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For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organized crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terri...
The Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesque comedy, drama, equestrian ballet, pastoral opera, amorous letters, lyric poetry, and history. Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court brings together close textual readings of Costa’s numero...
β-Carbolines: A Privileged Scaffold for Modern Drug Discovery provides a summary of methods for the synthesis of various natural products engineered with the diverse β-carboline scaffold and their biological evaluation. β-carboline and its derivatives have generated considerable interest in recent years for their versatile properties in chemistry and pharmacology. This is due to their ability to act as agonists to benzodiazepine receptors, hydroxy serotonin receptors, and intercalate into DNA and to inhibit CDK, topisomerase, and monoamine oxidase enzymes. Their pharmacological properties include anxiolytic, hypnotic, anticonvulsant, antiviral, antiparasitic, and antimicrobial attributes....
Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which films sponsored by Italian and American government agencies promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people.
It is perhaps a truism to note that ancient religion and rhetoric were closely intertwined in Greek and Roman antiquity. Religion is embedded in socio-political, legal and cultural institutions and structures, while also being influenced, or even determined, by them. Rhetoric is used to address the divine, to invoke the gods, to talk about the sacred, to express piety and to articulate, refer to, recite or explain the meaning of hymns, oaths, prayers, oracles and other religious matters and processes. The 13 contributions to this volume explore themes and topics that most succinctly describe the firm interrelation between religion and rhetoric mostly in, but not exclusively focused on, Greek and Roman antiquity, offering new, interdisciplinary insights into a great variety of aspects, from identity construction and performance to legal/political practices and a broad analytical approach to transcultural ritualistic customs. The volume also offers perceptive insights into oriental (i.e. Egyptian magic) texts and Christian literature.
This book presents the abstracts of the 19th International Congress of Heterocyclic Chemistry (19th ICHC) held in Fort Collins, Colorado, 10-15th August 2003 and provides the reader with a topical comprehensive reference source covering the latest developments in the heterocycles area. Each lecture from the 19th ICHC is presented as a one page abstract containing a textual summary of the lecture, including references, figures and contact details of the author(s).Papers are divided into the following sections: heterocyclic natural products, heterocycles in organic synthesis, bioactive heterocycles, heterocyclic materials &related topics, heterocyclic pharmaceuticals.The book of abstracts provides a topical reference source covering the latest developments in the heterocyles area.
If, as a corollary of urbanization, many artists seized, as early as the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, the city as object and scene of their reflection on a world under construction, it was not the same for rural areas. Generally speaking, until recently, the countryside's representations have been shaped by the writings of a ruling class. However, in recent decades, alongside the “country novels” or “terroir novels” that follow in line with the rustic current initiated in the nineteenth century, more demanding literary productions have emerged. These writings, often fed by the sense of loss and the end of a certain agricultural lifestyle, are also exploring the contemporary reconstructions of rural areas, little publicized. They redefine a new “regionality”, less militant and certainly less connoted in its nostalgic link to the land. This book revisits rural areas and their representations in contemporary writing, in both popular and high culture, in order to draw a global landscape of current rural areas and new regionalities.
This is the first comprehensive reference work in English dedicated to the writing of world-famous Italian mystery writer Andrea Camilleri. It includes entries on plots, characters, dates, literary motifs, and themes from the bestselling author's detective stories and television crime dramas, with special attention given to the serialized policeman Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Camilleri's most famous character. It also equips the reader with background information on Camilleri's life and career and provides a guide to the writings of reviewers and critics.
A fascinating feminist reading of an often scorned medium: the storytelling, cross-platform success, and female fandom of the photoromance. Born in Italy and successfully exported to the rest of the world, photoromances had a readership of millions in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, more than ten million Italians read a photoromance each week. Despite its popularity, the photoromance—a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings—was widely scorned as a medium, and its largely female audience derided as naive, pathetic, and uneducated. In this provocative book, Paola Bonifazio offers another perspective, making a case for the relevance of the photoromance...
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