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Fantastic Architecture and the Building of Europe in Valerio Evangelisti's Eymerich Fiction
No full textConcomitant with the horizontal expansion of EU territory through physical and political enlargement is a genealogy narrative, which emphasizes the ostensible roots of Europeanness in classical antiquity and Christianity. In the face of this sanitized genealogy, which lies at the heart of the European constitutional project, a range of alternative and more inclusive narratives circulate in contemporary European popular fiction. This paper focuses on a series of fantasy novels by the Italian author Valerio Evangelisti, featuring Inquisitor Eymerich as hero-investigator. In his highly popular novels, Evangelisti seeks to uncover layers of shared historical memory untainted with post-Enlightenment rhetoric.
The central architectural tropes of Evangelisti’s imaginary world are those of a castle and a convent, epitomizing the temporal and sacral power in European history. Each isolated from its outside environment and built on layer upon layer of subterranean chambers and corridors, the castle and the convent conceal a past quite different from the one championed in the official European genealogy. Memories of pagan worship and Islamic or Judaic learning – banished from the official rhetoric – continue to thrive, dark and threatening, in the subterranean strata of Evangelisti’s European edifice. Evangelisti thus provides an incisive critique of the official European story of origin, which threatens to suppress any alternative visions of European history or unorthodox avenues for European identity formation
Helminth biocoenosis of Lepus europaeus meridiei (Hilzheimer, 1906) from Pianosa island, Italy
No full textPianosa is a 10 km(2) Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea which is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park. In this island lives a brown hare population which, according to the literature, belongs to the ancestral taxon Lepus europaeus meridei that offers a unique opportunity to observe how the parasite biocoenosis shapes in condition of isolation, limited space availability and high population density. The aim of this work is to describe the helminth component community of a non-managed, isolated, and dense hare population, evaluating host-parasite relationship and parasite community structure. All 26 analyzed hares (13 males and 13 females) were in good physical conditions, and all of them harboured exclusively the nematode Protostrongylus oryctolagi only. This is the first report of this lungworm species in Italy. The estimated overall abundance was 48.15 worms per examined hare (range 3–258, median 50) and the parasites were unevenly distributed across host population, with few hosts having most parasites (aggregated or overdispersed distribution). No significant relationship was detected between the number of isolated parasites and hare sex and weigh. The effect of the isolation of Pianosa's hare population seems to have acted reducing parasite richness, while the high host density is probably the cause of the high prevalence and abundance of the single helminth species collected. In conclusion, despite the low impact of parasites confirmed also by the overdispersed parasite distribution, the low diversity of the studied parasite community sounds a warning for the management of the hare population and the whole Pianosa's ecosystem
Acquacoltura di specie emergenti: Genotipizzazione e pedigree in Anguilla anguilla, primi risultati.
No full textAbstract - Anguilla anguilla (Linnaeus, 1758) is a critically endangered species, whose existence in the wild is highly threatened by human activities and is included in the IUCN Red List of threatened species as “Critically Endangered”. Restocking and captive breeding programs designed to preserve the residual genetic variability should represent the future for conservation of this species. In this perspective, the present study aims to increase the knowledge about the mechanisms at the basis of reproduction of the European eel in semi-natural conditions, through paternity assignment. Here we show the very first parental assignment results of a plenty successful reproductive event that occurred in 2016: four families of European eel founded by four female plus 11 males in different mixes and their progeny, for a total of 206 samples. Parental allocations revealed the presence of different percentage of success of males in fertilizing eggs, with two “super-males” at the top of the productivity, with the 19.9% and 18.8% of total larvae (males 128 and 129) and two “weak-males” at the end of the distribution of productivity curve (males 134 and 135). Since the artificial reproduction of European eel is a very challenging topic for world aquaculture, these first results may help in drawing future breeding plans aimed both to increase the productivity for human consumption and to develop restocking plans in order to try to reduce the speed of decreasing in worldwide stocks of European eels
Sexual behaviour and reproductive performance of the endangered European eel Anguilla anguilla (Linnaeus, 1758) based on direct observationsand paternity assignment in semi-natural conditions
No full textEuropean eel Anguilla anguilla is among the highly valued species for aquaculture. Since its peculiar biology, it is not yet possible to complete the whole life cycle in artificial conditions and its supply depends entirely on wild catches. In the last 50 years this species has suffered a population reduction of 99 % mainly due to overfishing. In a conservation perspective, it is of fundamental importance to improve the aquaculture production of European eel, to avoid the extinction of this species and preserve its residual genetic variability, allowing at the same time the fulfilling of costumers request without increasing its harvesting pressure. In this study we aimed to deepen the knowledge about the mechanisms at the basis of reproduction of the European eel in semi-natural conditions, through direct observation of spawning behaviour and through the paternity assignment using microsatellite markers. The systematic and prolonged observation of the reproductive behaviour of European eel and the contextual parentage analyses we carried out for the very first time in this species on 39 adults and 432 F1 randomly collected. We contributed to unravel the sexual behaviour of this species in the most common artificial reproduction conditions (polyandry), and define the precise courtship sequence until the release of gametes, and the male-male hierarchy in courtship. We characterized for the first time three main types of male: dominant (the first who starts the courtship, and the one with the majority of F1 assigned), subordinate (which starts the courtship only in a second time and with a minor percentage of F1 ascribed) and ineffective (which sometime appears totally disinterested to courtship and has few F1 or none). The evidences here produced represent an important attempt for developing good reproduction practices of the critically endangered European eel, providing a good starting point for its future aquaculture production
