Italy

This introductory studio course presents photography as a medium of documentation, critical communication, and personal expression related to social issues and intimate involvement. It builds photography skills including composition, light, and technical expertise. Alongside developing skills, the course considers questions of identity and expression in photography and examines how photographs have been used as markers of cultural identification. The course challenge students to question, explore, and express their own identity through photography and to take inspiration from their host city environment, in synergy or contrast with their own identity. It deepens the ability to think critically and express thoughts through images and related texts by analyzing and interpreting experiences in Italian society. Through various photographic exercises and assignments, the course explores digital photography as a tool to interpret and narrate different aspects of the city and one's personal experience of and with it, reflecting on identity in a visual way. Lectures cover technical aspects related to shooting and editing, conceiving and amplifying projects, and addressing different audiences. The course also offers an overview on Italian and international photographers and different approaches in contemporary photographic practice. Classroom discussions, assigned readings, and photo responses, combined with the personal experience of the photographic medium, help to develop critical skills to understand how photographs work aesthetically and conceptually in various contexts, how they are used in contemporary society and culture, and how they become means of personal exploration.

The course introduces students to pivotal and methodological issues in the field of cultural anthropology. Topics change on a yearly basis. The Spring 2023 topic was: The Gift in the Greek and Roman World: Economy, Society, and Religion. The course includes a series of guest lectures. The course is graded pass/no pass only.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course provides knowledge on process and Quaternary geomorphology, with a focus on mountain environments. The course examines aspects of sediment supply and sediment transfer, including hillslope-channel interactions, the role of hydro-meteorogical forcing on the intensity and typology geomorphic transport processes. It also deals with sediment management in the Anthropocene, including the impacts of in-channel engineering infrastructures and landcover changes. Sediment yield and sediment storage in natural and regulated systems are also discussed, as well as the role of Pleistocene glaciations on the present spatial organization of geomorphic processes and sediment fluxes. In this context, the course further examines dating landforms and constraining denudation rates at millennial time scales. The lab-based component introduces students to expert-based mapping of sediment sources and channel changes, as well as glacial and periglacial landforms on remotely-sensed images to build georeferenced databases for geo-hazard assessment. The field-based component illustrates techniques for field-based mapping, characterizing channel bed texture, as well as monitoring water and sediment fluxes. The discussion is fostered by a literature review on selected topics that vary from year to year. Finally, analysis of data collected in the field is performed by groups of students, in preparation of a short technical report.

This course is part of the Laurea Triennale degree in Sculpture. This is an advanced course for students who already have experience in drawing techniques. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. Students are required to attend the theoretical part and the studio laboratory, and to complete individual projects. The course teaches students to perceive the human form through a structural view in order to grasp and identify the structural and plastic components of man and to reach an interpretation of the form in both analysis and synthesis. Students work under the etymological meaning of the word anatomy and dissect and analyze the form in its constitution and arrangement in space. Students apply this meaning to observe the human form from different points of view through repeated decompositions and rearrangements. The course focuses on the production of drawings (analytical, descriptive, or expressive), which involve drawing from a live model, from photographs, from art reproductions, or from anatomic studies for artistic purposes. The course includes a section devoted to the study of the human body in art from antiquity to the present and a section devoted to iconographic research on the morphological elements of animals, plants, and minerals. Assessment is based on the presentation and discussion of assigned art projects.

The course focuses on basic knowledge of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics and simple integrable models. Students are trained to write the Lagrangian and the Hamiltonian function for mechanical systems, to analyze the phase space and the stability of fixed points, to integrate the equation of a central field and a rigid body with rotational symmetry, and to use variational principles and canonical transformations. Course topics including dynamical systems; the definition of Equilibrium and study of its linear and non-linear stability; Lagrangian mechanics; symmetries; Noether's theorem; mechanical models; rotation group and rigid body; dynamics in a rotating frame; and Hamiltonian mechanics.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course introduces the analysis of conflicts and international interventions providing an overview of major theoretical approaches and empirical applications in those fields. The course deals with the conceptual and methodological tools provided by academic literature and applies such concepts and methods to analysis of major conflicts and experiences of international interventions. The course starts by introducing the major strands of research that analyzed conflict onset and dynamics. Then, an overview of scholarship on interventions is presented and discussed. Finally, 6 seminars are devoted to the application of theories to the analysis of wars (and interventions) in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Colombia, the Sahel region, and Syria.

