Charco Verde (Loqueleo Santillana, 2017) e Ítaca (Fondo Editorial Libros para niños, 2017). Su obra se ha publicado en antologías en Nicaragua, México, España, El Salvador, Bolivia, Chile y Perú. Algunos de sus cuentos están traducidos al inglés, portugués, italiano, alemán y vietnamita.

Abstract Background Although migraine is widespread and disabling, stigmatisation and poor awareness of the condition still represent barriers to effective care; furthermore, research on migraine individual and social impact must be enhanced to unveil neglected issues, such as caregiving burden. The project investigated the migraine illness experience through Narrative Medicine (NM) to understand daily life, needs and personal resources of migraneurs, their caregivers and clinicians, and to provide insights for clinical practice. Methods The project involved 13 Italian headache centres and targeted migraneurs, their caregivers and migraine specialists at these centres. Written narratives, composed by a sociodemographic survey and illness plot or parallel chart, were collected through the project’s webpage. Illness plots and parallel charts employed open words to encourage participants’ expression. Narratives were analysed through Nvivo software, interpretive coding and NM classifications. Results One hundred and seven narratives were collected from patients and 26 from caregivers, as well as 45 parallel charts from clinicians. The analysis revealed migraine perception in social, domestic and work life within the care pathway evolution and a bond between chaos narratives and day loss due to migraine; furthermore, narratives suggested the extent of the caregiving burden and a risk of underestimation of migraine burden in patients’ and caregivers’ life. Conclusion The project represents the first investigation on migraine illness experience through NM simultaneously considering migraneurs’, caregivers’ and clinicians’ perspectives. Comparing narratives and parallel charts allowed to obtain suggestions for clinical practice, while NM emerged as able to foster the pursuing of migraine knowledge and awareness.

Through three case studies, the article explores how digital media have been used in recent years to depict and comprehend experiences of cancer. It first investigates the illness blog, specifically Swedish journalist and musician Kristian Gidlund’s immensely popular blog In My Body, in which he, from 2011 to 2013, shared the narrative of his struggle with an aggressive, incurable, and ultimately deadly stomach cancer. It continues by discussing Italian engineer, artist, and hacker Salvatore Iaconesi’s digital open-source project La Cura – The Cure (2012), which has great relevance from both the digital and the medical humanities perspectives in the way Iaconesi uses his personal narrative of brain cancer to encourage people to join his struggle to find a cure. Finally, it analyzes the American couple Ryan and Amy Green’s videogame That Dragon, Cancer (2016). A game differing significantly from video and computer games in general and from other games taking cancer as their subject by letting the player enter the role of caregiver to a small child dying of cancer. Expanding on Lisa Diedrich’s theoretical concept of “doing illness”, the article emphasizes the performative dimension of narrating illness in digital media, considering how these authors and creators negotiate with narrative, cultural, and medial scripts when portraying their cancer experiences. It highlights the interactive and participatory dimension of doing illness in digital media, by exploring how the blog, open-source project, and videogame both invite and limit the audience’s opportunities to interact and participate with the illness narrative conveyed.

Explorations of the artist in the biopic genre are often formulaic in approach. The biographical narrative, modelled on the literary monograph, celebrates a public figure who overcomes challenges to rise to the top of their field. These films traditionally present the artist’s life and work as intrinsically involved with each other so that the artwork can only be explained through contextualising biographical knowledge. Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), in the vein of his highly personal, experimental filmmaking, is not a biopic in this traditional sense. Taking advantage of what little is known about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the Italian painter widely recognised as the first great artist of the Baroque period and a master of chiaroscuro, Jarman constructs a heavily fictional ‘biographical’ narrative. This narrative is built upon historical speculation, personal identification, and most significantly, his subjective interpretation and visualisation of the paintings themselves. A series of tableaux vivants, delicately postured, almost still, recreations of the paintings, provide the narrative impetus in Caravaggio. Many of these are situated as poses in preparation for Caravaggio's painting. These recreations are removed from their historical context, disregarding the artworks’ chronology and misplacing characters and events to construct a part-Jarman/part-Caravaggio profile – fictionalising both art and biography. This paper explores Jarman’s intricate appropriation of the art and biography of the artist in Caravaggio, and how this is implemented, and complicated, to serve his own narrative agenda. Developing André Bazin’s discussion about the adoption of one medium into another in ‘Painting and Cinema,’ I analyse the tableaux representing The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), The Entombment of Christ (1602-03), and Death of the Virgin (1606). This analysis takes place on three levels: firstly, art-history ‘fidelity;’ secondly, the perversion of the self-portrait; and finally, with direct reference to Bazin’s essay, the editing of the art-image.