Hermann Kant. Ein bio- bibliografisches Profil
No full textThe proximity to the power apparatus has cast dark shadows on the literary work of Hermann Kant, who is regarded as one of the most read authors of the GDR. Valerio Furneri embeds Kant's life and work in the all-German context of the 20th century and reinterprets his classics such as Die Aula or Der Aufenthalt. The author does not pursue the claim to rehabilitate the GDR, nor to trivialise Kant's role in it. Instead, the attempt is made to look at Kant's entire work from a temporal distance and to re-evaluate it. Through his works, Kant was able to accompany and depict not only the German-German history, but also European history.Die Nähe zum Machtapparat hat dunkle Schatten auf das literarische Werk von Hermann Kant, der als meistgelesener Schriftsteller der DDR gilt, geworfen. Valerio Furneri bettet Kants Leben und Werk in den gesamtdeutschen Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts ein und interpretiert vor diesem Hintergrund Klassiker wie Die Aula oder Der Aufenthalt neu. Der Autor verfolgt dabei weder den Anspruch, die DDR zu rehabilitieren, noch Kants Rolle darin kleinzureden. Stattdessen wird der Versuch unternommen, Kants Gesamtwerk aus zeitlicher Distanz zu betrachten und neu zu bewerten. Durch seine Werke gelang es Kant nämlich nicht nur die deutsch-deutsche, sondern auch die europäische Geschichte zu begleiten und abzubilden
Hermann Kant. Ein bio- bibliografisches Profil
No full textThe proximity to the power apparatus has cast dark shadows on the literary work of Hermann Kant, who is regarded as one of the most read authors of the GDR. Valerio Furneri embeds Kant's life and work in the all-German context of the 20th century and reinterprets his classics such as Die Aula or Der Aufenthalt. The author does not pursue the claim to rehabilitate the GDR, nor to trivialise Kant's role in it. Instead, the attempt is made to look at Kant's entire work from a temporal distance and to re-evaluate it. Through his works, Kant was able to accompany and depict not only the German-German history, but also European history.Die Nähe zum Machtapparat hat dunkle Schatten auf das literarische Werk von Hermann Kant, der als meistgelesener Schriftsteller der DDR gilt, geworfen. Valerio Furneri bettet Kants Leben und Werk in den gesamtdeutschen Kontext des 20. Jahrhunderts ein und interpretiert vor diesem Hintergrund Klassiker wie Die Aula oder Der Aufenthalt neu. Der Autor verfolgt dabei weder den Anspruch, die DDR zu rehabilitieren, noch Kants Rolle darin kleinzureden. Stattdessen wird der Versuch unternommen, Kants Gesamtwerk aus zeitlicher Distanz zu betrachten und neu zu bewerten. Durch seine Werke gelang es Kant nämlich nicht nur die deutsch-deutsche, sondern auch die europäische Geschichte zu begleiten und abzubilden
Special issue: Process safety in times of a pandemic
No full textGreen Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Safety and Security Scienc
The intentionality of matter: the personal character of nature in Edith Stein's "Potency and act"
No full textIn the closing chapter, Francesco Valerio Tommasi elaborates upon the analogy between person and nature in Stein. As he emphasizes, Stein attributes to nature an objectively spiritual dimension, a hidden form of intentionality. As the author suggests, for Stein nature turns out to be a living sign of the spirit—thus, a sign expressing spiritual values, such as emotions. This perspective is present in both the lectures on The Constitution of the Human Person and Potency and Act: the phenomenological reflection on personhood is combined, Tommasi argues, with a Thomist view that brings Stein to conceiving the life of the entire cosmos as a spirit (or act) informing it and shaping it into a living sign of the creation
Proceedings of the LREC 2020 workshop on Resources and Techniques for User and Author Profiling in Abusive Language (ResT-UP 2020)
No full textThis volume documents the Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Resources and Techniques for User and Author Profiling in Abusive Language (ResT-UP), held online on 12 May 2020 as part of the LREC 2020 conference (International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation).
The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers and scholars working on author profiling and automatic detection of abusive language on the Web, e.g., cyberbullying or hate speech, with a twofold objective: improving the existing LRs, e.g., datasets, corpora, lexicons, and sharing ideas on stylometry techniques and features needed for profile information extraction and classification. ResT-UP targeted Profiling scholars and research groups, experts in Statistic and Stylistic Analysis of texts as well as computational linguists who investigate author profile and personality both in short texts (social media posts, blog texts and email) and in long texts (such as pamphlets, (fake) news and political documents). ReST-UP represented an opportunity to share profiling experiments with the scientific community and to show automatic detection techniques of abusive language on the Web. Despite the cancellation of LREC 2020 due to the COVID-19 international emergency, ResT-UP was organized online on Microsoft Teams on May 12th 2020 and the programme included three oral presentations and featured an invited talk by Paolo Rosso. ResT-UP was attended by about fifty representatives of academic and industrial organisations
Welcome to Hell. Dante’s “Inferno” in Valerio Evangelisti’s Eymerich Cycle
No full textThe paper examines how Valerio Evangelisti took inspiration from Dante’s Inferno for his Eymerich saga. Evangelisti considers the Middle Ages a mirror of the present and depicts history as a complex system of interrelated events and characters which are mutually linked. In creating a medieval atmosphere which is synchronous with other eras, the author often evokes images and characters from Dante’s Inferno.Nell’articolo si mostra come Valerio Evangelisti si sia ispirato all’Inferno di Dante nella scrittura della sua saga di Eymerich. Evangelisti considera il Medioevo alla stregua di uno specchio del presente, e raffigura la storia come un sistema complesso di eventi interrelati e di personaggi reciprocamente legati l’uno all’altro. Nel creare un’atmosfera medievale che si presenta sincrona rispetto ad altre epoche, Evangelisti evoca soprattutto immagini e personaggi dell’Inferno dantesco
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