PRIN 2022 - DISCUI - Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali

Attributions, Perceptions, and Practices of Political Incivility in Europe (APP_PIE)

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: Among citizens and academics, awareness that political incivility is increasingly widespread and damaging to our democracies accompanies many reflections resulting from recent events. Convinced that political incivility should be studied in its differing expressions, the aim of the Attribution, Perceptions, and Practices of Political Incivility in Europe (APP-PIE) project is to examine the perception of incivility in public speech by all those involved in various ways; politicians, journalists and citizens. To achieve these goals, APP_PIE project will rely on a mixed-methods, comparative research design involving a large-scale survey citizens of three European countries (Germany, Italy and the UK), and in-depth studies in Italy on politicians and journalists through qualitative interviews. Simultaneously, we will investigate online incivility-in-practice through an ethnographic approach (Hine, 2020), by looking at case studies from Facebook pages of the most popular Italian news media outlets and case studies from Italian politicians’ Facebook pages.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 267.920 di cui € 200.100 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 82.252 di cui € 57.880 contributo MUR

Periodo: 15/10/2023 – 14/10/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof. Giovanni Boccia Artieri

Codice progetto: 2022JF3LC5

CUP: H53D23005850006

Promoting Multilingual Competence in Different Contexts

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: Multilingual competence is a cognitive advantage rather than a drawback: its promotion and development, however, become very limited when L2 acquisition takes place in classroom Foreign Language Acquisition. For this kind of L2 learners it is an arduous, even an impossible task to reach functional communication skills suitable for the context in which a conversation takes place. Foreign Language Acquisition seems notably less than ideal: the target language is not widely used, the L2 learning usually occurs in a pervasive L1 setting and employs only formal instruction on lexical and grammatical information, ignoring the connection between phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic levels and unaware of the processes (transfer and code-switching) that naturally occur in multilingual competence (cf. Derwing et al. 2022). This limitation is due only to unsuitable teaching practices and not to biological constraints (see Section 1). Investigating a dataset of unprecedented size, it has been recently shown that grammar-learning ability is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) (Hartshorne et al. 2018). Thus, multilingual competence can develop also in early adulthood in different contexts, as the ability to acquire an L2 is never lost (cf. Section 1). The success in developing multilingual competence depends on the quantity and the quality of L2 stimuli administered (Flege 1995). While the Council of Europe’s, since the late 1990s, tries to promote quality multilingual education facilitating and stimulating reflection between language professionals for curriculum development and in teacher education (cf. the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), the programs actually developed by the Italian Ministry of Education not seem to have acknowledged these goals, not completely at least (cf. Section 4). With this project, we intend to develop ad hoc methodologies useful for L2 trainers/educators and cultural mediators to better promote bi/multilingual competence in different contexts (cf. Section 2). The aim of this project is to heal the rift between second language research and L2 teaching methodologies, favoring the implanting of good practices that may help learners to control multilingual competence depending on the communicative context. Integrating the research background of each unit, we will do this by testing different kind of trainings able to develop finalized competence in different levels and processes crucial for multilingual competence: i.e., phonetic-phonological and morpho-syntactic levels, together with awareness of transfer and code-switching processes. The main result of the project will consist in a protocol useful for L2 instructors/educators/cultural mediators to promote multilingual competence in different contexts (cf. Section 3). Possible application potentialities, scientific impact, and economic impact are also discussed (cf. Section 4).

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 238.738 di cui € 179.839 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 67.371 di cui € 52.889 contributo MUR

Periodo: 05/10/2023 – 04/10/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof.ssa Gloria Cocchi

Codice progetto: 2022M4T9SB

CUP: H53D23004260006 

Sacred Fire: Inquisitions, Capital Punishment and Rites of Justice in Italy (13th-19th centuries)

