Provenance of chalk tesserae from Brading Roman Villa, Isle of Wight, UK

Thin section petrographical analysis of chalk tesserae at Brading Roman Villa, Isle of Wight, England, identifies a range of planktonic foraminifera and the calcareous algal cyst Pithonella that identify the Late Cenomanian Rotalipora cushmani Biozone (BGS Foraminiferal Biozones 4iii to 7). The local chalk crop to the north of the villa includes rocks of R. cushmani Biozone age, and indicates a likely local, rather than long distance, source for the tesserae. Microfossils provide a powerful tool for identifying the provenance of artefacts in Roman Britain.

Price-based demand side management: Assessing the impacts of time-of-use tariffs on residential electricity demand and peak shifting in Northern Italy

One of the most common Demand Side Management programs consists of Time-of-Use (TOU) tariffs, where consumers are charged differently depending on the time of the day when they make use of energy services. This paper assesses the impacts of TOU tariffs on a dataset of residential users from the Province of Trento in Northern Italy in terms of changes in electricity demand, price savings, peak load shifting and peak electricity demand at substation level. Findings highlight that TOU tariffs bring about higher average electricity consumption and lower payments by consumers. A significant level of load shifting takes place for morning peaks. However, issues with evening peaks are not resolved. Finally, TOU tariffs lead to increases in electricity demand for substations at peak time.

Did the RAI buy it? The role and limits of American broadcasting in Italy in the Cold War

With a 20 million dollar budget and 1,900 staff Voice of America broadcasted in 45 different languages and Italy was one of its main targets. By looking into what went on behind the microphone, this article addresses the extent to which cultural change was planned and structured transnationally, the interactions and interdependencies operating between Washington and Rome, and how a cooperation was achieved despite the fierce resistance of some of RAI’s executives. This allowed to air programmes produced in New York, and led to the launch of the most popular character of Italian radio and television: Mike Bongiorno.

Identification and ranking of extraordinary rainfall events over northwest Italy: the role of Atlantic moisture

An objective identification and ranking of extraordinary rainfall events for Northwest Italy is established using time series of annual precipitation maxima for 1938–2002 at over 200 stations. Rainfall annual maxima are considered for five reference durations (1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 h). In a first step, a day is classified as an extraordinary rainfall day when a regional threshold calculated on the basis of a two-components extreme value distribution is exceeded for at least one of the stations. Second, a clustering procedure taking into account the different rainfall durations is applied to the identified 163 events. Third, a division into six clusters is chosen using Ward's distance criteria. It is found that two of these clusters include the seven strongest events as quantified from a newly developed measure of intensity which combines rainfall intensities and spatial extension. Two other clusters include the weakest 72% historical events. The obtained clusters are analyzed in terms of typical synoptic characteristics. The two top clusters are characterized by strong and persistent upper air troughs inducing not only moisture advection from the North Atlantic into the Western Mediterranean but also strong northward flow towards the southern Alpine ranges. Humidity transports from the North Atlantic are less important for the weaker clusters. We conclude that moisture advection from the North Atlantic plays a relevant role in the magnitude of the extraordinary events over Northwest Italy.

Child anxiety and parenting in England and Italy: the moderating role of maternal warmth

BACKGROUND: Parenting factors have been implicated in the aetiology and maintenance of child anxiety. Most research has been correlational with little experimental or longitudinal work. Cross-cultural comparison could be illuminating. A comparison of Italian and British children and their mothers was conducted. METHODS: A sample of 8- to 10-year old children, 60 Italian and 49 English, completed the Spence Child Anxiety Scale. Mothers also completed two questionnaires of parenting: the Skills of Daily Living Checklist (assessing maternal autonomy granting) and the Parent-Child Interaction Questionnaire (assessing maternal intrusiveness). Parenting was assessed in two video-recorded blindly rated mother-child interaction tasks, the 'belt-buckling tasks and the 'etch-a-sketch', providing objective indices of overcontrol, warmth, lack of autonomy granting, and overprotection. RESULTS: There were no differences between the children in overall anxiety and specific forms of anxiety. Parenting, however, was markedly different for the two countries. Compared to English mothers, on the two questionnaires, Italian mothers were significantly less autonomy granting and more intrusive; and in terms of the observed indices, a significantly greater proportion of the Italian mothers displayed a high level of both overprotection and overcontrol, and a low level of autonomy granting. Notably, Italian mothers evidenced significantly more warmth than English mothers; and maternal warmth was found to moderate the impact of self-reported maternal intrusiveness on the level of both overall child anxiety and the level of child separation anxiety; and it also moderated the relationship between both observed maternal intrusiveness and overall child anxiety and observed maternal overprotectiveness and child separation anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: Although, compared to the British mothers, the Italian mothers were more likely to evidence high levels of parenting behaviours previously found to be anxiogenic, the high levels of warmth displayed by these mothers to their children appears to have neutralised the adverse impact of these behaviours.

Narratives of grassroots innovations: a comparison of voluntary simplicity and the transition movement in Italy

Grassroots innovations (GI) are promising examples of deliberate transformation of socio-technical systems towards resilience and sustainability. However, evidence is needed on the factors that limit or enable their success. This paper set out to study how GI use narratives to empower innovation in the face of incumbent socio-technical regimes. Institutional documents were comparatively analyzed to assess how the narratives influence the structure, form of action and external interactions of two Italian grassroots networks, Bilanci di Giustizia and Transition Network Italy. The paper finds an internal consistency between narratives and strategies for each of the two networks. The paper also highlights core similarities, but also significant differences in the ethical basis of the two narratives, and in the organizations and strategies. Such differences determine different forms of innovation empowerment and expose the niche to different potentials to transform incumbent regimes, or to the risk of being co-opted by them.

The diffusion of grassroots innovations for sustainability in Italy and Great Britain: an exploratory spatial data analysis

Little research so far has been devoted to understanding the diffusion of grassroots innovation for sustainability across space. This paper explores and compares the spatial diffusion of two networks of grassroots innovations, the Transition Towns Network (TTN) and Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (Solidarity Purchasing Groups – GAS), in Great Britain and Italy. Spatio-temporal diffusion data were mined from available datasets, and patterns of diffusion were uncovered through an exploratory data analysis. The analysis shows that GAS and TTN diffusion in Italy and Great Britain is spatially structured, and that the spatial structure has changed over time. TTN has diffused differently in Great Britain and Italy, while GAS and TTN have diffused similarly in central Italy. The uneven diffusion of these grassroots networks on the one hand challenges current narratives on the momentum of grassroots innovations, but on the other highlights important issues in the geography of grassroots innovations for sustainability, such as cross-movement transfers and collaborations, institutional thickness, and interplay of different proximities in grassroots innovation diffusion.

Voices of Occupiers/Liberators: The BBC's Radio Propaganda in Italy between 1942 and 1945

The ambiguity of the role played by British propaganda in Italy during the Second World War is clearly reflected in the phenomenon of Radio London. While Radio London raised the morale of the Italian civilians living under the Fascist regime and provided them with alternative information on the conflict, the microphones of the BBC were also used by the British government to address a country they were planning to occupy. In this article, I will analyse the occupation/liberation operations that were run at the BBC Italian Service from two separate angles. On the one hand, the analysis of the programmes broadcast between the months preceding the Allies’ landing in Sicily and the actual occupation shows how the Allies built their image as liberators and guarantors of better living conditions. On the other, the analysis of the relationships between the Foreign Office and the anti-Fascist exiles reveals that the Italian BBC broadcasters were not always allowed to freely express their political opinion or to dispose of their own lives.