Sicily cannot be compared with any corner of Italy. Sicily is a separate, like nothing else world. An ancient land that has absorbed the great history and cultures of different peoples. Wisdom and greatness of ancient times. Greek and Roman theaters, Arabic mosques, magnificent baroque ensembles, powerful medieval fortresses and castles, ancient cities with labyrinths of narrow streets, squares with fountains and cathedrals, museums with collections of masterpieces of world…
Read MoreItaly Economy and Finance from 1954 to 1959 Part III
In the sector of economic relations with foreign countries, exports, especially for developments in the second half, recorded an increase of 12% in value and of about 20% in quantity, against increases of 4 and 9% respectively on the side. of imports. As a result, the trade deficit in the balance of payments was reduced from 373 to 125 million dollars and the part of imports covered by exports went…
Read MoreItaly Economy and Finance from 1954 to 1959 Part II
According to Vaultedwatches.com, the Suez crisis caused in the second half of 1956 and in the first months of 1957 an upward movement of prices, which affected not only the goods forming the object of the transit trade through the canal, but spread to numerous other products, due to the increase in freight rates and hoardings. The import price index registered a 7% increase between June 1956 and January 1957…
Read MoreItaly Economy and Finance from 1954 to 1959 Part I
If 1953 can be considered the year of the return to a normal situation, after the overcoming of the decreasing phase of the Korean economy, it also represents the starting point for a further development of the Italian economy. The period from the end of 1953 to the Suez crisis was characterized by a continuous progress of economic activity, which took place in a climate of substantial monetary stability and…
Read MoreItaly Men of Letters Part IV
In Switzerland, Michele Ferrucci di Lugo taught Latin literature in Geneva and was one of the founders of the Geneva Society of History and Archeology. Filippo De Boni da Caupo near Feltre, historian and journalist, was from 1849 to 1860 in Zurich, where he published the Michele Ferrucci di Lugo taught Latin literature in Geneva and was one of the founders of the Geneva Society of History and Archeology. Filippo De Boni da…
Read MoreItaly Men of Letters Part III
In the century XVIII, from GD Cassini to Lagrange, from the Ragusa archaeologist Anselmo Banduri, librarian in Paris, to Ennio Quirino Visconti, Italy gave France outstanding scientists, as with the Riccoboni actors and authors, with Galiani, with Casanova, with Goldoni, with Denina, with Gerdil and many others gave her more or less talented writers in the French language. But other little-known men want to remember. Giovanni Oliva (who died in 1757) took care…
Read MoreItaly Men of Letters Part II
According to Sportsqna.com, Italian immigration was active in England, reaching its peak under Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Andrea Ammonio from Lucca, Henry VIII’s secretary for Latin letters, sang his victories over France in a Latin poem; Polidoro Virgilio from Urbino lived in England and was commissioned by Henry VII to write its history (1534); Petruccio Ubaldini, after having fought for Henry VIII, became the historian of Edward VI; Giovanni Florio was a distinguished philologist…
Read MoreItaly Men of Letters Part I
Of the troubadours of Italy, Sordello da Goito was in Provence for 40 years; Bonifacio Calvo, from Genoa, lived from 1252 onwards at the court of Alfonso X of Castile. Ruggero da Benevento wrote in Hungary a history of the invasion of the Mongols; and Brunetto Latini spent about six years in France, where he wrote, in French prose, Li livres dou Tresor . Italian culture penetrated Bohemia with Enrico d’Isernia, founder in Prague of a…
Read MoreItaly Literature – New Experiences (20th Century) Part IV
Narrator in verse, clear, lively, loose, Riccardo Balsamo-Crivelli ( Boccaccino , La fiaba di Calugino , etc.) had not undeserved a critical applause, which shows what fascination certainly gentle and delicate archaism has in Italy, in which he satisfies the traditional sense of form. And this is one of the reasons for the success of Sem Benelli’s plays too, dramatic dramas, but lacking in true vitality, which know of literature in inventions, in language, in…
Read MoreItaly Literature – New Experiences (20th Century) Part III
