This essay proposes to analyse aspects and issues of the ethical-political paradigm of historical studies, starting from the teaching of Benedetto Croce in the early twentieth century up to the developments of the Italian historiographical panorama in the twenty-first century.

The aim of this article is to analyse a corpus of Facebook comments extracted by the public pages of Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Renzi and Matteo Salvini concerning the year 2018 (Orrù 2020). The analysis aims to focus on three Italian ableist slurs about cognitive impairment (cerebroleso, handicappato and ritardato) used as metaphors in online speech acts. Comments will be analysed with a multifaceted approach. The theoretical point of view will involve studies about insults as linguistic and pragmatic acts (Brown & Levinson 1987; Culpeper 1996; Alfonzetti 2017), slurs and hate speech (Bianchi 2021; Cepollaro 2020), ableism built by medical terminology (Gualdo & Telve 2011), and finally metaphor (Mortara Garavelli 1988). With these theoretical bases, inquiries will be conducted with a corpus-based methodology, focusing on metaphors and cluster, syntax, and pragmatics of the linguistic acts involving target words. 

Using the tridimensional model of metaphor in communication (Steen 2008) multidisciplinary perspective (Musloff 2012, Steen 2011) in which cognitive notions are accompanied by political discourse analysis principles, this analysis aims to qualitatively describe the metaphors in the interviews fot the Italian press released between 1971 and 1981 by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a period in which the Romanian President had a notable international position. We will study the shorthand notes and the translations in Italian of five interviews published by the Italian newspapers «l’Unità» (Boffa 1971 and 1973), «Il Popolo» (Pellegrini 1978 and 1981), and «Corriere della Sera» (Petta 1981).

This article aspires to open a new prospective of study on the figure of the schoolmistress in the first half of the Italian twentieth century. The essay focuses on three lesser-known narrative works (two by women writers), with a look at two movies of the 1940s and 1950s. The study offers a thematic analysis on the character of the schoolmistress, who is not always adequately recognized and analysed. In the first part, a group of three short stories is analysed: Maria Messina’s L’ora che passa (1911) revolves around an emptied and disillusioned teacher, Rosalia, who has not found the means to emancipate herself in her profession; Ada Negri’s Anima bianca (1917) instead presents a teacher, Rosanna, fully realized in her role to the point of letting herself die when an event undermines her ability to teach; finally, Federigo Tozzi’s Un’osteria (1920) opens a contemporary debate on the suffering of those teachers, like Assunta, forced to work far from home. In the second part of the essay the discussion shifts to cinema: Vittorio De Sica’s Maddalena... zero in condotta (1940) is the parable of the teacher Elisa Malgari, who has to learn the most important lesson: letting herself be loved by a man. Finally, Alberto Lattuada’s Scuola elementare (1954) opens a glimpse into the crisis of the substitute teacher Laura Bramati in search of her true professional identity.