Il progetto del ritorno culturale e l'esperienza dei Fiumani

The article presents the results of field ethnographic research (February 2017, Italy, Turin) carried out by the author among the migrant community of the Russian Old Believers (Lipovans). The nature of the migration of the Lipovans, their social and familial ties with the homeland, and the dominance of their religious culture influenced their life strategies in Italy and marked the ways in which they preserved their cultural heritage in migration and in their new place. The analysis reveals the high degree of preservation of the religious values and practices in their new country, facilitated particularly by the role of the church or parish in the foreign environment. Beyond the maintenance and preservation of long-standing cultural values, practices, and identities, the new challenges to the religious identity of the Old Believers in Italy are also paid attention and the cultural problems in their migrant society are brought to light.

2022

"CHAIN - CULTURAL HERITAGE ACADEMIC INTERDISCIPLINARY NETWORK - MAY 2022 (UNIVERSITY OF CATANIA) - CRISIS AND CULTURAL HERITAGE" La chiesa romanica di San Cromazio o Santu Tomei (XII secolo) - distrutta nel corso del XIX secolo e ridotta a rudere – è localizzabile all’interno dell’odierno territorio comunale di Uta (Cagliari, Sardegna). Ad oggi il monumento versa in uno stato di semi abbandono, dovuto a molteplici fattori, quali la poca attenzione da parte delle istituzioni predisposte alla sua tutela, la collocazione ai margini dell’abitato e la prossimità delle rive del fiume Cixerri e dell’agglomerato industriale di Macchiareddu-Grogastu. A questi va a sommarsi l’apparente mancanza di interesse da parte della comunità locale, dovuta alla scarsa conoscenza della sua storia, forse offuscata dalla monumentale presenza della vicina chiesa di Santa Maria, meglio conservata e certamente più celebre in ambito sardo. Tale contesto si rivela interessante per la sperimentazione di nuovi processi di ricerca corredati da iniziative multidisciplinari sviluppabili attorno all’elemento centrale della chiesa stessa, con lo scopo di unire le consolidate analisi metodologiche dell’archeologia e della storia dell’arte all’attenzione verso le discipline sociali, la didattica, lo sviluppo sostenibile, la digitalizzazione. Partendo dal censimento delle attività di valorizzazione che hanno interessato il monumento nel corso dell’ultimo decennio e considerando l’analisi dei rispettivi risultati, si propone la progettazione di un programma didattico che trovi nella chiesa di San Cromazio un luogo di arricchimento culturale e identitario per la comunità, in dialogo con il consistente patrimonio del territorio. La proposta progettuale ha l’obiettivo di rispondere, con riferimento al contesto di pertinenza, a esigenze e obiettivi posti in luce dall’UNESCO, contenuti nell’Agenda 2030 e richiamati dalla misura “Turismo e cultura 4.0” della prima missione del recente “Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza” (PNRR) “Digitalizzazione, innovazione, competitività e turismo”.

MeTis - Mondi educativi. Temi indagini suggestioni, 2021

Memory. Identity. Culture. Collection of Essays., 2018

The “Istrian exodus”, a migration of about 250 000 people from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia to Italy (mainly to Trieste) after the Second World War, has been remembered in different ways at different times since then. Until the 1990s the memories existed mostly in the minds of the exiles and in local historiographical and popular publications but then they became national, a ubiquitous theme at the highest level. This article analyses the current state of these memories by examining some sites and cultural events in Trieste, in order to understand both the process of heritage and identity construction of the exile community and the reasons why a shared memory did not develop in this border area.