According to Rrrjewelry.com, characteristic in the writers of the twentieth century is this union of the creative spirit with the critical spirit, a union that, contemporaneity or succession, in any case requires an awareness of the creative work, which benefits and perhaps more often to the detriment of art. An acute critic of modern and contemporary literature was in his debut Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who then acquired a conspicuous place among…
Read MoreItaly Literature – New Experiences (20th Century) Part II
For these writers, Futurism was above all a school of freedom and they gave them much more than they did not receive any. For others it was a short episode in their literary career, an art experiment that led them to better find themselves in forms descending from the old romanticism. The sensational apostle of Futurism in a certain period of his activity was Giovanni Papini, whose intellectual life must be interpreted…
Read MoreItaly Literature – New Experiences (20th Century) Part I
Essential character of Italian literature in the first thirty years of the century. XX is a spirit of reaction to that tendency, which manifested itself in the last decades of the XIX, which seemed to hint at a degeneration (back in the centuries) of the sense of form – a precious achievement of a classical education many times secular – in the study of renewal or imitation of forms. Reaction therefore to…
Read MoreItaly History – Consolidation of Territorial States Part III
With this, the Savoy duchy, the republic of Venice, the republic of Florence were established on vast regional bases. Even the Visconti duchy, also locked up between Savoy and Venice, shrunken in the territory, nevertheless has the conditions for a life of its own. It is smaller than the Savoy duchy and the territory of Venice; but it possesses centrality, homogeneity, compactness which are as many elements of equilibrium. In the same years, the…
Read MoreItaly History – Consolidation of Territorial States Part II
But on Zara the Crown of St. Stephen, that is Sigismondo king of Hungary, boasted rights. Who in 1410 also became king of the Romans. And as such, he had titles to assert on Istria, already part of the patriarchate and passed to Venice; he could claim the cities that Scaligeri and Carraresi had kept as imperial vicariates, before Venice took them. He also intervened in the disagreement of Friuli, favoring the anti-Venetian side,…
Read MoreItaly History – Consolidation of Territorial States Part I
The century XIV is full of attempts at vast lordships, no longer limited to cities, and not even to the neighboring region. Frequent efforts, from Milan or Verona, to cross the Po and cross the Apennines: not to mention the vast influence, dominated in many places, by Robert of Anjou from the south. And all this, no longer on the basis of the ancient juridical title of king of Italy, but on new…
Read MoreItaly Figurative Arts Part IV
No monument of the great Carolingian sculpture has come down to us, none of the bas-reliefs that according to a contemporary poet represented in the palace of Ingelheim the most notable facts of ancient history and the wars of Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne. Therefore, it is not possible to measure in its extension the civil movement of the Carolingian time towards the ancient, towards Rome. The name of Rome runs on…
Read MoreItaly Figurative Arts Part III
In the meantime, similar forms take place in Ravenna, in full dominion of Byzantium, in the lunettes of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia and in the Baptistery of the Orthodox (449-459). In the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (mid-6th century), the Roman spirit no longer dominates, and Byzantinism infiltrates the vague indolent lines of the “procession of the Virgins”. Not the nocturnal lights of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, not the gentle melody…
Read MoreItaly Figurative Arts Part II
The art of architecture had fallen into disuse after the transfer of the imperial seat to Constantinople, so many public monuments remained deserted, and the faculty of building new ones was taken away from the Roman prefect. And Rome became immense, without borders, due to the thinned out inert population, laughing death. The columns generally bore a Corinthian capital of decayed shapes, with narrow volutes, the leaves attached to the edge…
Read MoreItaly Figurative Arts Part I
The art that expanded in Rome, lavishing Hellenistic elegance in the palaces, temples, basilicas, baths, went underground, in the cemeteries of the martyrs and of Christ’s faithful, and wore humble robes. It was always the same art that appeared of marbles and bronzes, of a people of statues, the sumptuous world of Rome; but in the dark galleries of the catacombs, in the darkness of the cubicles, among the funeral parlors, art…
Read More