Multiculturalism and time in Trieste: Place-marketing images and residents' perceptions of a multicultural city

This paper discusses how people encounter marketed images of places in order to explore whether place-marketing images are always seen as misrepresentations. As part of this, I question whether people always 'read' into place-marketing images the meanings inscribed by marketers, and I attend to the various dimensions of time that people draw on when articulating their views of their place's marketed identity. Using Trieste as a case study, I consider how a group of thirty-one residents perceived their city's 'multicultural character' as it was advertised during the bid for the 2008 World Expo and show that while the respondents did not read into Trieste's marketed multicultural image the meanings that the marketers intended, the interviewees largely supported Trieste's advertised image. I discuss how the evocation of specific temporalities (historical past, present and 'timeless') affected how the respondents articulated their views about Trieste's multiculturalism. I also explain why Trieste's marketed multicultural image captured the imaginations of the majority of the respondents

Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place

Lingotto used to be an important industrial site and a highly symbolic space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memories, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the last decades, following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s. The analysis shows that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin’s resilience strategies used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Furthermore, it shows how Lingotto is a highly resilient urban fragment and building. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve and stage local urban heritages, this paper offers an account of Lingotto’s resilience, which highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis of the evolution of Lingotto thus contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city, stressing the ambiguous role of the often-implicit politics of forgetting and amnesia in a framework of urban resilience

Breed contra beef: The making of Piedmontese cattle

In the spring of 2014, one of the authors (Paolo) was visiting the Green Market on Union Square, NYC, one of the most renowned farmers’ markets in the United States, performing a direct connection between producers and consumers of food, allegedly alternative to the mass retail channel (Tiemann, 2008), but also promoting what Sharon Zukin terms, from a critical standpoint, ‘the consumption of authenticity’ (2008). Exactly in the middle of the square, a farmer from Pennsylvania displayed a sign to attract customers claiming ‘Piedmontese Only’. Less than half a mile away, on Madison Square, at Eataly – the sumptuous sanctuary of ‘high-quality’ Italian food – the sophisticated New York consumer could already purchase a taste of Piedmontese beef at the butcher’s counter and at the Manzo restaurant (literally ‘beef’ in Italian) since the opening of the food mall, on 30 August 2010. The Piedmontese was officially recognized as a cattle breed in the 1850s. In 1996 it became the first presidium established by Slow Food in Bra, Piedmont.1 Its beef is now well renowned among gastronomists and listed in Michelin-starred restaurants (NAPA, 2010, p.6) and it is Eataly’s official beef in Italy and the US. But, what is, exactly, the link connecting these moments and places and which establishes a relationship between an apparently endangered cattle breed in the motherland of Slow Food and the sophisticated consumption practices of the world elites in New York City? La Granda, in its twofold role as a sociocultural and economic actor, provides the most obvious nexus, which articulates the connection between the past and present of the Piedmontese breed and the refined New York City cosmopolitan consumer. La Granda is the name of the Slow Food presidium of the Piedmontese breed founded by veterinarian Sergio Capaldo in 1996 to summon a small number of breeders and preserve the rearing of this apparently endangered cattle breed. La Granda Trasformazione is the meat-processing company, owned by Capaldo and Eataly’s founder Oscar Farinetti, established in 2004 to supply the Italian branches of the food mall with premium Piedmontese beef directly from the Slow Food presidium (Colombino and Giaccaria, 2013a).2 La Granda, rather obviously, does not directly supply the beef for Eataly New York. The beef sold at the butcher counter and used to cook at Manzo’s is more simply called ‘Piedmontese’ and is supplied by North American companies. The breed has in fact been reared in the US since 1979.3 However, La Granda and its founder play a key role in maintaining the consortium’s original quality conventions (Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006) – fixed and codified by the disciplinare di produzione (specifications of production), the document that establishes how exactly the cattle must be farmed, including strict rules on fodder and hygiene – by organizing workshops and training for Eataly’s butchers. Importantly, as we claim in this chapter, La Granda is only the final outcome of a contested process, originated in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, which has radically modified the political ecology of the Piedmontese breed. In this chapter, we ‘follow’ (Cook et al., 2006) the Piedmontese starting with a peculiar event that took place in 1886 in Guarene d’Alba, a small locality in the province of Cuneo (in Piedmont, Northern Italy) and ending on the butcher’s counter at Eataly, in contemporary New York City. In discussing some of the spatio-temporal trajectories of the Piedmontese, we bring to light the process that undergirds the transformation of a specific morphological feature – known today as the ‘double muscle factor’, and appearing randomly in some animals of this bovine population in the second half of the nineteenth century – from a (monstrous) anomaly to be eliminated into a key trait to be preserved. Consistently with a political ecology/actor-network theory approach (Bennett, 2010; Latour, 1999), we show how the current status of the Piedmontese, as a cattle breed that produces what is marketed as premium beef, is not a reflection of the animal’s genetic characteristics (see Holloway et al., 2011; Morris and Holloway, 2013). Rather, it is a matter of ‘natureculture’ (Haraway 2008; see also Latimer and Miele, 2013), that is the result of the complicated negotiations among veterinarians, livestock technicians, farmers and butchers, which have taken place from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day. This chapter is structured into three parts. First, we follow the development of the making of the Piedmontese breed from 1886 until the late 1950s. We bring into light how an intense and heated debate between experts and breeders focused on the ‘nature’ of the breed. Second, we move on to discuss how this contested negotiation between academics and practitioners eventually ‘fixed’ the purpose and ‘nature’ of the Piedmontese as a breed for meat, through the inclusion in this bovine population of animals previously constructed as ‘anomalies’, and the exclusion of other animals beforehand considered as ‘normal’. The last part of this chapter deals with the shifting status of the Piedmontese breed from an apparently endangered local animal species in the mid-1990s into a food specialty for the cosmopolitan consumer in contemporary New York