2018

Since 1993, Mohsen Lihidheb walks almost every day along the coast of Zarzis, a small Tunisian town; there he collects glass and plastic bottles, surfboards, bulbs, tires, toys, jackets, teapots, toothbrushes and more. Lihidheb has accumulated about 30.000 various objects which are now preserved in the Sea Memory Museum, a variegated and unusual structure, with indoor and outdoor spaces, preserving the installations that Lihidheb creates with the things collected during his meticulous wandering. One installation of Sea Memory Museum, dating back to 2014, is made of shoes. These are the shoes of the shipwrecked, of the drowned and the saved. The work "recalls the massacre happening here", emphasizes Lihidheb. This paper moves from the Tunisian coast and Lihidheb’s exhibition space, regarded as a type of storage memory, in order to ask whether cultural memory can transform itself in trans-cultural memory. The issue is tackled through a combination of post-colonial references on the museum as institution and through Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann’s theories on the functioning modes of cultural memory. The shoes installation in Zarzis suggested me an association with the broadly known work Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In Fredric Jameson’s interpretation, the passage from modernity to postmodernity is epitomized by two pictures, distant in time but sharing the same subject: shoes. The pages of this essay do not have any pretense to provide ultimate answers or theories; to the contrary, they are conceived as a small space of reflection on a global issue.

This article aims to study the protection assured to cultural identity of migrant people under international human rights law. The analysis stresses the relevant prospects opened in the light of interpretation elaborated by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on the right to take part in cultural life. In the recent years, the Committee has come to conceive the right of cultural identity as a right which, while keeping a collective dimension, must be recognised to every single individual; this interpretation opens the way to overcome the traditional interpretation protecting cultural identity only in favour of persons belonging to national minorities, and indigenous peoples

The objects that exiles carry on their journey are sentimental, functional and always constitutive of the material dimension of flying. In this study I will look at the specific material culture that the Italian migrants from the modern Slovenian and Croatian littoral brought with them at the end of World War II when they fled into Italy. This is an extraordinary assemblage of almost unknown material, which no other refugee community around the world possesses. This study reflects on the rapport formed between these objects and their stakeholders in the only three sites where they can be found in Trieste, the moral capital of the exodus. By focusing on the way people used these objects to communicate self-expressions and the way these objects have affected people's negotiation of social relationships, this research proves the importance of engaging with a more equalitarian approach to the study of the human-objects rapport when both dimensions are jeopardized. Within the three contexts analysed, these objects of migration acquire multiple social and aesthetic meanings, thus they emerge as physical and cultural remains of an exodus but also as actors able to shape the social importance of this neglected tragedy.

2011

Il libro affronta in un’ottica interdisciplinare il tema della valorizzazione del Patrimonio culturale materiale e immateriale, portando ad esempio alcuni casi emblematici che hanno come contesto l’Italia e la Giordania. La valorizzazione comprende tutte le funzioni gestionali connesse al patrimonio, in quanto si fonda sulla conoscenza, si persegue attraverso interventi di conservazione e promozione, e si realizza in un innalzamento delle modalità di utilizzazione e fruizione “ in forme compatibili con la tutela”. Partendo da questo presupposto gli autori presentano alcuni casi di interventi di nuova sistemazione di collezioni di oggetti, di possibile recupero e valorizzazione di tradizioni culturali connesse a Patrimoni architettonici e archeologici, di sperimentali metodologie di fruizione del patrimonio culturale attraverso l’informatica e la cybernetica, di progetti di sviluppo turistico legato a culti religiosi altrove abbandonati all’oblio. In ogni caso il tema della valorizzazione pone in gioco importanti fattori sui quali si fonda l’identità stessa di una collettività, la sua capacità di elaborare la memoria sociale e di prefigurare il proprio futuro. Il volume si presenta con testo bilingue e 40 fotografie.

Migration is a problem of highest importance today, and likewise is its history. Italian migrants that had to leave the peninsula in the long sixteenth century because of their heterodox Protestant faith is a topic that has its deep roots in Italian Renaissance scholarship since Delio Cantimori: It became a part of a twentieth century form of Italian leyenda negra in liberal historiography. But its international dimension and Central Europe (not only Germany) as destination of that movement has often been neglected. Three different levels of connectivity are addressed: the materiality of communication (travel, printing, the diffusion of books and manuscripts); individual migrants and their biographies and networks; the cultural transfers, discourses, ideas migrating in one or in both directions.