Pietas, Veritas, Camino Iniciático y Triunfo: la apertura humanista de Gioanna da Piacenza en los frescos de Alessandro Araldi

42 p. : il.-- Bibliogr.: p.39-42El presente estudio nos introduce en el análisis iconográfico de la llamada Camera (Estancia) de los grutescos, decorada con frescos por el pintor parmesano Alessandro Araldi (1460 ca – 1528) y cuya fecha de realización se remonta al 1514, como se deduce de la fecha del epígrafe puesto en el friso de la chimenea, ubicada en la pared norte de dicha habitación. El espacio se sitúa en el interior del que fuera conocido como Monasterio de San Paolo en la ciudad de Parma, capital de la provincia homónima en Emilia-Romagna (Italia). Este antiguo monasterio benedictino, en la actualidad visitable como espacio museal, gozó de su esplendor artístico a principios del siglo XVI, coincidiendo con el nombramiento de Gioanna de Piacenza como abadesa (1407-1424) del cenobio femenino. La Camera del Araldi es parte del conjunto de los apartamentos privados de la abadesa, y adyacente a la más célebre Camera de San Paolo, pintada por Antonio Allegri da Correggio en 1519. La decoración ofrece una lograda simbiosis de la maniera antigua y moderna, cubre la bóveda entera y desarrolla un ciclo pictórico de episodios extraídos del Antiguo y del Nuevo Testamento, a lado de otras representaciones simbólico-alegóricas, fruto del afán humanista de la abadesa Gioanna: ella estaba en continuo contacto con los círculos intelectuales abiertos a la literatura, al teatro y la escultura clásica, presentes en la ciudad emiliana y más extensamente en el norte de Italia. El mensaje iconográfico de la bóveda se desarrolla sobre un fondo azul oscuro del cual parece brotar un intricado sistema de grutescos, candelabros, seres imaginarios y elementos vegetales, permeados de una tonalidad prevalentemente dorada o blanquecina. La obra de Alessandro Araldi es el inequivocable testimonio de que la sintaxis “a la antigua” de los grutescos, de la que tenemos ejemplos en Roma ya desde las dos últimas décadas del siglo XV, experimentó una rápida difusión en el resto de Italia. No obstante, pondremos de relieve el profundo significado doctrinal y alegórico contenido en los doce lunetos, ocho recuadros y cuatro tondos de la bóveda e intentaremos demostrar que la guía espiritual de dicho conjunto de frescos fue la audaz abadesa Gioanna da Piacenza

Sustainable Urban Areas for 2030 in a Post-Covid-19 Scenario: Focus on Innovative Research and Funding Frameworks to Boost Transition towards 100 Positive Energy Districts and 100 Climate-Neutral Cities

Cities generate about 85% of the EU’s GDP. As such, they are key players in shaping and providing technological and social innovations but also environmental impact. Thus, they must urgently engage in unprecedented systemic transformational and bold transitions towards sustainability and climate neutrality. The contribution—taking into account that the concepts of community resilience and urban transition have changed as a consequence of COVID-19—critically discusses innovative frameworks and funding opportunities that Horizon Europe will put in place to boost sustainable urban areas in Europe, driving a transition to 100 Positive Energy Districts and 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030

An educational experience in ancient Rome to evaluate the impact of virtual reality on human learning processes

Immersive Virtual Reality technology has recently gained significant attention and is expanding its applications to various fields. It also has many advantages in education, as it allows to both simplify the explanation of complex topics through their visualization, and explore lost or unreachable environments. To evaluate the impact of immersive experiences on learning outcomes we developed an educational experience that lets users visit an ancient Roman Domus and provides information about daily life in Roman times. We designed a between-subjects data collection to investigate learning ratio, user experience, and cybersickness of participants through anonymous questionnaires. We collected 76 responses of participants (18–35 y.o.) divided into three conditions: a Immersive Virtual Reality experience, a slide-based lecture and a 2D desktop-based experience. Our results show that the virtual reality experience is considered more engaging and as effective as more traditional 2D and slide-based experiences in terms of learning

