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Gregory Ananian, the Sultan's Physician Who Fled to Trieste
Gregory Ananian is a peculiar figure: apparently very modern, yet full of contradictions, much closer to the modern age than to the nineteenth century, to the legacies of the Ottoman Empire than to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Ananian was born in Istanbul (1770), within the community of Armenians of Catholic faith. From a wealthy family, Ananian was thus able to attend the faculty of medicine at the University of Padua, then completing his internship in Paris, where there was a school run by Capuchin friars aimed at training Armenians as interpreters and missionaries. Yet, after this immersion in late eighteenth-century Europe, Ananian chose to...
Italy's Ambiguities in the Fiume Enterprise
Gaspari has published an essay by Luca G. Manenti and Fabio Todero that analyses the communication strategies beyond the slogans of the occupation of the city: myths, words and rites of Gabriele d'Annunzio's enterprise in Fiume (12 September 1919 - Christmas of Blood 1920). Source: Il Piccolo -...
Dante the irredentist was a manifesto of Italianity for the disputed lands
In an essay published by Carocci, Fulvio Conti retraces seven hundred years of political rereadings and manipulations of the supreme poet, particularly between the two world wars. On the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death, books on the subject are flooding the shelves of bookstores. One of the best that has appeared bears the signature of Fulvio Conti: “Il Sommo italiano. Dante e l' identità della nazione” (Carocci, 2021, 242 pages, 18 euros), which traces the transformations of the image of the “divine poet” from the eighteenth century to the present day. Not a biography, therefore, but a scrupulous investigation into how the figure of Dante has been absorbed, manipulated, praised by...
