Download or read book History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape written by Emilio Sereni and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emilio Sereni's classic work is now available in an English language edition. History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape is a synthesis of the agricultural history of Italy in its economic, social, and ecological context, from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. From his perspective in the Italian tradition of cultural Marxism, Sereni guides the reader through the millennial changes that have affected the agriculture and ecology of the regions of Italy, as well as through the successes and failures of farmers and technicians in antiquity, the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. In this sweeping historical survey, he describes attempts by successive generations to adapt Italy's natural environment for the purposes of agriculture and to respond to its changing ecological problems. History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape first appeared in 1961. At the time of its publication it was a pathbreaking work, parallel in its importance for Italy to Marc Bloc's masterwork of 1931, The Original Characteristics of French Rural History. Sereni invented the concept of the historical "agricultural landscape": an interdisciplinary characterization of rural life involving economic and social history, linguistics, archeology, art history, and ecological studies. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Italian Historical Rural Landscapes written by Mauro Agnoletti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-09 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable development and rural policies have pursued strategies where farming has been often regarded as a factor deteriorating the ecosystem. But the current economic, social and environmental problems of the Earth probably call for examples of a positive integration between human society and nature. This research work presents more than a hundred case studies where the historical relationships between man and nature have generated, not deterioration, but cultural, environmental, social and economic values. The results show that is not only the economic face of globalization that is negatively affecting the landscape, but also inappropriate environmental policies. The CBD-UNESCO program on biocultural diversity, the FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems and several projects of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, as well as European rural policies acknowledge the importance of cultural values associated to landscape. This research intends to support these efforts.

Download or read book A Short Environmental History of Italy written by Gabriella Corona and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Richness and the Fragility of Italy's Humanised Environment This book, a translation of the author's original Italian Breve Storia dell'Ambiente in Italia (Il Mulino, 2015) aims to bring together the general lines of interpretation of Italian environmental history from the decades prior to national unification to the present day, laying foundations for the writing of national history from an environmental history perspective. The volume reconstructs processes of change in the use of natural resources in Italy, and the associated environmental and social consequences. The use in historical analysis of a polysemic concept such as 'environment' expresses the deep synergies in the history of Italy that have tied together nature and human activities, ecological and socio-economic issues. The ancient roots of settlement, early anthropisation by past civilisations and historical features of the processes of transformation of rural and agricultural landscapes to which large areas of the peninsula have been subject impose a historical reconstruction in which changes in the use of natural resources are closely intertwined with changes in the territory considered as a natural historical context, built and humanised. Furthermore, corollary to the great richness and variety of nature and landscape, the artistic and archaeological sites, agriculture, gastronomy and oenology, that have 'supported' the country in its rise to global political significance, is vulnerability in terms of geological fragility, hydrographic system and seismicity. The book aims to understand how Italy as a unitary state has ruled the balance of an area overwhelmed by the impact of an economic development model characterised by high consumption of natural resources and energy. With this in mind, an important focus of consideration is the relevance of public policies, and the relationship between policy-makers and the knowledge experts that influence them. The book is divided into four parts, corresponding to four pivotal moments: the decades before national unification and the global factors at work; the end of the nineteenth century, when economic take-off combined with a hygienic revolution; the effects of Italian transition from a rural to a highly industrialised country in the decades after the second world war; and the 1980s in which laissez-faire capitalism and the acceleration of destructive processes co-existed with the growth of environmentalism and public environmental awareness. The chronological division is accompanied by a focus on topics, including: the effects of global changes and the role of structural characters; the repercussions for environmental equilibrium of 'commons' disintegration and the triumph of property rights; the impact of industrialisation and the hygienic revolution; the transition from renewable to non-renewable energies; nature protection, from the first movement to political environmentalism; the acceleration of soil consumption and of hydrogeological instability; the destructive modality of the expansion of metropolitan areas; the effects of agricultural modernisation, consumer society and the waste problem; the growth of ecomafias and environmental crimes.

Download or read book The Landscapes of Italian Food written by Gregory Smith and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines contemporary food systems in Italy, paying particular attention to the landscape, innovative local practices and local cultural history. It illustrates the utility of the value chain concept in navigating the complexities of comparative advantage in an advanced market setting. It establishes the connection between the landscape and individual food practices, and how they have responded to the commodification of the agri-food system, maintaining a distinctive local character while ensuring development and a healthy diet. It explores how community gardens are now a consolidated part of Italian urban experience, as well as the multiple policy frameworks which govern these activities. The book then explores a wider range of food procurement channels, from food cooperatives to buying groups and institutional partnerships, including the strategies employed by large retail groups to respond to the growing environmental sensitivity of their customers. Multifunctional implications of antimafia activities involving social agriculture are also explored. Finally, the book ends with a survey of European and domestic Italian policies aiming to protect and promote healthy food practices while preserving the integrity of the landscape. This is fascinating reading for anyone interested in quality food and the territory, as well as academic readers from such disparate disciplines as sociology, urban studies, anthropology and Italian studies.

