Ricerc@Sapienza

Often chosen as the privileged setting for plays, poems, and novels, Italy has been one of the core English literary imageries from the Middle Ages to the late Victorian era and beyond. However, more than an actual geographical space, the presence of Italian locations within the corpus of British literature can be configured as a distinctive discursive practice disclosing a variety of literary possibilities or, as what Roland Barthes would say, a situation d’écriture: a writing situation capable of conveying an inexhaustible basin of themes and conventions.

Not long ago, the authors of this paper came across a box containing a portion of the archive of Vincenzo Federici. This discovery gave rise to a research project that involved the location, analysis, and archival arrangement of the remaining part of the archive, and the study of sources found in other archives to reconstruct the many aspects of the activity of a multifaceted academic character.

Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum was carried out in 1463 at Cosimo de’ Medici’s request and first printed in Treviso in 1471 without Ficino’s consent. This translation, together with Ficino’s preface running through Trismegistus’s life and writings, was the starting point of modern Hermetism. The striking success of the Pimander–by far the most widespread of Ficino's works–is demonstrated by more than 40 extant manuscripts, 24 printed editions up to the end of the sixteenth century, and renaissance translations in many vernacular languages.

In the last decade, Sapienza University of Rome has incentivized its internationalization strategy. Using Infosapienza data, the research aims to model the probability of success of students with migratory background and to assess the extent to which this probability depends on migratory background and on the socioeconomic characteristics of the students themselves.

The data provided by the National Institute for Statistics showed that, over the last ten years, the youth employment rate (15-34 years) has decreased by 10.2 percentage points. However, if we look at the segments, the young unemployment rate has considerably increased both for the young adults 15-24 years of age (from 20.4% in 2007 to 34.7% in 2017) and for the young adults 25-34 years (from 8.3% to 17%).

We investigate youths’ conceptualization of social robots. Informed by Schudson’s theory of the potency of the cultural object, we conducted two studies. The first study centered on essays on social robots written by bachelor’s and master’s students. The second study centered on prototypes of social robots built by small groups comprised of same students. The essays and prototypes were content analyzed. The results confirm that social robots embody all five dimensions that characterize cultural objects.

The contributors deal with several ‘facets’ of the Italian seventies. Simona Colarizi provides an overview of the decade, analysing in particular the categories of movements, reforms, democracy, and transition. The article by Eugenio Capozzi focuses on the growing sentiment of hostility towards professional politicians, taking into account its origins and causes.

A large part of the existing historical research on the seventies in Italy takes the category of crisis to define the country’s situation in that decade. During the seventies Italy experienced a multifaceted systemic crisis: institutional, economic, political, cultural, social, and religious. This interpretation is convincing, however, only if the term-concept ‘crisis’ is not solely adopted in its negative connotations and the seventies are not exclusively understood as an age of darkness (and violence).

Due to the characteristics of migratory phenomenon in Italy, the arrival by boat of immigrants and refugees represents a “media icon” of the whole migration issue. The news-report on this topic are paramount in the construction of political polarization regard the management of fluxes; seemingly, they support the prevalent discourse frame of emergency and social alarm (or, sporadically, the pietistic or the rescue ones).

An updated inventory of the native vascular flora of Italy, providing details on the occurrence at regional
level, is presented. The checklist includes 8195 taxa (6417 species and 1778 subspecies), distributed in
1092 genera and 152 families; 23 taxa are lycophytes, 108 ferns and fern allies, 30 gymnosperms and 8034
angiosperms. The taxa currently occurring in Italy are 7483, while 568 taxa have not been confirmed in
recent times, 99 are doubtfully occurring in the country and 19 are data deficient. Out of the 568 not