Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

In a difficult year for our country and for the world, Studi Umbri returns to its readers with its customary wealth of authors and contributions. Once again, the journal offers a viewpoint on reality that is especially attuned to the human sciences, to art and to dialogue among disciplines.

The rediscovery of great literature has always been a privileged feature of our cultural space. Albert Camus, often invoked in these months for his masterpiece “The Plague”, is reread here by Mauro Agostini with a rare breadth of vision. The same breadth that, after all, marked the work of the French-Algerian intellectual, a man capable of drawing on every potential of the word. The whole of Camus’s work, Agostini writes, places man at its centre, in his insignificance but also in his greatness. In this sense it never ceases to offer precious material for interpreting the present.

The plot of “Romeo and Juliet” also contains a pandemic, and yet the tragedy has almost always been overlooked by literary treatments of the theme. To make up for this, Alessandro Clericuzio offers us a savoury portrait of “Shakespeare in quarantine” and of his account of illness as both reality and metaphor.
The rich literary section of this issue then makes room for another genius, Pablo Neruda, as well as for the many voices that over the centuries have told of the beauty of the Clitunno.

Art. The cover is devoted to Nicola Renzi, a prolific painter and sculptor from Perugia. But we also offer a reflection on the timeless performances of Marina Abramovic and a description of the SMAArt centre for the conservation of art.

And then many other subjects. A well-documented essay on Raffaele Rossi and on the “intellectual challenge” of the journal “Umbria contemporanea”. The story of the legendary communist school of Le Frattocchie. The effects of technology overuse in childhood. Organic farming and the concept of “food security”. The third and final instalment of the series “From Stone to the Atom”.