This article aims to analyse the reasons for the unexpected absence of Greece in Mario Rigoni Stern’s works about the Italian military campaign against Greece during the winter of 1940-1941. As a young soldier, Rigoni Stern fought in that terrible war in the Albanian mountains, close to the Greek line, and recounted those events many years later. I focus in particular on Quota Albania (1971), in an attempt to show that the novel is not only a memoir, but rather a Bildungsroman, in which he recounts his personal life, his disillusionment with Italian disorganisation and the difficult conditions he endured, the cold and hunger. Furthermore, I would like to explain that the surprising indifference to Greek events is linked not only to the author’s narrative intention, but also to the fact that in the final battle Rigoni Stern did not go to Greece, and never returned thereafter. On the other hand, his unfamiliarity with the Mediterranean justifies the lack of descriptive details of the Greek landscape.

Abstract Background. Literature shows that migrants—a generic definition for persons who leave their own country of origin—have increased psychopathological vulnerability. Between 2014 and 2017, 976 963 non-European Union (non-EU) people arrived in Italy, of which 30% for humanitarian reasons. This study is aimed at a better understanding of the experience of asylum seekers who transferred to Italy were subjected to the EU Dublin Regulation and most of them suspended in their asylum application. Methods. We elaborate a descriptive study based on a population of refugees and asylum seekers who have suffered from social and personal migratory stressful factors. Clinical data was collected between 2011 and 2013 at the “A. Gemelli” General Hospital IRCCS, Rome, Italy. Minors, elderly people, and patients who are unable to declare a voluntary consensus and economic migrants were excluded from the study. Candidates for the status of refugee or asylum seekers were included. Results. The sample consisted of 180 asylum seekers aged 25.52 ± 5.6 years. Most frequently diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (53%), subthreshold PTSD was reported in 22% of subjects. We found phenomenological patterns highly representative of PTSD of the dissociative subtype. Around 20% of the sample suffered from psychotic symptomatology. Conclusions. Loss of the migratory project and the alienation mediated by chronic social defeat paradigm may trigger a psychopathological condition described by the failure to cope with the negative emotional context of social exclusion and solitude. A common and integrated treatment project is needed, with the scope of reintegrating the migrant’s personal and narrative identity.

Over the last decades, consistent research showed that voluntary work could be considered as a tool for professional development and concrete employment: volunteering could be either experienced as a desire to improve career opportunities or to acquire new skills. The study aimed to investigate voluntary work as a context of informal and non-formal workplace learning and vocational guidance, useful to develop skills and abilities, namely the capital of personal and social resources, that could promote future employability. Participants were 38 young volunteers who experienced the Universal Civil Service, a national Italian program addressed to young people aged up to 28 years, giving them both the opportunity to engage in social activities useful for the community and have the first contact with a working context. In line with the objectives of the study, participants were invited to describe their volunteering experience in a diary, highlighting if and to what extent this context contributed to enhancing their employability capital, namely the asset of skills, knowledge, and networks acquired, that they could transfer to a future professional domain. The narrative data collected were examined through diatextual analysis, a specific address of discourse analysis designed to catch the relationship between enunciators, text, and context of the talk. This qualitative analysis allowed us to investigate the meanings young people attributed to these activities. In light of these results, the paper contributed to investigate volunteers’ perceptions about the conditions that could best foster this specific kind of workplace informal and non-formal learning and at proposing a qualitative perspective on the analysis of the employability capital they developed.