Download or read book La Villa written by Bartolomeo Taegio and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1559 and appearing here for the first time in English, La Villa is a rare source of Renaissance landscape theory. Written by Bartolomeo Taegio, a Milanese jurist and man of letters, after his banishment (possibly for murder, Thomas E. Beck speculates), the text takes the form of a dialogue between two gentlemen, one a proponent of the country, the other of the city. While it is not a gardening treatise, La Villa reflects an aesthetic appreciation of the land in the Renaissance, reveals the symbolic and metaphorical significance of sixteenth-century gardens for their owners, and articulates a specific philosophy about the interaction of nature and culture in the garden. This edition of the original Italian text and Beck's English translation is augmented with notes in which Beck identifies numerous references to literary sources in La Villa and more than 280 people and places mentioned in the dialogue. The introduction illuminates Taegio's life and intellectual activity, his obligations to his sources, the cultural context, and the place of La Villa in Renaissance villa literature. It also demonstrates the enduring relevance of La Villa for architecture and landscape architecture. La Villa makes a valuable contribution to the body of literature about place-making, precisely because it treats the villa as an idea and not as a building type.

Download or read book The Befana Is Returning written by Steve Siporin and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of January 5, in certain areas of southern Tuscany, a costumed, singing troupe of characters visits residents' homes, expecting to be fed and feted. This is the Befanata, a mumming tradition centered in Tuscany, whose main character--the Befana--is a kindly old woman or grandmotherly witch who delivers toys, candies, and gifts. The Befana Is Returning is a deeply researched, deftly insightful presentation of this living tradition that adds a large missing piece to the array of contemporary ethnographic scholarship on mumming.

Download or read book The Development of Agricultural Science in Northern Italy in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century written by Martino Lorenzo Fagnani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late eighteenth century and subsequent Napoleonic Era witnessed a turning point in the establishment of agricultural science as a well-defined discipline in northern Italy. In this book, Martino Lorenzo Fagnani traces these developments by reviewing the correspondence of naturalists and agriculturists as well as the research plans of universities, academies, societies, institutes, and governments. He explores the establishment of a broad knowledge network encompassing all of Europe while also investigating the reasons behind the exchange of seeds, the establishment of spaces for experimentation such as scientific gardens and experimental fields, and the organization of specialized journals and monographs. This work represents an important contribution to the historiography of Italian agricultural science, filling a significant gap in our knowledge of related developments.

Download or read book Global Environmental History written by Ian G Simmons and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courses which deal with environmental history have long lacked a comprehensive overview. I. G. Simmons has made a significant contribution with a book that looks at the long-term history of environment and humanity from 10,000 BC to AD 2000. This far-reaching text considers the global picture and recognises the contributions of many disciplines including the natural sciences, the social sciences, and increasingly, the humanities.As a starting point, this book takes the major phases of human technological evolution of the last 12,000 years and considers how these have affected the natural world. It then considers the response to conditions such as climate change, putting today's preoccupations into a long-term perspective. This is a book of history, not prophecy, and so makes no judgements on current anxieties.

Download or read book Biocultural Diversity in Europe written by Mauro Agnoletti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book collects a selection of the papers presented at the meeting held in the context of the Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity (JP-BiCuD). Recognizing the inextricable link between biological and cultural diversity, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) joined forces, and in 2010 launched the Joint Programme on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity (JP-BiCuD). The first meeting for the implementation of the JP-BiCuD was held in Florence (Italy) in April 2014 and produced the UNESCO-sCBD Florence Declaration, which highlights the concept of biocultural diversity. The European rural territory is predominantly a biocultural, multi-functional landscape, providing a crucial and effective space for integration of biological and cultural diversity, suggesting the need to revise some of the current strategies for the assessment and management of biodiversity.

Download or read book Waymarking Italy s Influence on the American Environmental Imagination While on Pilgrimage to Assisi written by Robert Lawrence France and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undertaking a peripatetic pilgrimage that is equal parts a daily description of a 200-kilometre walk from the wounded mountain of La Verna to the tortured river in Assisi, and an examination of the debt owed to Italy in terms of ecocultural and environmental scholarship, this book provides an innovative addition to the nascent field of ecocritical narrative scholarship. Through a process that has been referred to as “deep-travel“ or “mind-walking,” the text fulsomely reviews how time spent in Italy influenced the writings of notable North American environmental historians, geographers, scientists, nature writers, landscape architects, and restoration theorists about the conception and manipulation of the natural world. This literary field study highlights how the phenomenological co-traversing of texts and trails can be a valued methodology for undertaking environmental criticism.

Download or read book War Agriculture and Food written by Paul Brassley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays examines one of the crucial periods in the evolution of the European rural economy and society, assessing the effects of the Second World War on the European countryside, and the impact of food and agricultural problems on the outcome of the war.

