Come lo scrittore italiano d'oggi vede la nostra scuola

When women choose to participate in violent or subversive organizations, they invert gender binaries and enter into what has traditionally been considered to be a male sphere. Both fictional and nonfictional accounts of this behavior often depict these actions as irrational and dehumanize the female actor via narrative techniques that strip them of their femininity and even their humanity. Using Sjoberg and Gentry’s Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics as a base, this article argues that Helena Taberna’s film Yoyes (2000) moves beyond these punitive narratives by depicting Yoyes as a multifaceted human being instead of pigeonholing her into a stereotypical gender role. As such, it represents a new possibility for representing the complexity of violent women without recurring to dehumanizing narratives to account for their behavior.     

The pentiti of the Sicilian mafia in the 1930s

Mussolini had declared that Fascism, through the anti-mafia campaign entrusted to Cesare Mori, prefect of Palermo, in the second half of the 1920s, had conclusively liberated Sicily from the mafia. However, from the early 1930s a new deterioration of public order on the island was evident, and the regime was forced to launch a second, and much less publicised, repression of this phenomenon. In the course of its careful investigations the body given responsibility for pursuing this repression, the Ispettorato Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza per la Sicilia, compiled a series of reports, including the Processo verbale di denunzia relating to the area around Palermo. With a level of detail never seen before, these reports described the structure, organisation and dynamics of mafia groups. This was possible because police officers had available members of the mafia groups themselves – genuine pentiti – who had decided to make disclosures to the authorities.     

Conspiracy theories in Republican Italy: the Pellegrino Report to the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism

This article analyses the draft of the final report prepared by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, who from 1994 to 2001 chaired the ‘Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres’. The document was completed in 1995 and attempted a general interpretation of the causes of the political violence that had been a major feature of the history of the Italian Republic up to that point. The report was closely connected with what is often described as the moment of the transition between Italy's ‘first’ and ‘second’ Republic and, in keeping with revisionist theories current at the time, attributed responsibility for misdeeds and occult plots (real or imagined) that occurred in Italy over a period of forty years primarily to ideological division caused by the Cold War. This paper argues that this resulted in a highly distorted narrative of Italian history in which events appear to be determined almost exclusively by external factors to the exclusion of important internal dynamics.     

A study by thermal treatment and X-ray powder diffraction on burnt fragmented bones from tombs II,IV and IX belonging to the hypogeic necropolis of “Sa Figu” near Ittiri,Sassari (Sardinia,Italy)

In the course of an anthropological investigation of three tombs of the hypogeic necropolis of “Sa Figu” (near the village of Ittiri in North Sardinia, Italy), numerous burnt bone fragments were collected. In particular, from the whole necropolis we selected a tenth of long bones from tomb IV, a small fragment of femur from tomb II and four fragments belonging to tomb IX. The aim of this work is to determine a temperature range to which the bone fragments were heated, in order to assess a funerary cremation which was presumably used at that time to quickly and hygienically eliminate the flashy parts of deceased people rather than a purification rite with fires inside the sepulchres. We attempted to evaluate the range of temperature to which the bones were likely subjected, making a joint use of thermal treatment and powder X-ray diffraction investigations. From our X-ray line broadening results carried out with a modern approach (Rietveld method), it emerged that a group of five fragmented burnt bones (one specimen belonging to tomb IV, the other four from tomb IX) were subjected to a heat treatment in a temperature range from 600 and 750 °C. Conversely another group of bones (belonging to tombs II and IV) turned out to be subjected to temperatures not higher than 250 °C.