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony and his friends use “prosthetic memories” to anchor their ethnic and criminal identities. Prosthetic memories were theorised by Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. She argues that prosthetic memories are memories acquired through the mass media and do not come from a person’s lived experience in any sense (Landsberg 20). In this article, I will outline how The Sopranos television show and its characters interact with prosthetic memories. Extending Christopher Kocela’s work on The Sopranos and white ethnicities, I will show how characters use prosthetic memories to define their ethnicity while the show itself knowingly plays with this to provide comedic and critical commentary about the influence of gangster stereotypes. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories are powerful memories of historical events or narratives that an individual was not present for. They are typically formed at the "interface between a personal and historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum" (2). It is at such a moment that a person can suture themselves into a larger history. Consequently, these memories do not just enhance an individual’s apprehension of a historical event. Rather, they create a deeply felt personal memory of a past event through which they did not live (Landsberg 4). Prosthetic memories are largely made available through the technologies of mass culture such as film, television and experiential places like museums. Their accessibility helps to differentiate them from other cultural strategies for passing on memories to future generations. Other strategies have typically been rooted in the cultural or racial status of an individual (Landsberg 22). In addition, Landsberg asserts that the successfulness of mnemotechnic rituals like the Jewish Passover Seder is dependent on ethnicity (26). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels concludes that these rituals can only be effective if the individual has “some prior assumption of identity between you and them and this assumption is often racial” (680). Contrastingly, the perpetuation of prosthetic memories through mass media makes them widely accessible across racial lines. According to Landsberg, they are not “naturally- ethnically, racially or biologically- one’s intended inheritance” (26). Prosthetic memories introduce the possibility that memories can be acquired by anyone. The technologies of mass culture make these memories portable and as such, challenges the assumption that memory is “in anyway essential or organically grounded or the private property of a specific ethnic or racial group” (27). In The Sopranos, most characters are third or fourth generation Italian immigrants. Much like for many ‘real’ Italian migrants, time has severed familial connections to their homeland (see Landsberg 49-55). Landsberg suggests that immigrants initially became Americanised in order to escape persecution and being labelled as “other” (51). This meant that ethnically exclusive mnemotechnic rituals were not preserved for subsequent generations of immigrants. In order to sustain an ethnic identity, immigrants (and the characters in The Sopranos) have been forced to turn to more accessible tools like prosthetic memories. Christopher Kocela’s analysis of Italian-Americanness in The Sopranos, argues that characters maintain an Italian American ethnicity while still racially identifying as white. According to Colin Webster “white ethnicity” can be best exemplified through the long tradition of European immigration to America (295). With the influx of immigrants, there was a codification of the idea that “some whites are ‘whiter’ than others” (Webster 297). European working-class immigrants struggled to be afforded the same white “privileges” and membership to the white race. Instead, they were defined as being members of “other” white ethnicities. Roediger argued that such a denial of whiteness pushed European immigrants to insist on their own whiteness by defining themselves against other ethnic minorities like African Americans (8). Between 1890 and 1945, eventual assimilation saw white ethnicities become “fully white” (Roediger 8). Webster argues that: “In this sense, whiteness is nearly always salvageable in a way that black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American ethnicity is not (sic)” (Webster 297). In a similar vein, Kocela suggests that the assimilated characters in The Sopranos benefit from their white racial status while still maintaining an Italian ethnicity. This celebration of ethnic difference by Tony and his friends can serve as a smokescreen for the silent maintenance of whiteness (Kocela 14). Kocela suggests that the show critiques these types of responses that characters have to their ethnicity, stating that "we do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own" (16).Kocela’s article provides a useful discussion about the relationship that characters in The Sopranos have with their ethnicity. This article extends this discussion by showing how prosthetic memories and characters’ understanding of mass media are a crucial element in how such ethnic identities are formed. This will lead to a discussion about how The Sopranos