Italy

This course offers an exploration of the origins, functions, and effects of political institutions in historical perspective, paying particular attention to their dynamics (that is, how different institutions appeared and how they changed over time). The course utilizes critical reading and discussion of research papers that apply theoretical insights and empirical tools to engage in major debates about the nature and consequences of political institutions. The course integrates material from a variety of disciplines including political science, international relations, political philosophy, economics, and history. The course examines what types of political institutions form, why they form, what they do, and how they evolve. Students discuss a series of debates related to the rise and consolidation of states in historical perspective, and review current (and some classic) works on the subject. These debates include why nation-states came to dominate over other state forms (such as empires or city-states), which role elites played in state formation, in which ways the functions of the state began to take shape, or how state capacity was built and sustained in different places and times. 

This is an intensive beginning Italian language course designed for students with 0-1 quarters of previous Italian language. This course serves as an introduction to Italian language for Bocconi students. Basic grammar is applied through exercises, games, communicative activities, short written texts and oral monologues and role play. Students learn to express basic needs, enabling them to communicate in familiar situations regarding familiar topics. Students read brief, simple texts and write brief descriptive and narrative texts. Grammar topics covered include: regular and irregular verbs, regular and irregular participles, reflexive forms, auxiliary and modal verbs (eg. potere, dovere, volere), and use of the verb 'piacere'. Students learn active conjugation of the auxiliary verbs, 'essere' and 'avere' and regular verbs in the indicative tense (present, past tense, imperfect, future simple); the conditional present and the imperative. Other grammatical elements include forms and uses of simple and articulated prepositions, adverbs, connectives, determinate and indeterminate articles, gender and number of adjectives, common regular and irregular nouns, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, subject pronouns, direct and indirect pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and possessives. Student performance is evaluated based on quizzes and a final exam. Texts include a reader provided by Bocconi.

This course provides a core of knowledge of Italy’s post-Unification history, grounding students in the political, economic, and social development of the country. Commencing with the nation-state’s formation, the analysis of issues surrounding Italy’s early identity, society, and political structures reveals many of the problems that subsequent regimes have sought to address. After developing a solid grounding in the formation and establishment of the new nation state, the course explores the impact of World War One upon the interwar period of Fascist Italy. After establishing what Fascism was and what it meant for Italian people, consideration turns to the Second World War, the fall of Italian Fascism and its long-term legacy upon the postwar Republic. Examination of post-1945 Italy considers the influence of America and the Cold War upon the internal battle for political control between the Left and the Catholic Right. This period also focuses on Italy’s economic recovery and re-entry into "normal" diplomatic relations that was rubber-stamped by the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. With the country’s foreign relations stabilized, attention turns to the internal crises of insurrection, terrorism, mafia activity and corruption that led to Tangentopoli, the collapse of the old political order, and the rise of Silvio Berlusconi. The course concludes by examining the rise of the contemporary political phenomenon of the Five Star Movement and the Lega.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course explores the connection between globalization, the evolution of criminology, and crime, and how this connection changes in space and time. Globalization affects crime phenomena in a variety of ways: creating new conditions and opportunities for new types of crime or reshaping more traditional criminal behaviors and increasing insecurity and fear of crime. Moreover, globalization requires new categories to explain and understand crime and therefore affects and reshapes many traditional criminological theories. Finally, globalization has an impact also on strategies of crime control and surveillance.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 188A and Bologna course number 78696, is associated with the LM in Language, Society, and Communication degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 188B and Bologna course numbers 29886 and 81714, is associated with the LM in Modern, Post-Colonial and Comparative Literatures and the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programmes.
This course examines languages as cultural features linking the human communities to their territories, history, and geopolitical evolution, with a particular analysis of the changes occurred in the spatial dimension of languages, in connection to acculturation processes and to linguistic policies. In this respect, the course deals with the regional division of the European languages and with the EU language policy both in respect to minority languages and to the process of linguistic education of its citizens. The relationship between linguistic diversity and biological diversity is also explored with a geographical focus on the issue of language death. The course examines the relationship between space/place and language from different perspectives. At the beginning of the course, the students explore the field of cultural geography and its main themes, concepts, and keywords. After having explored the differences between linguistic geography and geographies of languages, the course focus on the second and using both theories and empirical cases, looks at the interconnections between culture, cultural geography, and language geography; language as cultural phenomenon; toponyms and culture; and semiotics of space. Moreover, the course observes how the relationship between geography and language expresses itself in different configurations of bodies and spaces: digital and media spaces, literary spaces, migratory fluxes, terrorism discourses and place-bound semiotics, tourism performance, and cultural and intercultural spaces.

The first objective of the course is to explore and understand the storytelling epic, the symbolic imaginaries, and the ideological architectures of media events, both planned and unplanned. The specific focus on the recent "trauma television," the coverage of dramatic moments in human and medium history will provide students a further direct-experience based occasion to develop a critical and meaning creation oriented approach towards the medium. The final goal is to let students appreciate how television works, how it’s able to take a precise picture of constitutive parameters, problematic conjunctions, practices, moods, and contradictions of society, and why it still plays such a strategic role in social, cultural, and political issues in national and international contexts. The course main subject is essentially the relation of reciprocal influence between television and society. Built on a solid critical basis, mostly linked to cultural studies, sociology and journalism theories, the course is designed under the theoretical umbrella of the most important medium scholars, from McLuhan to Beaudrillard, and from Kellner to Dayan and Katz. The course discusses topics including television communication in general, its main theories, its complex spectrum of meanings, its storytelling processes, and its numerous social implications; the media events field, with ritual planned events (typically contests, conquests, coronations) and disruptive unplanned ones (disaster, terror, and war); and the "trauma television" of the last two years that is putting unexpected events in the television central stage as never before, even in some cases questioning their very notion – specifically the pandemic, the Capitol Hill riots, the various natural disasters caused by the climate change, and the Taliban takeover of Aghanistan – ground-breaking examples of the link between medium, contemporary history and our everyday life.

The course discusses two main topics. The first topic is on Etruscans and the Italic peoples: Ancient Italy between Bronze Age and Iron Age. Topics include the transition from the protovillanovian to the villanovian period; transformations of the population, origin of the proto-urban centres and “formation” of the Etruscan ethnos; cultures, languages, and peoples of the pre-roman Italy; Etruscans and their relationships with the other italic peoples: commercial exchanges and cultural connections; and cultural and chronological periods. The second topic is on History and culture of the Etruscans Culture: The Villanovian period (IX-VIII c. BCE). Topics include from the hut to the house and from the village to the town; the early forms of social and political organization; the Orientalizing period (VIII-VII c. BCE): the rise and consolidation of the aristocracy; the culture of the princes; palaces and big funerary architecture; different expressions of the aristocratic ideology; the Archaic period (VI c. BCE): the end of the aristocracies and coming of the demos; big works of urban monumentalizing; cities and their harbors; relations with the oriental Greek Culture; the Classic period (V-IV c. BCE): the dominance of the inner Etruria and the crisis of the coastal Etruria; the artistic issue and the relationships with Greece; the Hellenistic period (IV-III c. BCE): the great “crisis” of the Fourth Century and the return of aristocracies; the relations with Macedonia and Magna Graecia and last great season of the Etruscan culture; and conflict with Rome and decline of the Etruscans.