Download or read book Landscape Agronomy written by Davide Rizzo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-09 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landscape is widely identified as a relevant target both by integrative policies and across the disciplines dealing with resource management and territorial planning. Landscape agronomy promotes a greater involvement of agricultural sciences into this arena by increasing the attention on the dynamics relating the farming practices to the natural resources and the temporal and spatial patterns of land covers. This book covers the background that improved the transdisciplinary interface of agronomy with spatially-explicit disciplines like landscape ecology and geography both in research and in training programs, in addition to some experiences of participative landscape management. On these bases, the state of art on cutting-edge data availability and methodological issues is used to select and discuss some worldwide case studies. This selection of research topic examples underpins the concluding discussions about challenges ahead. Researchers as well as policy and decision makers are the main target of this book that seeks to provide a toolbox of concepts, examples and ideas to improve the understanding of agricultural landscapes. Agricultural activities manage the greatest share of land surface on Earth with fast-paced changes compared to any other human land use. With this book we aim at providing a stronger interface between agricultural science and landscape design processes.

Download or read book Hidden Histories written by D. Medina Lasansky and published by didapress. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tuscany is a landscape whose cultural construction is complicated and multi-layered. It is this very complexity that this book seeks to untangle. By revealing hidden histories, we learn how food, landscape and architecture are intertwined, as well as the extent to which Italian design and contemporary consumption patterns form a legacy that draws upon the Romantic longings of a century before. In the process, this book reveals the extent to which Tuscany has been constructed by Anglos — and what has been distorted, idealized and even overlooked in the process.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern Italy written by Mark Gilbert and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2007-09-19 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy is a country that exercises a hold on the imagination of people all over the world. Its long history has left an inexhaustible treasure chest of cultural achievement. The historic cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice are among the most sought-after destinations in the world for tourists and art lovers, and Italy's natural beauty and cuisine are rightly renowned. Italy's history and politics are also a source of endless fascination. Modern Italy has consistently been a political laboratory for the rest of Europe. In the 19th century, Italian patriotism was of crucial importance in the struggle against the absolute governments reintroduced after the Congress of Vienna, 1814-15. After the fall of Fascism during World War II, Italy became a model of rapid economic development, though its politics has never been less than contentious and its democracy has remained a troubled one. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern Italy is an attempt to introduce the key personalities, events, social developments, and cultural achievements of Italy since the beginning of the 19th century, when Italy first began to emerge as something more than a geographical entity and national feeling began to grow. This is done through a chronology, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, an introductory essay, a map, a bibliography, and some 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on prominent individuals, basic institutions, crucial events, history, politics, economics, society, and culture.

Download or read book The Conservation of Cultural Landscapes written by Mauro Agnoletti and published by CABI. This book was released on 2006 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conservation and management of cultural landscapes, interpreted as the result of the interrelationships among economic, social and environmental factors through time and space, emerges as essential components in the definition and application of a modern approach to sustainable development. Cultural landscapes are the result of management practices and knowledge accumulated in human history and contribute not only to the cultural heritage of the world, but also to biodiversity and aesthetic beauty, providing also multiple goods and services for the development of rural areas. However, landscapes are severely endangered not only by some effects of the socioeconomic development, but also by inappropriate policies in agriculture, forestry and nature conservation. This interdisciplinary book presents a range of different methods developed to analyse, restore and manage cultural landscapes, reporting a number of case studies from Europe and north America, but raising some questions about the need for a revision of some past orientations.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History written by Francesco Boldizzoni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History documents and interprets the development of economic history as a global discipline from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Exploring the normative and relativistic nature of different schools and traditions of thought, this handbook not only examines current paradigmatic western approaches, but also those conceived in less open societies and in varied economic, political and cultural contexts. In doing so, this book clears the way for greater critical understanding and a more genuinely global approach to economic history. This handbook brings together leading international contributors in order to systematically address cultural and intellectual traditions around the globe. Many of these are exposed for consideration for the first time in English. The chapters explore dominant ideas and historiographical trends, and open them up to critical transnational perspectives. This volume is essential reading for both academics and students in economic and social history. As this field of study is very much a bridge between the social sciences and humanities, the issues examined in the book will also have relevance for those seeking to understand the evolution of other academic disciplines under the pressures of varied economic, political and cultural circumstances, on both national and global scales.

Download or read book Trees Are Shape Shifters written by Andrew S. Mathews and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the anthropogenic landscapes of Lucca, Italy, and how its people understand social and environmental change through cultivation In Italy and around the Mediterranean, almost every stone, every tree, and every hillside show traces of human activities. Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them. Maintaining landscape stability by caring for the forms of trees, rivers, and hillsides is a way that people link their experiences to the past and to larger scale political questions. The human-transformed landscapes of Italy are a harbinger of the experiences that all of us are likely to face, and addressing these disasters will call upon all of us to think about the human and natural histories of the landscapes we live in.