comments on and treats these adopted stereotypes. “What do poor Italian-immigrants have to do with you?”: How Characters Interact with Prosthetic MemoriesCharacters in The Sopranos heavily rely upon stereotypes from gangster films to perform their version of Italian Americanness. A reliance on prosthetic memories from such films leads to the manifestation of violence being intertwined with the characters’ ethnic identities. Brian Faucette has discussed the inherent link between violence and gangster films from the 1930s-60s. He claims that “it was violence that enabled the upward mobility of these figures” (76). It is almost impossible to separate violence from the gangster films referenced in The Sopranos. As such, violence becomes part of the ritualistic ways prosthetic memories are created. This is evident in the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Christopher performs his first hit (kill). In the scene, he shoots rival gang member, Emil, in the back of the head at Satriales Pork Store. Before the hit, the pair are standing close together in front of a pinboard collage of “classic” Italian movie gangsters. As they both walk away in opposite directions the camera pulls out diagonally to follow Christopher. Throughout the duration of the shot, the collage is always placed behind Christopher. Finally, when the pan stops, Christopher is positioned in the foreground, with the collage behind him to the right. The placement of the collage gives it a front row seat to the ensuing murder while serving as a kind of script for it. It is not enough for Christopher to simply kill Emil, rather it is important that it is done in the presence of his idols in order to ensure his enhanced identification with them. Moreover, for Christopher, being an Italian American gangster and violence are inseparable. He must perform acts of extreme violence in order to suture himself into a larger, stereotypical narrative, that equates Italian-Americanness with the mafia. Through Landsberg’s theory, it is possible to see the intertwined relationship between performances of Italian-Americanness and violence. To enact their version of Italian-Americanism, characters follow the script of masculine-violence inherent to gangster films. As well as tools to perform Italian American identities, prosthetic memories can be used by characters to deny their whiteness. Kocela argues that Tony can deny or affirm his whiteness, depending on the situation. According to Kocela, Tony’s economic success is intrinsically linked to his racial status as a white man (16). However, this is not a view shared by characters in the show. In the episode From Where to Eternity Dr. Melfi asks Tony how he justifies his criminal lifestyle: Tony: When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.Dr. Melfi: That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?Kocela describes Tony’s response as a “textbook recitation of the two-family myth of Italian-American identity in which criminal activities are justified in a need to resist assimilation” (28). It is evident that for Tony, being Italian American is defined by being ethnically different. To admit that whiteness contributes to his economic success would undermine the justification he gives for his criminal lifestyle and his self-perceived status as an Italian American. Despite this, Melfi’s statement rings true. The experience of “poor Italian immigrants” does not affect Tony’s daily lifestyle. Characters in The Sopranos do not face the same oppression and discrimination as first-generation migrants (Kocela 28). After decades of assimilation, Tony and his friends turn to the narratives of discrimination and ethnic difference present in gangster films. This is exemplified through Tony’s identification with Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Vito exemplifies Tony’s notion of Italian Americanism. He was a poor immigrant that turned to criminality to protect the Italian-American community and their way of life. Vito is also connected to Italy in a way that Tony admires. When Paulie asks Tony what his favourite scene from The Godfather is he responds with: Don Ciccio’s Villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily, the crickets, the great old house. Maybe it’s because I’m going over there, ya know? Gangster films and representations of Italian-Americanness often deliberately differentiate Italian families from “regular” white people (D’Acierno 566). According to D’Acierno, gangster narratives often involve two types of Italian families, one that has been left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and another that has resisted this through organised crime (D’Acierno 567). Tony and his friends tap into these narratives in their attempt to create prosthetic memories that differentiate their ethnicity and ultimately draw attention away from the whiteness which silently benefits them.The “inauthenticity” of these prosthetic memories is probably most pronounced in the episode Commendatori when Tony, Christopher and Paulie visit Italy. The trip shatters the expectations that the characters had of their homeland and sheds light on some of their delusions about what it means to be Italian. Paulie expects to love Italy and be greeted with open arms by the