Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography.
Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Aldo Schiavone sign a polemical and passionate book between history and politics, built through the experience and encounters of a journey, a reconnaissance of the places of an Italy today on the margins, but in which perhaps our common destiny is written.
Who does Galileo belong to? Why does everyone want him and desire him? Why has that trial continued to be discussed and fought over in a veritable political and cultural battle for over two centuries? An endless subject that has never been told
The discovery that her paternal grandmother, whom she believed to be of English origin, was in fact from a Jewish family, albeit converted, inspired the author to research her origins, starting with her surname, Wildt, which originated in Eastern Europe. Archival research reveals that the family had arrived in Milan in the early 19th century, where they had settled and evidently converted. This concealment of Jewish origins, even in a family of converts, demonstrates the difficulties of being accepted and the need to defend oneself with lies.
It is impossible to understand today's Italy without knowing its past and investigating the historical turning points that have shaped its identity over the centuries. It is with this conviction that Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Paolo Mieli trace in these pages a detailed outline of Italian and European history over the last two hundred years, in a synthesis that is as essential as it is rigorous. What was Cavour's role in the process of national unification? How did communism establish itself in Russia during the First World War?
Only an intellectual and moral revolution can prevent the West from losing itself, reconnecting it instead with the best part of its history.
Fear created religion: so Lucretius. Fear of death, of sin, of the other world, but also and above all of the brevity and precariousness of life. Hence devotion, that bargained donation of self that man makes to the divine powers. The term embraces a great variety of practices, beliefs, traditions, united by a common character, that of moving on Jacob's biblical ladder that, resting on the earth, reached with its summit all the way to heaven.
But how fascist is Fascist Rome?
How mass society and modern culture asserted themselves and blended into the contradictory reality of the Mussolini regime
Rome was the place where the twentieth-century atmosphere dressed in Fascist garb had its greatest public manifestations, where the regime imbued works and dreams, streets and squares, sports grounds and film studios, suburbs and cultural institutes, newspapers and universities with itself.
Adriano Prosperi’s new book examines some famous cases of historical forgeries: the donation of Constantine to the Pope of Rome, the forgeries of Annio da Viterbo, the ‘Lead Books of Sacromonte’ and the Immaculate Conception in 17th century Spain, and the ‘Protocols of the Elder Saviours of Zion’.
A careful review of the documentation of these cases shows that the discovery of the truth has never completely erased the historical effectiveness of the forgery.
The protagonist of this book is a play, not a flesh-and-blood character. But it sort of is because everyone flocks to see it, everyone stands in long lines at the box office to admire it. It is Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, first staged in Italy in 1963, at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, directed by Giorgio Strehler. A Galileo that arrives in Milan at the end of a long journey. Before arriving there, the reader will travel halfway across Europe and the United States with Brecht, observing him as he works on his most painful and most famous play.