International Economics dominates the public debate. Has globalization helped or hurt the citizens of developed and emerging nations? What will be the consequences of Brexit for Great Britain and for the EU? Will there be a “trade war” between the United States and China, and what would its consequences be? Is the Euro-Dollar exchange rate too low or too high, and what should the European Central Bank do about it? Getting the answers right is important for policymakers, for economic experts in government and in the private sector, and also for any interested citizen. International Economics gives no ready-made answers to these questions, but it gives us important tools to think about them. The course aims to give students an overview of this framework and show them how it can help us to better understand the world we live in. The course discusses topics including the world economy since the Industrial Revolution; the theory of comparative advantage; the role of resources for trade; the effects of trade and migration on the income distribution; economies of scale and trade; exporters, multinational firms, and offshoring; trade policy; the balance of payments and the true meaning of trade deficits; exchange rates; international capital flows and international financial crises. In order to successfully follow this course, students should be familiar with basic microeconomic concepts such as budget sets, indifference curves, consumer and producer surplus, and marginal cost. They should also be at ease with simple mathematical tools such as derivatives and solution methods for linear equation systems.

The course provides a basic understanding of the probabilistic models and techniques underlying the most widely used classes of stochastic processes. The main focus is on modeling aspects, which are completed by a description of some popular algorithms for simulation. Mathematical concepts are integrated with real-world applications and examples and illustrated through simulations. At the end of the course, students will have bridged the gap between their elementary probability skills and the knowledge required to understand and use basic models based on stochastic processes. The course discusses topics including conditional probabilities and conditional expectations; introduction to stochastic processes and Markov chains; discrete-time Markov chains: Chapman-Kolmogorov equation, Classification of states, Limiting properties, and Applications (e.g. stochastic models, sequential testing, and website ranking); introduction to Stochastic Simulation, Simulation techniques, and Monte Carlo methods; Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms, and Computational applications; counting processes and the Poisson process, Continuous-time stochastic processes, and examples and modeling applications. The course requires students to have solid knowledge of calculus and basic probability theory (e.g. probability distributions and random variables) as a prerequisite. Some knowledge of basic programming tools (such as R) is also required.

Economic policies differ widely across countries and – within the same country – even over time. Among OECD countries, government expenditure ranges from less than 40% in the US to almost 60% in Finland. What explains these large differences? The many tools provided by economic theory generally fail to offer a complete and satisfactory answer to this question. The course mission is to analyze the determinants of economic policy in modern democracies and to show how these policies may differ according to the different political institutions in place. The course consists of four parts. The first part of the course discusses the tools of political economics. The second part of the course compares the welfare states across industrialized countries, with special emphasis on the pension systems and the labor market, and discusses the political feasibility of structural reforms. It also addresses the differences in economic policies that may arise from the political institutions, with particular emphasis on the analysis of the electoral rule and of the regime type. The third part analyzes dynamic policies – public debt, economic growth – in a political economy framework to understand how political incentives shape current and future policies. The last part addresses the debate between the role of culture and institutions in shaping economic growth. To feel comfortable in this course, students should be familiar with the optimization techniques learned in math and microeconomic courses.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The objective of the course is to present the most effective techniques for the solution of complex decisional problems arising in the optimal planning and management of large-scale systems concerning both the public and the private sectors. Mathematical models and heuristic algorithms for the practical solution of the corresponding optimization problems are described. Particular attention is given to the algorithmic and implementation aspects. Applications of the proposed techniques to real-world problems are presented and analyzed. The course discusses topics including: basic integer programming optimization: integer programming models, formulations, relaxations; basic heuristic approaches: constructive algorithms and local search procedures, examples for KP01 and TSP; worst-case performance analysis; metaheuristics: Multistart, Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, Iterated Local Search, Variable Neighborhood Search, Large Neighborhood Search, Ruin and Recreate, and Ant Systems; optimization on graphs: shortest path, minimum spanning tree, and maximum flow; heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms for difficult combinatorial optimization problems; and real-world applications. Prerequisites for this course are: basic knowledge of Operations Research, as well as the implementation of computer codes and complexity theory.