locals. Unfortunately, he dislikes it all because it is too foreign for him. At the banquet, Paulie finds the authentic Italian octopus uneatable and instead orders “spaghetti and gravy.” He is also unable to use the bathrooms because he is so used to American toilets. When at a local café he tries to initiate conversation with some local men using broken Italian. Even though they hear him, the group ignores him. Despite all this Paulie, pretends that it was a great trip:Big Pussy: So how was it?Paulie: Fabulous, I felt right at home… I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t been … especially any Italian. The prosthetic memories that defined these characters’ perceptions of Italy are based on the American media’s portrayal of Italy. Commendatori thus exposes the differences between what is “authentically Italian” and the prosthetic memories about Italy generated by American gangster films. By the end of the episode it has become clear that these “inauthentic” prosthetic memories have forged an entirely different, hybrid ethnic identity.“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes”: How The Sopranos Treats Prosthetic MemoriesIntertextuality is an important way through which the audience can understand how The Sopranos treats prosthetic memories. The prosthetic memories generated by characters in The Sopranos are heavily based on stereotypes of Italian Americans. Papaleo states that the Italian stereotype is “composed of overreactions: after bowing, smiling and being funny, the Italian loses control” (93). Mafia films are crucial in defining the identity of Tony and his friends, and David Pattie suggests that they are a “symbolic framework within which Tony, Paulie, Christopher and Silvio attempt to find meaning and justification for their lives” (137). In a similar way, the audience is invited to use these same films as a frame for watching The Sopranos itself. Mafia stereotypes are one of the dominant ways that depict Italian Americans on screen. According to Larke-Walsh, this has perpetuated the belief that crime and Italian-Americanness are synonymous with each other (226). The show is obsessively referential and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of these films for much of its effect. Pattie describes how such use of intertextuality can be explained: "[there are] two ways of looking at self-referential programs: one in which readings of other media texts can be contained first of all within the film or program in which they occur; and a more covert type of referential work, which relies almost exclusively on the audience’s detailed, constantly-updated cultural intelligence" (137). The Sopranos operates on both levels as references that are simultaneously textual and meta-textual. This is evident through the way the show treats The Godfather films. They are by far the most frequently mentioned ones (Golden 95). According to Chris Messenger, the central link between the two is the acknowledgement that “America itself has been totally colonised by The Godfather” (Messenger 95). The Godfather is an urtext that frames how audiences are invited to view the show. As such, The Sopranos invites the viewer to use the Godfather as a lens to uncover extra layers of meaning. For example, The Sopranos uses the misguided ways in which its characters have taken on stereotypes from The Godfather as a source of humour. The series plays on the fact that characters will allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour. In the pilot episode, Christopher calls “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero to help him dispose of a body. Christopher informs Pussy that it’s his plan to leave the body at a garbage stop to be discovered by the rival Czechoslovakians. Christopher hoped this would emulate the “Luca Brasi situation” from The Godfather and intimidate the Czechoslovakians. When he explains this to Pussy, they have the following exchange. Pussy: The Kolar uncle is gonna find a kid dead on one of his bins and get on our fuckin’ business… no way!Christopher: Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.Pussy: Luca Brasi… Luca! There are differences Christopher… okay… from the Luca Brasi situation and this. Look, the Kolar’s know a kid is dead, it hardens their position... plus now the cops are lookin’ for a fuckin’ murderer!To members of the audience who are familiar with The Godfather, it immediately becomes clear that Christopher is comically misguided. In the Godfather, Luca Brasi was murdered because he was caught trying to infiltrate a powerful rival organisation. Fish wrapped in his bullet-proof vest were then sent back to the Corleones in order to notify them that their plan had been foiled (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). The “Luca Brasi situation” was a calculated and strategic move whereas Christopher’s situation amounts to a seemingly random, unauthorised killing. This sequence in The Sopranos uses this comparison for comedic effect and plays on the stereotype that all Italian Americans are mafioso and that all mafia behaviour is interchangeable. The symbolic language of the “Luca Brasi” scene is contrasted with explicit shots of a slumped, lifeless body. These shots are a source of macabre humour. The audience is invited to laugh