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: This project aims to reconstruct the history of death sentences imposed by the courts of the medieval Inquisition and the Roman Holy Office in the Italian peninsula from the 13th to the 19th century. Through a database, it will record the victims condemned for crimes of heresy, while an interdisciplinary approach will analyse the historical, anthropological, legal, medical, material, emotional, iconographic and narrative implications of the death penalty between the late Middle Ages and the end of the ancien régime, when the courts of faith dependent on the Papal Curia were active. The project members will analyse a wide range of sources (legal and theological-moral texts, manuals and instructions for judges, medico-legal treatises, collections of sentences, documents of confraternities for the spiritual comfort of convicts, account books, trials for magic spells, chronicles, diaries, avvisi, engravings, paintings, epigraphs, graffiti in court prisons) in order to address and better understand the following issues: how and to what extent the Inquisition applied the death penalty; how it was justified or contested; whether burning was the only way to wipe out the “heretical infection”; what impact the sentences had on families and communities; what political and religious significance this manifestation of ecclesiastical justice had in specific contexts; how the spectacle of public punishment was staged; how the reaction of the crowd was controlled; what fate the remains of the condemned had, what fears they aroused and what use was made of them in magical practices; what memories the death sentences left behind in monuments, iconography, diaries, news sheets and chronicles; how the bloody image of the Inquisition was constructed, and what differences existed between the punitive practice of the Roman Holy Office, that of the secular courts and the more spectacular practice of the Iberian Inquisitions in Europe and the rest of the Catholic world. The research group intends to publish a series of articles on journals and to organise a comparative international conference and a public exhibition on the history of the death penalty. The database that will record the list of victims of the Inquisition in the Italian peninsula will be accompanied by a second database that will aim to catalogue the accounts - handwritten and printed broadsheets - developed around the executions, to allow a better understanding not only of how justice was practised, but also how and why, in some cases, it was narrated.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 277.001 di cui € 170.768 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 73.126 di cui € 54.382 contributo MUR

Periodo: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof. Guido Dall’Olio

Codice progetto: 2022SW2XRF

CUP: H53D23000330006 

The mask between rituality and theatre. Archaeological, literary, historical, anthropological, and performative investigation of material culture in the classical world through Digital Humanities tools with a view to a broader, fairer and more inclusive cultural fruition.

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The project aims to identify the functions of the ancient mask using an interdisciplinary approach. In particular, an investigation into the theatrical mask will be conducted in the context of the anthropology of the stage gesture, based on Roman literary evidence (especially Plautine) and their relationship with the corresponding Greek models. The products of the research will be made available to theater companies and theatrical productions, with whom we intend to plan the staging of two shows to be represented, concurrently with the opening of the planned exhibitions in the Archaeological Area of Lipari Research on classical theatre may also be linked to research on modern and contemporary theatre.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 248.701 di cui € 199.359 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 81.264 di cui € 65.606 contributo MUR

Periodo: 17/10/2023 – 16/10/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof. Roberto Mario Danese

Codice progetto: 2022WSXJC5

CUP: H53D23007140006 

Circulating Populist Sentiments in 21st Century Film and TV Fiction in Italy

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The aim of this project is to study the role played by fictional audiovisual media in cultures of populism, in 21st-century Italy. In past decades, liberal democracies have been threatened by the rise of populist movements, hegemonizing complex social and economic crises through a pattern of recurring, simplified narratives. Key features of this “populist imagination” are: the rhetorical construction and idealization of national “people”; its habitual relationship to a charismatic leader; a social binary between that “people” and a corrupt elite or external enemy; and contempt for traditional political processes. The role of the media in the affirmation of populism has been widely acknowledged: political narratives and audiovisual fiction spread through an interrupted flow in the mediascape. Though much research has been dedicated to the role of the information media, little work has illustrated the extent to which fictional narratives are a crucial actant in the populist mediascape.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 218.672 di cui € 190.459 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 80.253 di cui € 66.571 contributo MUR

Periodo: 17/10/2023 – 16/10/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof. Dominic Francis Graham Holdaway

Codice progetto: 20229B57SX

CUP: H53D23006700006 

Vitruvius’ De Architectura in the Classical and in the Early Modern Age. Philology, Archaeology, Digital Library, and 3D Modelling

