The Novel of Ferrara
Introduction by Jamie McKendrick to his translation of The Novel of Ferrara (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019) In short stories, novels, poems, and essays, Giorgio Bassani has composed perhaps the…
Essays
The People Next Door
As long as we live in this house there is no need for Stolpersteines, we don’t need to stumble in memory.
Advertising the Self: Formiggini’s Talking Postcards
In an era in which advertising was not yet an industry but rather an incipient trade entrusted more to imagination than anything else, the Italian publisher Angelo Fortunato Formiggini invented…
A chemist’s book changed John Barnett’s life.
The graphic artist’s Carbon illustrates an element’s journey from a star to his brain We are delighted to repost a review of John Barnett’s beautifully conceived visual meditation on the…
Aldo Braibanti: The Scandal of the Imagination
A modern anarchist outlines a new ecological horizon where man renounces the idea of primacy over other living beings. Imagination is his main instrument: when he puts it to…
The State, the Church, and the Constitution.
Piero Calamandrei’s statement at the Constitutional Assembly, March 1947 Two years after the liberation of Italy, April 25th, 1945, the Constitutional Assembly discussed how to define the relation between Church…
A Memory of Le Murate
I was released from Le Murate three days ago. In my section, there was an inmate from Prato – the nicest man, who had been “in” for the past fourteen…
Memorial Stones
The complex and often elusive workings of memory (including the memory and memorialization of the Shoah) have been often explored also by literature, from the immediate post-war period to the…
Where are sociologists when we need them?
We are facing a new world: in recent months, the pandemic, the shortcomings of our political system, the unrestrained use of social media, the crisis of traditional journalism, ideological polarization,…
Legitimizing Fascism Through the Holocaust?
The reception of the TV miniseries Perlasca: un eroe italiano in Italy. As the Holocaust becomes increasingly present in the political discourse in the US, Europe and Israel, this reflection by…