at the contrast between the subtle, thoughtful nature of the Luca Brasi situation and the brash violence of Christopher’s own predicament. Through this comedic situation, The Sopranos critiques Christopher’s aspiration to be a godfather-esque gangster by showing his incompetence. Christopher’s misreading of the situation is further emphasised by his mistakenly referring to Luca Brasi as “Louis”. After Pussy says: “There are differences… from the Luca Brasi situation and this”, the dialogue pauses and the scene cuts to an immediate close up of Emil’s body falling to the side. This illustrates that part of the joke is that characters are willing to allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour, no matter how inappropriate. Therefore, Christopher is willing to refer to a scene from the Godfather that fails to account for the context of a situation without even consulting the knowledge of Big Pussy. This leads to a larger critique of the ways in which films like The Godfather are presented as a script for all Italian Americans to follow. Nevertheless, The Sopranos still has a role in perpetuating these same stereotypes. Tomasulo has argued that "despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender" (206). This results in a perpetuation of negative stereotypes about working class Italian Americans that affirm old Hollywood clichés. While The Sopranos has tried to transcend this through complex characterisation, irony and universalisation, Tomasulo asserts that most audiences “take The Sopranos as straight - that is a raw unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent” (206). The origin of characters’ anti-social personalities seems to stem directly from their ethnicity and their being Italian appears to constitute an explanation for their behaviour. In his article Kocela discusses the complicated relationship that characters have with their white ethnicity. Through an application of Landsberg’s theory it is possible to understand how these ethnicities are initially formed and how they continue to circulate. In response to assimilation, characters in The Sopranos have turned to mass media to generate prosthetic memories of their ethnic heritage. These memories generally originate in classic gangster films. They are used by characters in The Sopranos to deny their whiteness and justify their criminality. The Sopranos itself comments on the complex ways that characters interpret gangster film stereotypes for both comedic and critical commentary. In the epilogue of her book, Landsberg asks: “How can we be sure the politics inspired by prosthetic memories are progressive and ethical?” Prosthetic memories generated by gangster texts are almost inherently problematic. Scholars have criticised the hyper-aggressive masculinity and regressive gender roles that are rampant throughout the genre (Larke-Walsh 226). For Tony and his friends, these problematic gender politics have helped justify their criminal lifestyle and valorised violence as part of ethnic performance. Similarly, these stereotypes are not always circulated critically and are at times perpetuated for audience enjoyment. AcknowledgmentI would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Michelle Phillipov for providing constructive feedback on earlier drafts. References“Commendatori.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. Tim Van Patten. HBO, 2000. DVD.Coppola, Francis, and Mario Puzo. The Godfather. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1972.“D-Girl.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Todd A. Kessler. Dir. Allen Coulter. HBO, 2000. DVD.D'Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.Faucette, Brian. "Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s." Atenea 28.1 (2008): 75-85.“From Where to Eternity.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Michael Imperioli. Dir. Henry Bronchtein. HBO, 2000. DVD. Golden, Cameron. "You're Annette Bening? Dreams and Hollywood Subtext in The Sopranos." Lavery, David. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from H.B.O. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 91-103.Kocela, Christopher. "Unmade Men: The Sopranos after Whiteness." Postmodern Culture 15.2 (2005). <http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.105/15.2kocela.html>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Rememberance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Messenger, Christopher. Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became Our Gang. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.Michaels, Walter Ben. "Race into Culture: A Critical Geneology of Cultural Identity." Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 655-85.Larke-Walsh, George. Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from The Godfather to The Sopranos. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.Papaleo, Joseph. "Ethnic Images and Ethnic Fate: The Media Image of Italian Americans." Ethnic Images in American Film and Television (1978): 44-95.Pattie, David. "Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film." Lavery, David. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. 137-152.Roediger, D.R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 2007. Thorburn, D. "The Sopranos." In The Essential H.B.O Reader, eds. G. Edgerton and J. Jones. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 61-70.Tomasulo, Frank. "The Guinea as Tragic Hero: The Complex Representation of Italian Americans." In The Essential Sopranos Reader, eds. David Lavery, Douglas Howard, and Paul Levinson. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 196-207.“The Sopranos.” The Sopranos: The Complete First Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. David Chase. HBO, 1999. DVD. “Walk like a Man.” The Sopranos: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Terence Winter. Dir. Terence Winter. HBO, 2007. DVD. Webster, Colin. "Marginalized White Ethnicity, Race and Crime." Theoretical Criminology 12 (2008): 293-312.

