The Tenco effect. Suicide,San Remo,and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.     

Animal Electricity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Many Facets of a Great Scientific Controversy

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century.     

Institutional Arrangements and Political Mobilization in the New Italian Regionalism: The Role of Spatial Policies in the Piedmont Region

The paper focuses on the resurgence of the regions as protagonists of the process of the state rescaling in many European countries. In the EU countries this process can be seen as a result of a mix of economic and institutional factors, which have been producing an increasing competition between the central governments and the regional authorities. The rise of the multi-level governance and of the so-called Euroregionalism has reinforced the role of the regional scale in the territorial development: on one hand, with new actors like agencies and organizations engaged in the economic development (FDI attraction, place marketing, innovation and learning), on the other hand by the resurgence of “old” actors, such as the regions, in many cases empowered by processes of institutional devolution. The literature has investigated this re-composition of the political space with regard to the “hollowing out” and the “rescaling” of the state. On the base of these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss some empirical evidence from the Italian experience, in order to show whether and how the regional structures are not only “spaces for policies”, but also “spaces for politics”. Over the last decade, the changes in legal framework, the external inputs from supranational levels of government—the European Commission—and the re-territorialization processes have introduced many elements of innovation in the role of the regions. By illustrating the case of the Piedmont Region, we try to demonstrate that the transition towards the region as an active space of politics can be mediated by the sphere of the policies, especially the spatial ones.     

Underwater Investigation on a Marble Cargo Wreck at Capo Bianco near Isola di Capo Rizzuto,Crotone, Italy

The cargo of marble blocks off Capo Bianco was dated to the Roman period. New sampling and analysis has identified Carrara marble, and also Rosso di Francia and Portargento, which strongly suggests a post‐medieval date. This leads to the suggestion that nearby finds dating between the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th may come from the same ship, perhaps sailing from France and Liguria to deliver stone in southern Italy. This is rare evidence of the post‐medieval marble trade and demonstrates the importance of archaeometric analysis for the interpretation of wrecked cargos. © 2011 The Authors     

PARETO OR LOG‐NORMAL? BEST FIT AND TRUNCATION IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF ALL CITIES*

In the literature, the distribution of city size is a controversial issue with two common contenders: the Pareto and the log‐normal. While the first is most accredited when the distribution is truncated above a certain threshold, the latter is usually considered a better representation for the untruncated distribution of all cities. In this paper, we reassess the empirical evidence on the best‐fitting distribution in relation to the truncation point issue. Specifically, we provide a comparison among four recently proposed approaches and alternative definitions of U.S. cities. Our results highlight the importance to look at issue of the best‐fitting distribution together with the truncation issue and provide guidance with respect to the existing tests of the truncation point.     

Making Italians out of rocks: Mussolini's shadows on Italian mountains

In this article I use the case of mountains to explore the ways in which the Fascist regime articulated its vision of nature/human relationships. I will show how mountains were considered as creative environments which could produce a special type of people: the montanari (mountaineers), meaning with this word mountain villagers rather than mountain climbers. The Fascist regime praised people from the mountains – especially from the Alps - as the true and better stock of Italians; that environment made them strong, healthy, pure, and disciplined, as the rhetoric of the Great War had supported. The Fascist regime celebrated the virtues of montanari by birth, those who were born and raised in the mountains, but it also aimed at employing the creative power of nature in its plan to shape the new Italian. In the article I show how the regime employed mountains in its discourses and practices of ‘bonifica umana’ (human reclamation) which involved both body and soul. In the Fascist narratives, mountains were the open air gymnasium for building a stronger man, a living archive of ruralism for reproducing the true Italian, and the secular church of the collective memory for the making of national subjects. The blend of nature, culture, and politics in the Fascist discourse on mountains and people is at the core of this article.     

Robustness of Social‐Ecological Systems: Implications for Public Policy

We conceptualize social‐ecological systems (SESs) as complex adaptive systems where public policy affects and is affected by the biophysical system in which it is embedded. The study of robustness of SESs combines insights from various disciplines including economics, political science, ecology, and engineering. In this paper we present an approach that can be used to explore the implications for public policy when viewed as a component of a complex adaptive system. Our approach leverages the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to provide a platform for interdisciplinary research that focuses on system‐wide outcomes of the policy process beyond just policy change. The main message is that building robustness can create new vulnerabilities. Fail‐free policies cannot be developed, and instead of a focus on the “right” policy, we need to think about policy processes that stimulate experimentation, adaptation, and learning.     

The case of specialized towns in Guangdong,China

The illustration of some preliminary results of an ongoing research on the industry in Guangdong, China, is the core of this article. In particular focus is on the so called ‘specialized towns’ and the industries that characterize them as complex actors of Chinese industrial development. The evidence on these specialized towns is quite interesting as such, being not yet well acknowledged in the international literature. However, it is also believed that an investigation of these realities may contribute to the understanding of new engines of industrial development in the context of contemporary global economic relations—what is called the ‘new industry’. Furthermore, some light is shed on the nature of the competitive challenge that China poses to traditional European industry: it is not only cheap labour, cheap land, dumping, and the like. In the new emerging China government visions, policies and industrial organization architecture seem to play a central role. In this context, the authors conclude proposing a framework of questions relevant to some of the most industrialized areas of Europe, that is the Italian regions characterized by a great diffusion of industrial districts.