Gulliver unbound. Possible electoral reforms and the 2008 Italian election: Towards an end to ‘fragmented bipolarity’?

This article considers the systemic effects of the electoral reform approved by the centre-right in December 2005, and the factors that led to the crisis of the Prodi government, highlighting the way in which the issue of electoral reform and the likelihood of an electoral referendum contributed decisively to the breakdown of the fragile coalition maintaining the Prodi government in office. The article then analyses the ‘game’ surrounding possible electoral reforms, examining the interweaving of the preferences and vetoes of the various political actors, showing how these were influenced by the strategic aims of each actor and by the process of re-structuring of the party system. Finally, the new configuration of the political supply as it took shape in the run up to the 2008 general election is analysed, showing how this new format derives from the actors’ strategic adaptation to the electoral rules in force, and how the election may signal the end of a period of Italian politics marked by ‘fragmented bipolarity’.     

La Sicilia dei Moncada. Le corti,l'arte e la cultura nei secoli XVI–XVII

In the last few decades many studies have underlined the role of philhellenism in shaping the Risorgimento as a transnational movement. But philhellenism also had a significant impact in embodying the pre-unification Italian state in a new imaginative framework, marked by the binary oppositions of civilized/barbarian, liberal/despotic and north/south. This article analyses the influence of philhellenism in shaping the imagery of the Kingdom of Sardinia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the role played by this local imagery in promoting opposing patriotisms within the national political sphere in the years leading up to the unification of Italy. Cavour’s moderate party stressed the positive impact of the Piedmontese domination over the island of Sardinia in order to underline Piedmont's image as a force of modernization of a land strongly marked by feudal despotism and pastoral violence. By contrast, Mazzini and the democrats also deployed a philhellenic narrative scheme to explain the backwardness of Sardinia with reference to the despotic and ‘oriental’ character of the Piedmontese domination in an attempt to encourage opposition to unification under the leadership of the subalpine government.     

Anisotropic Variance Functions in Geographically Weighted Regression Models

Most standard methods of statistical analysis used in the social and environmental sciences are built upon the basic assumptions of independence, homogeneity, and isotropy. A notable exception to this rule is the collection of methods used in geographical analysis, which have been designed to take into account serial dependence often observed in spatial data. In addition, recent developments, in particular the method of geographically weighted regression, have provided the tools to model non‐stationary processes, and thus evidence that challenges the assumption of homogeneity. The assumption of isotropy, however, although suspect, has received considerably less attention, and there is thus a need for tools to study anisotropy in a more systematic fashion. In this paper we expand the method of geographically weighted regression in a simple yet effective way to explore the topic of anisotropy in spatial processes. We discuss two different estimation situations and exemplify the proposed technical development by means of a case study. The results suggest that anisotropy issues might be a fairly common occurrence in spatial processes and/or in the statistical modeling of spatial processes.     

The technology of early platinum plating: a gold mask of the La Tolita culture,Ecuador

A metallurgical study of platinum plating on a gold pendant of the La Tolita culture of northern Ecuador was carried out, using high‐magnification examination by scanning electron microscopy with analytical facilities. The plating layer was found to comprise a 25 µm thick foil of platinum grains sintered with a gold–silver alloy. The high silver content of this alloy suggests the deliberate selection of pale‐coloured, silver‐rich alluvial gold. The foil had been bonded on to the pre‐formed gold sheet by hammering and heating. It is postulated that a strip of gold sheet was plated by this method and that several pendants were cut from it.     

Holocene fire history of black colluvial soils revealed by pyrolysis-GC/MS: a case study from Campo Lameiro (NW Spain)

The colluvial soils of Galicia (NW Spain) are records of Holocene environmental change. In spite of the omnipresence of charcoal fragments in these soils, the effect of fires on the development of the Galician landscape and the potential role of past societies are poorly understood.     

Milling Cereals/Legumes and Stamping Bread in Mauretanian Tamuda (Morocco): An Interdisciplinary Study

African Archaeological Review - Recent archaeological excavations (2016–2019) in the city of Tamuda (northern Morocco) yielded evidence of commercial milling and bread-making facilities dated...     

Representative archaeological finds of <Emphasis Type="Italic">pietra ollare</Emphasis> from Comacchio (Italy): identifying provenance and high-T mineral breakdown reactions hindering lithotype classification

Three different lithotype groups have been recognized in representative fragments of pietra ollare artefacts found in the mediaeval archaeological excavations of Comacchio (Italy). Petrographic, mineralogical and chemical compositions clearly show that Valchiavenna and Valmalenco, in the Central Alps, represent the provenance areas of two of the pietra ollare groups, i.e. grey carbonate talc schist (also known as soapstone) and green chlorite schist, respectively. The third representative pietra ollare group consists of whitish-yellowish rocks inferred to be Alpine talc schists that have suffered some artificial pyrometamorphic transformation hindering their classification in the framework of pietra ollare lithotype categories and source localities reported in literature. A distinguishing feature of these high temperature-fired (HT-fired) talc schist samples is the occurrence of talc and chlorite dehydroxylation and subsolidus reaction products, mainly protoenstatite/enstatite + forsterite, together with relatively low loss on ignition values. These talc schists might have been exposed to temperatures >900 °C (with the resulting talc dehydroxylation producing a void-rich texture), but never reaching 1200 °C, which is the sintering temperature for soapstones. The whitish-yellowish artefacts were definitely not used as containers for cooking food at temperatures below or around 500–600 °C (as instead shown by the preservation of the original physical features of the grey pietra ollare lithotypes), but in some kind of higher-T pyrotechnological processes.     

Applying the technique of image classification to climate science: the case of Andalusia (Spain)

This paper proposes an empirical climate classification method based on the application of multivariate statistics. In this method, the technique of supervised and unsupervised image classification is used to classify the data and define climatic units. envi software is used to perform the image classification, specifically, the Iterative Self‐Organizing Data Analysis Technique algorithm. Supervised classification is also applied based on reference variables, fundamental parameters and a classifier. The obtained results display greater objectivity, reliability, operability, accessibility and reproducibility than previous climate classifications devised for the region of Andalusia (Spain), taking into account that these previous classifications were not based on quantitative criteria.