AbstractDigital platforms are the essential infrastructures of electronic commerce, online communication, and digital social relationships. They connect two interdependent groups of web users (parties offering goods, services, and digital content; and parties interested in accessing this supply) and enable their transactions. Moreover, they provide additional services such as online payment, collection of reviews and feedback, and internal instant messaging. However, the term “platform” can be misleading, since it seems to denote a virtual space or a technical tool without legal personality. In other words, platforms are masking corporations who hide behind them in order to avoid the legal responsibilities stemming from their status as social institutions. This exploits the dominant theory of the firm as a nexus of contracts and is intended to release the agents involved in the system of production from the restrictions that protect weaker parties in the age of industrial capitalism. Companies who organize production through platforms thus obtain both indirect and direct benefits. In particular, indirect benefits derive from making consumer law more complicated to apply by creating conditions that frustrate the traditional distinction between professionals and consumers. In fact, any user can provide services and sell or share their personal goods (e.g., cars, apartments, clothes, etc.) and other commodities through platforms. However, this does not mean that information asymmetries do not continue to exist, or that weaker parties do not need to be protected. This confusion benefits companies that enable these transactions, since online relationships are not burdened by informative duties. In this case, companies use the platform narrative to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, where simple, ubiquitous exchanges yield advantages. In addition, platforms provide direct benefits by eliminating the hierarchical organization of their production system in order to adopt the least burdensome and most flexible forms of employment. Companies generally rely on ICT tools to show that the parties offering the service are independent and are not subject to their control. The platform narrative glosses over the labor exploitation issues generally referred to as “uberification”. In addressing the questions outlined in this introduction, the paper will be organized as follows. Part I will discuss how the platform economy is challenging consumer law by short-circuiting its legal grounds in ways that allow companies to benefit. Part II will focus on the direct effects of the platforms’ denial of hierarchical organization: starting from the Italian Supreme Court’s ruling in the Foodora lawsuit, we will explore emergent models for organizing the system of production and their impact on the main categories of private law.

AbstractThe dowry system originated in South Asia and the new patterns of household formation among Indian migrant minorities have been debated in the international literature, particularly in the UK. However, less attention has been paid to the pre-marital bargaining strategies used in the most recent Punjabi immigration to Italy (to date the largest Indian Diaspora in Europe) and to how a certain idea of kinship and a cultural code of spousal/parental relations are enacted through gift, exchange and favor. This article explores the “marriage market” among youth of Punjabi descent in Italy (between first and second immigrant generations), investigating the bride-groom selection procedures and the economic transactions which endorse a wedding agreement. Reports of ethnographic research just concluded in the northern rural districts of Bergamo and Brescia indicate that dissonant subjective narratives give voice to family and community conflicts across genders and ages in setting up new domestic groups, capturing the shifting local milieu after the economic crisis. Using an intersectional perspective, which highlights diversity in the Italian Punjabi community (with regard to class, caste and faith), we ascertain how categories of social difference are reproduced, contested and transformed throughout wedlock, and see how a traditional tempered endogamy has long become transnational and partly disrupted. Analyzing how young Indian Italians selectively resort to discourses about love/convenience, right/duty, control/autonomy, we will consider whether and how personal agencies may navigate hierarchical structures such as patriarchy, social inequality and capitalist development.

