Mediterraneo, Società Civile, Politica e Interculturalità
Articles in English language
Rome, sixty years later. Children swarm into the streets and the gardens of the Capital, where cars cannot drive, and walls are covered with placards. The spring has just found its way through, and fresh grass grows between the sampietrini and along the rifts on the asphalt. An old man in a line 19’s tramway…
Continua a leggereThey are holding a gun to our heads. They have seized 2017. This is how the new year begins. Like in a big bank robbery, they have pointed their gun-machines at people. This is the image which comes to my mind when I look around myself and listen to the news. We are walking in…
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My new book has been released in January 2017. It is entitled “Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity – Beyond Eurocentrism” and is published by Palgrave Macmillan, part of the Springer group. You can order it here: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319459608 The book explores the commonalities between the struggles of the last years around the Mediterranean and tries to find the cultural roots of this…
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Despite the fact that Donald Trump, addressing his supporters in New York right after having received the news that he would be the new president, said: “It is time for us to come together as one united people. It is time”, many voiced out their hostility marching a few hours later in the streets of…
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Never Facebook has been so proliferous in offering the most disparate views on the same topic, as in the day after the Brexit referendum. Some fellows were predicting the European Apocalypse, others were vocalizing their excitement for their rewarded hate against Europe, and others were sending to hell the Brits. Some distinguished friends were writing:…
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Fuck Humanity. [Signed] Aleppo, April 28, 2016. This is what someone wrote on a wall of Aleppo while the recent bombing campaign of al-Asad’s regime was going on without hesitations, with the backing of Russia, after having buried the ceasefire and started doing what they have always wished to do: annihilate people to win territory.…
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Yesterday, once I heard about the terror attacks in Brussels, the first thing I did was to call a couple of very close friends to make sure that they were all right. In Europe, even someone who is not familiar with that city must know someone else there. One of my friends, passed by Maalbeek…
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My first time in a fertilizers factory. Built by the Soviet Union in 1967 and commissioned in 1974, located nearby Mazar Sherif, not far from the borders with Uzbekistan. Large, rationally designed, antiquated in its appearance, surrounded by scattered trees and high grass, in the middle of the countryside, accessible via an old paved road,…
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Scene 1 The husband calls the wife complaining that nobody serves him a cup of tea. He sits on a cushion, in the living room. The wife comes, reassures him that the water is boiling, and asks him to talk over an important topic. The husband, a moustached man, raises his voice and says: “Bring…
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Kabul reminds me of Rio de Janeiro, a never ending urban carpet teeming with life, surrounding rocky and statuesque peaks, at which feet the poorest build their own shelters clinging to the mountain’s vertical walls. The only differences are that Kabul’s peaks are naked and trees are lonely, women are hiding their beauty in public,…
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Special issue: When Sicily challenges the narrative of the end of Mediterranean hopes Kanaltürk and Bugün, two Turkish independent TV channels are closed by the police on October 28, with the accusation of fomenting terrorism (but apparently, the two channels were investigating the corruption inside Mr. Erdogan’s party). Five days earlier, a court of Istanbul…
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The Treaty of the European Union says: «The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance,…
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Llegò la Primavera. Spring has finally arrived! This is what Pablo Iglesias wrote on his party’s website a few hours after the announcement of the results of last Sunday’s local and regional elections in Spain. Is this the beginning of a new regional Spring wave, after Greece massively turned to anti-austerity Syriza? When the Indignados…
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Another slap to the Tunisian Revolution, another stab in the womb of the Arab Spring. The attack to the Museum of Bardo of March 18, 2015, was a political act. Contrary to what several Western media have related, the attack was most probably not orchestrated by ISIS, but by a brigade named ʿAqba Ibn Nāfiʿa,…
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The Universal Forum of Cultures, a major cultural happening organized by UNESCO and intended to take place every three years in a different city, was supposed to be the cherry on the cake of Naples’ internationalization policy, and occur in 2013. In 2011, the well-known songwriter Roberto Vecchioni was named Universal Forum of Cultures’s president.…
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