The 1561 Earthquake(s) in Southern Italy: New Insights into a Complex Seismic Sequence

In the summer of 1561, a strong seismic sequence struck southern Italy, then the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples. Both the Italian seismological tradition and the latest catalogues locate it in the Vallo di Diano (Diano Valley), a low-seismicity intermontane basin 100 km south-east of Naples. We explore the hypothesis that current perception of the 1561 earthquake is distorted by the nature of the historical dataset from which its parameters have been assessed, and which mostly derive from a single—albeit very detailed—primary source. We present and discuss several previously unconsidered original accounts. Our results cast doubts on the traditional interpretation of the earthquake, which could have been either one Vallo di Diano mainshock or several strong earthquakes within a time/space window compact enough for contemporary viewers to perceive them as one. Unquestionably, there is much more to the 1561 earthquake(s) than previously appeared. We hope that this groundbreaking effort will rekindle the interest of the seismological community in this seismic episode, our knowledge of which is still far from complete.     

湖南望城风篷岭一号汉墓的年代与墓主

风篷岭M1是近年来长沙地区所发掘的最为重要的大型汉墓。本文以考古资料为基础,侧重从历史学角度对该墓的墓主身份、墓葬年代及相关问题进行探讨,认为该墓下葬年代当在西汉元、成帝之际,其上限为墓中出土铭文所云之长沙元年。此长沙元年当是孝王刘宗元年,即元帝初元三年(前46年)或四年(前45年)。墓主张姬最有可能是孝王刘宗之王后,且与长汤M1墓主张端君可能均出自富平侯张安世家族。     

Fighting for Trieste: nationalism and political violence at the edge of the Iron Curtain

Between 1945 and 1954, the Italian and Yugoslav governments staunchly disputed national sovereignty of Trieste and northern Istria. Although scholars have extensively studied the diplomatic dimension of what became known as the ‘Trieste question’, only a few have devoted attention to the Italian government’s aggressive strategy toward the city from 1945 to 1954. This article examines the Italian politics of nationalism in Cold War Trieste by investigating the interactions between the central government, the Allied authorities and the local political forces that either supported or opposed Italian territorial claims toward the city. Based upon the study of Italian as well as Allied governmental records, state-led propaganda and public press, this article suggests that the central government not only tolerated but also encouraged phenomena of local political violence to oppose the Communist threat and defy Allied occupation. This study ultimately proves the residual strength of nationalism as a political ideology and further elucidates the undisclosed relationship between right-wing movements and the central government during the early years of the Cold War.     

Secondary schools in Napoleonic Italy (1802–14)

Napoleon conceptualized public education, especially at the secondary level, as a tool designed to unify and strengthen the state. In France, he set up forty-five secondary schools, lycées, characterized by uniformity, a hierarchical structure, centralization, state control, and a standardized curriculum. He exported the French education system to his satellite states to help in ‘frenchifying’ them. This article discusses the establishment of secondary schools, licei, in the Republic and Kingdom of Italy (1802–14), exploring educational legislation and its implementation and the Direzione generale di pubblica istruzione that ran public education. The government created a liceo in each of the twenty-four departments. This article studies academic disciplines, teachers, books, student numbers, and other aspects that concerned the functioning of the schools. It assesses the consequences of the educational reforms and argues that the Napoleonic authorities laid the foundations of a modern public secondary school system in Italy.     

Persian Monshi,Persian Jones: English Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Centuries

From the seventeenth century, Mosleh al-Din Sa?di Shirazi (d. 1291), a key figure in Persian classical literature, became the center of Europeans’ attention: his name appeared in travelogues and periodicals, and selections of his tales were published in miscellaneous Latin, German, French, and English works. To follow Sa?di’s impact on English literature, one needs to search for the beginning of the “Sa?di trend” and the reasons that led to the acceleration of the translation process of his works into the English language in the nineteenth century. This article examines the role of the British educational institutions in colonial India in the introduction of Sa?di and his Golestān to the English readership, and, in parallel, it uncovers the role of the Indo-Persian native scholars (monshis) who were involved in the preparation of translations. The article discusses how the perception of the British towards Sa?di’s literature developed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how their approach towards the translation of the “text” and its “style” evolved in the complete renderings of the Golestān.     

近代托斯卡纳与法兰西的重要关系——“佛罗伦萨国家档案馆＂有关档案研究

意大利统一前,托斯卡纳大公国是意大利中部一个较为重要的国家,其历史曲折复杂。由于它的战略地位、经济力量和政治价值,托斯卡纳在意大利和欧洲历史中一向发挥突出的作用。在法兰西第二共和国与法兰西第二帝国时期,据佛罗伦萨国家档案馆已解密的有关档案,托斯卡纳大公国曾密切注视法兰西政治局势、政府活动及其对外政策,对法实行一种积极政策。托法之间的密切关系具有重要的意义,它为我们了解欧洲近代历史的深度提供了一个生动的例子。     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

Dendrochronological analysis of bowed and plucked instruments from the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory,Naples

The Museo Storico Musicale of the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory of Music in Naples owns a collection of over 200 musical instruments of considerable historical importance. Within the collection, 30 bowed and plucked instruments representative of the Neapolitan violin-making tradition were analysed dendrochronologically to date them, estimate the provenance of the wood and investigate the instruments’ construction characteristics. The values of the statistical cross-dating tests were generally high and allowed 26 instruments to be dated. In all but one case, the dates were consistent with those of the catalogue. From the perspective of wood selection, we noted an unusual use of very old spruce wood, well beyond simple seasoning. The construction technique of the soundboard and other characteristics show good similarities with instruments analysed in other Italian collections. Thus, even in Neapolitan instruments, the growth rings are smaller in small instruments and larger in cellos or double basses. In conclusion, the Neapolitan violin-making school has shown great care in the choice of wood, most coming from regions as far away as Germany or Switzerland, thus confirming the existence of an active large-scale trade in wood for the production of musical instruments.     

Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi,Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Sa?di in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Sa?di would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Sa?di in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.