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The project focuses on two aspects of Vitruvius De Architectura Libri Decem (first century B.C.): The first aspect, is not to consider it only as a primary source used by Early modern readers, but as a synthesis of what Vitruvius saw and interpreted in terms of Greek Hellenistic and Early Augustan architecture. This distinction allows to investigate on how the Latin architectural theoretician was able to understand and to describe the ancient architecture and how he related to architecture of his time both in terms of active design as an architect and in terms of a proto-architectural criticism and theory. The second aspect of the project is about Vitruvius De Architectura as a source in early modern time, from the editio princeps edited by Sulpicio da Veroli (Rome c. 1486) up to Daniele Barbaro’s (Venice 1556). Historiography tends to consider the De Architectura a monolithic source that, starting from the fifteenth century was read by architects, patrons, and humanists to learn the hidden theory and the logic of the ruins. Early modern editions are seminal for archaeologists, historians of Latin and Italian literature, less so for architectural historians, because they tend to neglect the plurality of the first generations of modern editions filled with mistakes, misinterpretations, and corruptions of the text. This project aims to question the notion of “Vitruvian orthodoxy” claiming that this treatise is not the single link of the chain that connects classical architecture with the modern one, but a much more multifaceted and complex part of a process of transmission of the culture of classical architecture. In so doing De Architectura turns into a device that links at least three different periods of time in the history of architecture: The Pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic period, the Early Augustan period, and the Renaissance.The research group is organized into three units and a sub-unit: The first unit belongs to the University of Bologna coordinated by the P.I., the second unit belongs to Politecnico of Turin. These two units, composed of architectural historians, will be in charge of the philological and textual analysis of a selection of manuscripts and a dozen of printed Renaissance editions. The third unit from the University of Urbino will cover the archaeological part of the project focusing on Temple G at Selinus, Sicily, which features are compatible with Vitruvius’s description of the Doric temple, and the basilica of Fano of which Vitruvius himself claimed to be the architect and the builder. The Sub-unit is the Museo Galileo in Florence which will provide all the support for the digitalization of the data. An innovative database will make it possible to navigate all the Renaissance editions making them comparable in many different ways. This database is the first step in the creation of a digital “Vitruvioteque” displaying all the materials pertaining to Vitruvius, his treatise, and his context.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 257.145 di cui € 200.719 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 86.664 di cui € 59.300 contributo MUR

Periodo: 17/10/2023 – 16/10/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof. Oscar Mei

Codice progetto: 2022PCRLJ9

CUP: H53D23007050006 

Work, workplaces and mobility in preindustrial Italy: a gender perspective

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The research project aims to improve our knowledge of gender dynamics within the workplace in the pre-industrial age, focusing on the Italian peninsula between the 15th and 19th century. The objective is to quantify in which activities and in what percentage women and men were engaged and to reconceptualize of some of the main categories in historical analysis and in the current debate, such as productive/unproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, and domestic/care/non-domestic work. Therefore, the project includes every form of work, be it rewarded with money, non-monetary means, or carried out in compliance with family duties and forms of reciprocity between family members, parents, neighbours. While previous studies have focused mainly on urban areas, this project will also examine the rural context, which it will attempt to quantify through a geo-referenced analysis, owing to the wealth of information available for Italy. Attention will also be paid to short and long-distant mobility. New research will be carried out in the Italian archives, making innovative use of the abundance of information especially in criminal sources. The results will then be compared in a European perspective through a final conference. The project will create a qualitative and a quantitative database using a novel methodology that links the language used, space utilisation, and forms of mobility to accomplish its goals. It will also enable us to broaden the knowledge of the dynamics affecting the world of work in the pre-industrial age by linking gender, work, workplaces and mobility in a comparative and quantitative way for the first time. A long term perspective will offer insight on dynamics that are very important for the current debate, which the outbreak of the pandemic has exacerbated. These include gender discrimination in the workplace, the work done in the domestic sphere, gender roles, and women’s contribution to national income.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 300.030 di cui € 249.472 contributo MUR