Cibo e biopolitica

La biopolitica rappresenta una chiave di lettura utile ad analizzare le modalità di potere, le tecnologie, i discorsi e le pratiche mirate a plasmare vita biologica (zoé) e quella socioculturale (bios) sia degli individui che delle popolazioni. Il cibo rappresenta una problematica biopolitica per almeno tre motivi principali: si tratta anzi tutto di un elemento di origine biologica; in secondo luogo, inteso come nutrimento, il cibo sostiene sia la vita biologica che quella culturale (come mezzo di socializzazione usato dagli esseri umani e dalle istituzioni); infine, il suo consumo è legato alla salute fisica ed economica delle popolazioni

Effects of Tenebrio molitor larvae meal inclusion in rainbow trout feed: myogenesis-related gene expression and histomorphological features

The effects of Tenebrio molitor larvae meal (TM) dietary inclusion in rainbow trout diet were evaluated on muscular growth using gene expression and histomorphological features of liver, spleen, kidney, anterior and posterior gut through histopathological analyses. Two hundred fifty-two grow-out rainbow trout were fed four experimental diets containing increasing levels of TM: 0% (TM0), 5% (TM25), 10% (TM50), and 20% (TM100) corresponding to different levels of fish meal replacement (0, 25, 50, and 100%, respectively). Muscular growth was evaluated analysing the expression of various genes involved in different steps of myogenesis. Among the analysed genes, only MyoD expression resulted significantly higher in fish fed TM100 compared to fish fed TM0. The gut histomorphology was not affected by TM dietary inclusion and villus height differs from anterior and posterior segments regardless of the fed diet. Histopathological alterations were observed in all the sampled organs for all the dietary treatments; however, dietary TM inclusion did not influence either development or severity of the observed histopathological changes. The results obtained confirmed the safe utilisation of TM as an alternative protein source in rainbow trout diets and highlighted the necessity to deepen the studies of TM effect on the myogenesis process, especially at a molecular level.Highlights Rainbow trout can effectively be fed with a TM protein source. Total FM substitution by TM (TM100) decreased MyoD gene expression. Increasing TM dietary inclusion did not influence gut histomorphology

Unusual localization of pennella sp. In swordfish (xiphias gladius) hearts

The genus Pennella comprises hematophagous parasites of marine aquatic species, including cephalopods, marine mammals, and pelagic fish. Nine species have been officially included in the genus Pennella plus another six species inquirendae. They are most often found in the host’s musculature, without penetrating internal organs. For the present study, 83 hearts from swordfish (Xiphias gladius) caught in the Mediterranean Sea were sampled and immediately fixed in formalin for histopathological analysis. In total, 10 (12.05%) hearts were found to be parasitized by copepods of the genus Pennella. Macroscopically, there was mild-to-severe fibrinous pericarditis with atrial wall thickening and multiple parasitic nodules. Histologically, the parasitic nodules were surrounded by an inflammatory-necrotizing reaction. Parasitic infestation by Pennella spp. is common in pelagic fish and in swordfish, in particular. Here, however, we report atypical cardiac localization. A future area of focus is the evaluation of cardiac Pennella spp. infestation by histopathology and genetic identification of the parasites

Definition of the role of chromosome 9p21 in sporadic melanoma through genetic analysis of primary tumours and their metastases

Malignant melanoma (MM) is thought to arise by sequential accumulation of genetic alterations in normal melanocytes. Previous cytogenetic and molecular studies indicated the 9p21 as the chromosomal region involved in MM pathogenesis. In addition to the CDKN genes (p16/CDKN2A, p15/CDKN2B and p19ARF, frequently inactivated in familial MM), widely reported data suggested the presence within this region of other melanoma susceptibility gene(s). To clearly assess the role of the 9p21 region in sporadic melanoma, we evaluated the presence of microsatellite instability (MSI) and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in primary tumours as well as in synchronous or asynchronous metastases obtained from the same MM patients, using 9 polymorphic markers from a 17-cM region at 9p21. LOH and MSI were found in 27 (41%) and 11 (17%), respectively, out of 66 primary tumours analysed. In corresponding 58 metastases, MSI was found at higher rate (22; 38%), whereas a quite identical pattern of allelic deletions with 27 (47%) LOH+ cases were observed. Although the CDKN locus was mostly affected by LOH, an additional region of common allelic deletion corresponding to marker D9S171 was also identified. No significant statistical correlation between any 9p21 genetic alteration (LOH, MSI or both) and clinicopathological parameters was observed. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer.co