This book aims to build a solid and proper contribution to the contemporary global debate on the experience of democracy and its possibilities as the most effective mediator of a series of challenges, a debate that is necessarily rooted in the critical reassessment of its Greek cultural heritage. The book is articulated around the identification of a concrete problem: the need for studies that critically discuss Athenian democracy, seen as a daily problem and practice, based on its staseis (crises) and metabolai (changes), and whose solutions and strategies may still contribute to the reflection on the social, intellectual and ethical-political challenges of contemporary democracy.

This collection gathers the contributions of ten scholars on the topic of transnational cultural and physical mobility originating in China. These contributions aim to open conversations among Chinese Studies scholars by applying a Mobility Studies perspective. Exploring diverse narratives and forms of representation from people of Chinese heritage, the book is divided into three parts that each look closely at the relationship between movement and cultural production. The first part is dedicated to four types of mobility of people from China to Italy, namely tourist mobility (Miriam Castorina), labor mobility (Valentina Pedone), student mobility (Xu Hao), and mobility of social elites (Andrea Scibetta). The second part is dedicated to examples of reverse mobility from Italy to China (Gao Changxu, Chiara Lepri, Giuseppe Rizzuto). The third part focuses on case studies based on mobilities from China to territories other than Italy (Rebecca Ehrenwirth, Martina Renata Prosperi, Giulia Rampolla).

Plutarch's Cities is the first comprehensive attempt to assess the significance of the polis in Plutarch's works from several perspectives, namely the polis as a physical entity, a lived experience, and a source of inspiration, the polis as a historical and sociopolitical unit, the polis as a theoretical construct and paradigm to think with. The book's multifocal and multi-perspectival examination of Plutarch's cities - past and present, real and ideal-yields some remarkable corrections of his conventional image. Plutarch was neither an antiquarian nor a philosopher of the desk. He was not oblivious to his surroundings but had a keen interest in painting, sculpture, monuments, and inscriptions, about which he acquired impressive knowledge in order to help him understand and reconstruct the past. Cult and ritual proved equally fertile for Plutarch's visual imagination. Whereas historiography was the backbone of his reconstruction of the past and evaluation of the present, material culture, cult, and ritual were also sources of inspiration to enliven past and present alike. Plato's descriptions of Athenian houses and the Attic landscape were also a source of inspiration, but Plutarch clearly did his own research, based on autopsy and on oral and written sources. Plutarch, Plato's disciple and Apollo's priest, was on balance a pragmatist. He did not resist the temptation to contemplate the ideal city, but he wrote much more about real cities, as he experienced or imagined them.

The formulation of Maxwell’s equations completely defines the connection between the electric field and the magnetic field, definitively unifying electricity and magnetism and at the same time providing a theoretical synthesis of all the experimental phenomena connected to these areas. In his revolutionary 1864 memoir where J.C. Maxwell presented his equations, he cites a handful of scientists, which were at the basis of his Theory. This book, in its first part, presents an insight on all these latter scientists, reconstructing the scientific network behind Maxwell’s unification and, in the second part, focuses on the Italians in such a network: Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti and Riccardo Felici, with a further insight on the connections between Maxwell and Italy and, in particular, Tuscany.

An exercise in cultural sociology, Moral Codes and Social Structure in Ancient Greece seeks to explicate the dynamic currents of classical Hellenic ethics and social philosophy by situating those idea-complexes in their socio-historical and intellectual contexts. Central to this enterprise is a comprehensive historical-sociological analysis of the Polis form of social organization, which charts the evolution of its basic institutions, roles, statuses, and class relations. From the Dark Age period of "genesis" on to the Hellenistic era of "eclipse" by the emergent forces of imperial patrimonialism, Polis society promoted and sustained corresponding normative codes which mobilized and channeled the requisite emotive commitments and cognitive judgments for functional proficiency under existing conditions of life. The aristocratic warrior-ethos canonized in the Homeric epics; the civic ideology of equality and justice espoused by reformist lawgivers and poets; the democratization of status honor and martial virtue that attended the shift to hoplite warfare; the philosophical exaltation of the Polis-citizen bond as found in the architectonic visions of Plato and Aristotle; and the subsequent retreat from civic virtues and the interiorization of value articulated by the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics, new age philosophies in a world remade by Alexander's conquests--these are the key phases in the evolving currents of Hellenic moral discourse, as structurally framed by transformations within the institutional matrix of Polis society.