Italy

This course provides students with a sound basis for communicating effectively and accurately in oral and written Italian. Students obtain proficiency in basic Italian spelling and pronunciation. Elementary Italian grammar and syntactic structures are covered, especially the use of nouns and adjectives and regular and irregular verbs in the present and past tense. Authentic materials (songs, videos, advertisements, and film clips) are used in a communicative-based approach, and emphasis is placed on the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students participate in several sessions of language exchange with Italian university students, and field trips take them outside the classroom to engage with the city and Romans to reinforce the grammatical skills learned in class. The course is conducted entirely in Italian.

The course provides analytical and critical tools aimed at knowledge, enhancement and communication of cultural heritage sites, applying the theoretical and practical methodologies of Digital Humanities. The course introduces the principal methods of investigating and visualizing urban historical contexts and their long-term transformations. The course comprises the fields of Urban History and Architectural Representation. In addition to traditional sources and interpretative models, students are introduced to digital technologies, enabling them to experiment with new applications for digital urban history. This is achieved through in-depth case studies developed through teamwork. The course comprises a number of general urban history lessons, whose content ranges from modern to contemporary cities. Their focus rests on the methods, visual and textual sources, and the analytical tools necessary for understanding urban and territorial settlements in both European and international contexts. A series of lectures will be dedicated to specific topics: the dynamics of creation of the built space; the relationships between center and periphery, urban cartography, and the development of a city’s everyday infrastructure. Lessons then focus on water cities, particularly on the case study of Venice’s lagoon. Emphasis is placed on analyzing its processes of growth and urban development, its principal buildings and their reuse, covering the chronological period ranging from the 16th century to the present day. The course also includes seminar activities and site visits to some lagoon islands. Both these experiences foster the physical knowledge of the Venetian environment and its descriptive textual and visual sources. Building on the study and critical interpretation of historical materials and using GIS and 3D modeling tools, students, divided into small working groups, reconstruct the historical stratigraphy and the ancient conformation of over sixty islands shaping the Venetian archipelago, investigating them either at the urban or architectural scale.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the main interdisciplinary theoretical, methodological, and technical tools of the historical-religious studies that deal with religious pluralism in urban contexts in the Modern and Contemporary Ages. The course focuses on different source materials to highlight and describe how religions create their worldviews and interact with the broader cultural, economic, and material context. The aim of this course is to investigate the relationship between religion and urban life, focusing on the theme of religious diversity, as it is organized and present in different urban contexts. A historical journey through different cities offers several different urban examples of how religion contributed to shape the environment, how religious interactions and encounters were established and negotiated, and ultimately how religious conflict and interactions might determine the future of cities.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The objective of this course is to provide an advanced-level overview of the institutions, policies, and politics concerning economic governance in the European Union (EU). The course examines the process of European economic integration; the formulation, adoption, and implementation of the main economic policies in the EU, and the impact these policies have on member states. The course covers a variety of topics, including an overview of the institutions and policy processes in the EU economic governance; theories of European integration, and EU governance and political economy; Single Market and competition policy; Economic and Monetary Union; governing finance in the EU and internationally; the political economy of Brexit; the financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and the EU response; and the EU's economic responses to the pandemic.

The course examines the theoretical and methodological tools to understand and analyze human language in its complexity and in its various manifestations, i.e. languages. At first, human language is contextualized within the larger set of semiotic phenomena, and the main models of linguistic and non-linguistic communication will be compared. The course then defines the concept of natural language, within a broader perspective taking into account the world's languages and their variation in time and space, and focuses on the concept of linguistic diversity. The diversity of languages is the background during the middle part of the course, where various levels of linguistic analysis are explained and demonstrated using examples from Italian and other European and non-European languages. The course addresses phonetics, phonology, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In light of the different levels of analysis addressed, the course proposes possible typologies and taxonomies with which to organize linguistic diversity, and concludes by discussing the concept of linguistic universals.

The course has 2 parts: A & B. Students must take both parts. Students who complete a term paper on a pre-approved topic are awarded 1 extra unit. Maximum units for the course are 8. Part A covers types of comics from the 13th century to the 16th century. Part A is dedicated to comic in literature. The first part focuses on Boccaccio with in-depth studies on the DECAMERON, and the second part is dedicated to the reading of Machiavelli. Part B discusses poetry and theater in the 18th and 19th centuries. Part B discusses Goldoni, Pascoli, and an in-depth study of Dante's INFERNO in the context of poetry.

Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Since the publication of the WEALTH OF NATIONS by Adam Smith, the sources of global inequality have been a key subject in economics. As Robert Lucas has famously claimed, once we start thinking about them, "it is hard to think about anything else." This makes the study of economic growth and development over the long run relevant for economics and the social sciences alike. Economic history introduces tools and methods of describing and analyzing growth and development and it develops critical thinking by demonstrating both the potential and limitations of economic theory in explaining economic change in the real world. The course consists of an overview of Western economic development from the early modern period, ca. 1500, to the present. The course focuses on the drivers of industrialization and of increased prosperity in the Western world and on the historical origins of the disparity in the wealth of nations today. The course is organized in two parts. The first part discusses the drivers of long-run development: the commercial, agricultural, and industrial revolutions, the role of institutions, and the origins of globalization. The second part illustrates the impact of major shocks on economic development in the 20th century: the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the challenges of the new globalization since the 1970s.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course examines Greek and Roman theatre as a whole (places of performance, festivals and dramatic competitions, poets and preserved works; directors, chorus, players; relationship with public and institutions; the different dramatic genres and their history) and develops a critical attitude towards the main issues concerning the Greek and Roman theatre. Course contents include dramatic performances in the ancient world, with a special regard to Athenian tragedy and its importance for the modern theatre, and Euripides and Alcestis.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course is intended for students who have a strong background in sociological theory. The terms of reference for the theoretical part are based on Italy and in particular on Palermo, Sicily, and the Zen neighborhood. The course focuses on the concept of community both in socio-cultural and socio-spatial terms as well as the relationship between the concepts of community and social capital, with particular attention to the question of environment from an empirical point of view. Special attention is placed on the concepts of community and social capital at the general theory level, standard and non-standard research tools, advantages and disadvantages of empirical environment research that focuses on community and social capital concepts. The course is divided into three thematic modules. The first module introduces the concept of community, both as a reference to classical authors such as Tonnies, Weber, and Park, and as a socio-cultural and socio-spatial meaning. In the second module, using the above theoretical framework, the relation between community and social capital is considered in order to develop the connection between these two concepts and the neighborhood, in terms of urban sociology and in the light of recent acquisitions of neighborhood studies. A special section is also dedicated to the question of urban sustainability with particular reference to the relation between the concept of resilience and the neighborhood approach. The third module is dedicated to studies that explore the relation between poverty, neighborhood and social capital through the development of a mixed methods approach. This section also stresses the importance of the distinction between structure and culture in the study of urban poverty. Required reading includes: COMUNITÀ, CAPITALE SOCIALE, QUARTIERE by M. Castrignanò, LO ZEN DI PALERMO by F. Fava, CERCANDO RISPETTO by P. Bourgois, and I REIETTI DELLA CITTÀ by L. Wacquant. Assessment is based on a final oral exam that covers the assigned readings and the social research methodology and techniques discussed in the course.