Importo totale UniUrb: € 94.662 di cui € 76.566 contributo MUR

Periodo: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente UniUrb: Prof.ssa Raffaella Sarti

Codice progetto: 2022BMSNA3

CUP H53D23000160006 

Federico Barocci in modern sources, from Urbino to Europe: a digital corpus

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The project aims to create a corpus of the documentary, literary and historiographical sources relevant to the activity and the renown of Federico Barocci. All these sources shall be available online, thus developing the innovative opportunities represented for scholars and researchers by digital humanities on a large scale. Thanks to these new methods and techniques the project will create an unprecedented research tool that would bring together a vast amount of archivistic material, now scattered in many different and distant places. It will be possible to organize, to share and make available an incredibly rich, diverse and so far largely unpublished corpus of data, and critical approaches, thus granting its knowledge, multidisciplinary cross dissemination and preservation. The corpus includes the collection of documents, published and unpublished, arranged in chronological order and displayed in transcriptions with a brief apparatus of commentary. The chronological span of the project covers the whole life of the painter, and the first period of his critical reception until 1672, when the most well-known biography of Barocci appeared, in the Vite by Giovan Pietro Bellori. As demonstrated by similar cases (e.g. corpora of Raffaello, Baccio Bandinelli and Rubens) this kind of resources is essential for promoting both basic and specialised research as well as international cooperation. More specifically, the creation of such a tool represents the presupposition on which we can reconstruct Barocci's artistic evolution on solid historical grounds, whereas, to the present day, it is still interpreted on idealised and sentimental grounds, which prevent us from assessing its pivotal role in the history of Italian and European artistic culture between Sixteenth and Seventeenth century. This documentary evidence, in fact, clarifies the painter's biographical events, the development of his activity, his technical and graphical culture, his stylistic evolution, the relationship between paintings and architectural/luministic setting, the patronage of the Della Rovere court and the religious orders of the duchy, the net of relationship between Urbino, Rome, Genoa, Naples and Milan and the Europeans courts, in particular the Hasburg, the dynamics of the diplomacy, the rules and the exceptions of the artistic market. At the same time, the project aims to build an articulated network of knowledge and skills, as it can be created by the employ of digital humanities, which, in cases such as the proposed project, can fully express their potential. It would be an innovative and unique tool also as far as the fruition of the works of the artist preserved in Italian and international museums is concerned, which may contribute to create new opportunities in the field of cultural heritage in their most advanced and international dimension. The corpus offers the opportunity to insert additions and integrations also after the duration of the biennium.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 250.819  di cui contributo MUR € 189.776

Importo totale UniUrb: € 139.264 di cui contributo MUR € 107.776

Periodo: 12/12/2023 – 11/12/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente: Prof.ssa Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari 

Codice Progetto: 2022JTS3XS

CUP: H53D23011530006

Centuries of Transition. Greek Poetry and Music in the Fourth Century BC

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: Within the field of Ancient Greek studies, 4th-century BC poetry and music are generally considered as an intermediate phase, wedged between the ‘golden’ era of the 5th century BC and the major developments of the Hellenistic period. The fragmentary nature of many accounts has conditioned and hampered research on the topic. On closer inspection, however, 4th-century output reveals some distinctive, significant features that had a lasting impact on the history of poetic genres and Greek culture. As some recent publications have shown, it seems increasingly important to redefine the profile of 4th-c. poetry and music; naturally, without ignoring its function as an essential historic and cultural watershed, this redefinition must avoid using value judgments that tend to flatten its interpretation, fundamentally based on (largely negative) comparisons with examples from previous periods and with subsequent output. This project therefore intends to closely analyse the materials that have survived dispersion. We will study the specific details and mutual relationships between the main genres (epic, elegy, iambic and lyric poetry, tragic and comic theatre, carmina epigraphica) and contexts of poetry, along with music theory and practice. The aim is to contribute to: retrieving and identifying personalities and phenomena; understanding the processes of change in poetic and musical forms; reconstructing the conditions of historic production (places, occasions and purposes) and circulation (including performance, early book collections, and monumentalisation through epigraphs); recognising 4th century poetry and music’s unique features and role within the cultural dynamics of Ancient Greece, shaped by tradition and innovation, going beyond stereotypes and preconceptions.

