Pollution Monitoring for Sea Salt Aerosols and Other Anionic Species at Hagar Qim Temples,Malta: A Pilot Study

The damaging effects of sea salt aerosols on Globigerina Limestone are well known, and various professionals have studied and reported on the often complex underlying deterioration mechanisms. Following a preventive conservation project, undertaken to shelter and protect the UNESCO World Heritage Neolithic temple sites of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, the Preventive Conservation Unit within the Diagnostic Science Laboratory at Heritage Malta embarked on a pilot study to identify whether sea salt aerosol deposition patterns within the site alter significantly post sheltering. The results from this short pilot study, by identifying the presence of salts using ion chromatography, have shown that there is a consistent pattern that when directly linked to the intrinsic shape of the temple interior as well as to the micro-environmental factors that are changing as a direct result to the sheltering, point to the trends of greater pollutant accumulation, particularly dust.     

The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.