This issue of the journal opens with a piece by Bruna Filippi. A historian by profession, she has long placed the history of the Society of Jesus at the centre of her interests. In Filippi’s work you will find a detailed and precise account of the role that, for a certain period, the Jesuits played in the city of Perugia. Next, Marco Saioni, the official in charge of communications at the Archaeological Museum of Umbria, presents the museum and its new exhibition arrangements, while not neglecting to give us a brief history of the Museum and rounding off, with a light provocation, a quiet polemic tinged with irony. Antonio Senatore, an art historian, tells us, from an iconological angle, of the beauty, the history and the meaning of the images of Porta S. Angelo. Francesco Torchia, a theatre director and drama teacher, starts from Bob Dylan to take stock of the state of theatre in schools, one of the many strange objects (as Gelmini teaches us) that extracurricular subjects have become. Philosophy does not exist; philosophies exist. But we are not talking about existentialism, positivism, neo-Kantianism, and so on: those are the business of the Academy, and Studi Umbri is, and means to be, something other than the stuffy and solemn journals the Academy produces. We are talking instead about corporate philosophy, the philosophy of the web and others of the kind (anyone can coin a philosophy of their own). Sandra Palermo, a diehard Hegelian and an editor of Studi Umbri, enlightens us on the philosophy of football which, among the many philosophies attached to the most disparate and often truly undeserving disciplines, is certainly not the most unworthy. Primo Levi wrote some of the foundational books of twentieth-century Italian literature (not only Italian, not only literature and not only of the twentieth century, just to be precise). But the author of If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved also wrote poems, few poems, yet among those few some are, in our view, truly not to be missed. Giorgio Pangaro, an editor of Studi Umbri, tells us about them. Francesca Borrione, a doctoral candidate and essayist, writes about cinema after September 11, and, still on the subject of cinema, the endless story about the end of cinema continues, as usual at the hand of Daniele Dottorini. The issue closes with an essay by two anthropologist friends who work in Argentina, Elisa Gabriela Palermo and María Alma Tozzini, a homage to, and a remembrance of, one of the greatest thinkers of the century just past: Claude Lévi-Strauss. When one lists the great minds of the more or less recent past, it is almost automatic to cite Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Watson&Crick, and so on, and, if one is not too ungenerous or biased, one closes the series with Marx. Usually the matter is left hanging, to suggest that yes, there have been many others, but that, when it comes to power of thought, coherence of theoretical elaboration and influence exerted, outside the narrow circle there is nothing left but to settle into the lower circles. Lévi-Strauss, who died at the end of last year, has not yet finished making the force and complexity of his thought felt, not only on those who work in anthropology, but on all who, in any capacity, have to do with the humanities in their broadest sense.
Enjoy the reading.