The result will be a synoptic vision of this cultural era, able to hold its own against the most recent trends in international research and make its own contribution with original results and new academic tools. The research will take an interdisciplinary methodological approach that combines the various areas of expertise involved (textual, linguistic, metric and rhythmic, musicological, historic, historic-literary, historic-anthropological and iconographic). To this end, interaction between the different research units is essential and will be enabled by a programme of shared initiatives and regular meetings. The expected outcomes include: editions and commentaries of testimonia and texts; the publication of specialist essays; the organisation of seminars, webinars and a final conference; the creation of a web portal and use of IT tools that will provide crucial support, not least to enable a widespread and indeed necessary dissemination of the research results in a way that is accessible to the non-academic community.

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 296.697 di cui contributo MUR € 190.376

Importo totale Uniurb: € 71.849 di cui contributo MUR € 45.943

Periodo: 12/12/2023 – 11/12/2025

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente: Prof.ssa Liana Lomiento 

Codice Progetto: 20227H5JF2

CUP: H53D23011480006

Loyalty and disloyalty to the Italian Republic. The difficult path towards the construction of a democratic citizenship

Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: The research project intends to analyse the theme "Loyalty and disloyalty to the Italian Republic", between the end of WWII and the 1990s. In fact, throughout these decades, various moments have arisen in which individuals, political groups and sectors of the institutions have implemented conduct that contradicted the duties of loyalty to the Republic and observance of its laws (Art. 54 Const). The main reasons behind the "disloyalty" were charges against the Republic of not respecting founding values of the Constitution; perceiving it as expression of the interests of the wealthy classes, focused only on their own privileges; the belief that Republican institutions were unable to protect the "true" interest of the nation.The still little explored topic, for an innovative approach, requires the questioning of some consolidated interpretations. For a long time, an important part of the historiography has narrated the history of the country, and of the Republic, in a predominantly negative way. A story, told in a succession of failure or missed opportunity.Examples are the formulas that have marked much of the debate on the most dramatic moments of national life: the unfinished Risorgimento, the Mutilated Victory, the betrayed Resistance, the unfulfilled Constitution and the massacres in the 70s that were left unpunished. The innovative dimension of the research lies in the intention of starting from the accusations of disloyalty and from the claims of loyalty to the Republic, to go beyond the ideological oppositions and analyse the complex process of building a democratic citizenship. To this end, the following areas will be considered: 1. Discussions on the concept of loyalty/disloyalty in the formation and development of the Constitution; 2. The intricate relationship between forms of disloyalty to the Republic, and defence of the values of the Constitution, in the world of youth protest between the 60s and 70s, in the galaxy of the anti-mafia, and among former Italian colonial settlers, divided between nostalgia for the imperial past, and recovery of the relationship with post-fascist Italy; 3. Tensions within military institutions, split between isolated subversive tendencies and a majority loyal to the institutions; 4. The variegated world of pacifism, which by disobeying the laws in force, considered to be in contradiction with certain constitutional principles, laid the foundations for the future recognition of fundamental civil rights. The research intends to focus on the dialectic between divisive and constructive elements in the history of republican Italy; not erasing the shadows, but not necessarily making them the center and the end of the story. In other words, we want to explore the difficult path toward the construction of the Republic which, despite deep contrasts, has seen loyalty and dedication to some common values that have been and still are the basis of democratic coexistence grow and consolidate. 

Importo totale del finanziamento: € 293.768 di cui contributo MUR € 172.743

Importo totale Uniurb: € 72.626 di cui contributo MUR € 52.709

Periodo: 04/02/2025 – 03/02/2027

Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento Scienze della Comunicazione, Studi Umanistici e Internazionali (DISCUI) 

Referente: Prof.ssa Anna Tonelli 

Codice Progetto: 2022JNZ4S8

CUP: H53C24001440006