AbstractDifferent scholars have emphasised the psychological distress experienced by health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, there are almost no qualitative studies and we know very little about the everyday experience of this group. The present study’s goal was to explore how health workers interpreted the meaning of the pandemic crisis in their life. An online survey was available during the Italian lockdown. Respondents were asked to write a passage about the meaning of living in the time of COVID-19. A total number of 130 questionnaires (M = 42.35; DS = 10.52; women: 56.2%) were collected. The Automated Method for Content Analysis (ACASM) procedure was applied to the collected texts to detect the factorial dimensions underpinning (dis)similarities in the respondents’ narratives. Such factors were interpreted as the markers of latent dimensions of meanings (DS). The two main DS that emerged were characterised by the pertinentisation of two extremely basic issues: what the pandemic represents (health emergency versus personal crisis) and its impact (powerlessness versus discovery of new meanings). On the whole, health workers’ narratives help to highlight the risk of normalising the feelings of fear and impotence experienced when facing the health emergency and the need to recognise that such feelings are strictly intertwined with the limited resources received to “face the battle”; the need to recognize the human vulnerability of the women and men “inside the lab coat” and the human effort to maintain or reconstruct a sense of self and purpose in the face of troubled circumstances.

Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 209–21. Cooks.com Recipe Search. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.cooks.com›. Darling, Jennifer Dorland. Ed. The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. Des Moines: Meredith, 1996. Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking. North Vancouver: Whitecap, 2003. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. The Recipe Reader. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Heldke, Lisa."Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice." Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Ed Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke. Indiana UP, 1992. 203–29. ---. “Recipe for Theory Making.” Hypatia 3.2 (1988): 15–29. Inness, Sherrie. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. U of Iowa P, 2001. Leonardi, Susan. “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster à la Riseholme, Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104.3 (1989): 340–47. Marquis, Marie. "The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes." What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Ed. Nathalie Cooke. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 213–27. Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2002. Tye, Diane. Baking As Biography. Canada: McGill-Queen UP, 2010. Wagner, Vivian. “Cookbooks of the Future: Bye, Bye, Index Cards.” E-Commerce Times. Ecommercetimes.com. 20 Nov. 2011. 16 April 2013. ‹http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/73842.html›.

This paper focuses on how remote workers experienced their job and everyday life during the Italian lockdown imposed by the national government to contain the spread of COVID-19. Specifically, this contribution focuses on the interdependence of work and everyday life, and the role of digital devices and online platforms during the home-confinement period, and it explores the consequences of social distancing measures on remote workers and on their working and personal conditions. The study draws from 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with remote workers, i.e., individuals which could work from home through digital technologies during the national lockdown. Results highlight that during the lockdown, some participants attempted to cope with the unprecedented triumph of technologically mediated work, others described remote work as liberating and attractive, as it avoids commuting and allow people to organize their activities autonomously, without constraints of space and time. However, their initial enthusiasm decreased after a few weeks of domestic confinement. The experience of remote workers that emerges is a “fractured” one, which appears as a characteristic feature of forced and continuous remote work. Indeed, the coronavirus crisis has accentuated the infrastructural role of digital platforms and intensified the ‘deep mediatization’ of social life and labour, thereby normalizing transmedia work and the ‘extension of already media saturated working conditions’.