This paper aims at delineating the basic principles for a semiotic approach to monuments and memorials. Monuments are built forms erected to confer dominant meanings on space. They present an aesthetic value as well as a political function. Often, political elites erect monuments to promote selective historical narratives that focus on convenient events and individuals while obliterating what is discomforting. While representing selective historical narratives, monuments can inculcate specific conceptions of the present and encourage future possibilities. As such, monuments become essential for the articulation of the national politics of memory and identity through which political elites set political agendas and legitimate political power. However, once erected, monuments become social properties and users can reinterpret them in ways that are different or contrary to the intentions of the designers. Previous research has explored monuments as either aesthetic objects presenting historical and artistic values or as political tools in the hand of those in power. Hence, this research has wittingly or unwittingly created a gap between the material-symbolic and the political dimensions of monuments. Moreover, it has variously given more emphasis either to the intentions of the designers or to the interpretations of the users. The semiotic approach to monuments can address these issues providing a holistic approach that overcomes the rigid distinctions predominant in previous research on monuments. Although useful analytical categories, the distinction between material-symbolic and political dimensions cannot be extended to the ontological state of monuments. Semiotics can be useful in investigating the meanings of monuments as actively created by the interplay of the material, the symbolic and the political dimensions. It provides a methodological basis to consider designers and users as equally contributing to the meaning-making of monuments. KEYWORDS monuments and memorials, semiotics of culture, national identity, memory, meanings.

Between July 2011 and August 2011, the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) gene was detected in Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli isolates obtained from six patients hospitalised in four healthcare facilities in northern Italy. The patient who had been hospitalised in New Delhi, India, from February to May 2011 and subsequently in the Bologna area, Italy, from May to July 2011, may have been the source of the outbreak. Our findings suggest ongoing spread of this carbapenem-resistance gene in Italy and highlight the need for intensive surveillance.

Nine suspected cases of food poisoning were reported from three hospitals to the epidemiology and prevention service (Servizio di Epidemiologia e Prevenzione - SEP) of the local health authority in Naples district (Azienda Sanitaria Locale, ASL NA 4) betw

L'obiettivo di questo contributo è indagare le azioni di street art e ricolorazione praticate sui monumenti della dittatura comunista "sopravvissuti" alla demolizione dopo la fine del regime. Si considereranno le riscritture che hanno permesso ai monumenti di diventare spazio della protesta, in netto contrasto con il valore di progettazione affidatoli. In queste pagine, inoltre, si indagheranno gli effetti delle esplosioni semiotiche prodotte dalla risemantizzazione monumentale e dall'inversione enciclopedica messa in atto dalla protesta stessa. Attraverso l'analisi di tre monumenti si approfondirà il rapporto tra immaginario e iconoclastia, definendo una nuovo genere di "attacco alle icone", non finalizzato solo alla distruzione ma alla generazione di altri ecosistemi narrativi e nuove deonotologie delle immagini.The aim of this paper is to consider the actions of street art and urban recolouring on the monuments of communist dictatorship, which have not been demolished after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Such rewriting actions have converted these monuments in spaces of artistic disputes in stark contrast with the memory conveyed by the communist regime. My goal is to understand the semiotic logic that characterizes the art of protest on the dictatorship monuments. In addition, with the analysis of three specific monuments I will investigate the relationship between imaginary and iconoclasm with the purpose of defining a new form of "attack on image" which is not only aimed at the destruction but also at the creation of new imaginaries. Parole chiaveStreet art, monumento, immaginario, iconoclastia performativa, memoria culturale Key WordsStreet art, monument, imaginary, performative iconoclasm, cultural memory Sommario 1. Introduzione 2. La risemantizzazione del monumento 3. L'esternalizzazione del dissenso: l'iconoclastia performativa 4. L'iconoclastia performativa come strumento di creazione di nuovi immaginari 5. Iconoclastie e passioni del futuro Bibliografia Settembre 2017 | www.ocula.it |

This article explores the narratives of the Covid-19 crisis in Italy, in the ways that they intersect with cultural memory processes. Moving from the hypothesis that the Covid-19 crisis, in Italy, has undergone two distinct narrative phases, we focus on the comparison between the forms taken, during the first lockdown, by an important (but also somehow divisive) memory ritual: the celebration of 25 April (the day that Italy was liberated from Nazi-Fascism) and the newly established commemorations of Covid-19 casualties. The aim is to observe the osmoses between two discursive domains (memory discourse vs emergency discourse). To do so, we propose the concept of “pre-emptive memory,” which can be defined as an act of—unwitting—anticipation, pre-figuration, and re-combination of the future cultural memory of an ongoing event in the present.