Extraction of antibacterial active compounds from dry leaves of African plants of the Combretaceae family

The dry leaves of two African plants of the Combretaceae family, furnished by the botanist of the St. Jean de Dieu hospital of Tangueita (Benin, central Africa),were extracted with a sequence of 5 solvents with increasing polarity (from cyclohexane to water).The raw materials, obtained from these extractions following solvent evaporations, were tested for antibiotic activity against gram negative and gram positive bacterial strains. According to the results of a modified Kirby-Bauer test, no promising effect was obtained against Gram negative bacteria while interesting dose-effect activities were observed against Gram positive strains. In particular, from G. senegalensis active compounds were found in the low polarity extract (dichloromethane) which, at a concentration of 800 μg/disk (13 mm diameter disk), resulted in a grow inhibition crown of 4.7 mm and 2.6 mm on Enterococcus faecalis and Staphylococcus aureus MSSA, respectively. An higher amount of the aqueous extract (4760 μg/disk) also produced a good result as 5.7 mm and 5.0 mm crowns were observed. The extracts from C. micranthum showed an inhibiting effect in the more polar extracts (i.e. from ethanol and water) which gave 1 mm of grow inhibition crown on both strains at a concentration of 1000 μg/disk. The most promising extract from each plant was partially purified and then tested on some clinical relevant bacterial strains: S. aureus MRSA, Clostridium difficile, Streptococcus pyogenes, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Corynebacterium striatum, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Haemophylus influenzae, Escherichia coli, obtaining a good killing effects on the Gram positive bacteria of the panel

Strategies for preventing group B streptococcal infections in newborns: A nation-wide survey of Italian policies

Background: There are no Italian data regarding the strategies for preventing neonatal group B streptococcal (GBS) infection. We conducted a national survey in order to explore obstetrical, neonatal and microbiological practices for the GBS prevention. Methods: Three distinct questionnaires were sent to obstetricians, neonatologists and microbiologists. Questionnaires included data on prenatal GBS screening, maternal risk factors, intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis, microbiological information concerning specimen processing and GBS antimicrobial susceptibility. Results: All respondent obstetrical units used the culture-based screening approach to identify women who should receive intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis, and more than half of the microbiological laboratories (58%) reported using specimen processing consistent with CDC guidelines. Most neonatal units (89 out of 107, 82%) reported using protocols for preventing GBS early-onset sepsis consistent with CDC guidelines. Conclusions: The screening-based strategy is largely prevalent in Italy, and most protocols for preventing GBS early-onset sepsis are consistent with CDC guidelines. However, we found discrepancies in practices among centers that may reflect the lack of Italian guidelines issued by public health organizations

Unsupervised neural networks as a support tool for pathology diagnosis in MALDI-MSI experiments:A case study on thyroid biopsies

Artificial intelligence is getting a foothold in medicine for disease screening and diagnosis. While typical machine learning methods require large labeled datasets for training and validation, their application is limited in clinical fields since ground truth information can hardly be obtained on a sizeable cohort of patients. Unsupervised neural networks - such as Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) - represent an alternative approach to identifying hidden patterns in biomedical data. Here we investigate the feasibility of SOMs for the identification of malignant and non-malignant regions in liquid biopsies of thyroid nodules, on a patient-specific basis. MALDI-ToF (Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization -Time of Flight) mass spectrometry-imaging (MSI) was used to measure the spectral profile of bioptic samples. SOMs were then applied for the analysis of MALDI-MSI data of individual patients' samples, also testing various pre-processing and agglomerative clustering methods to investigate their impact on SOMs' discrimination efficacy. The final clustering was compared against the sample's probability to be malignant, hyperplastic or related to Hashimoto thyroiditis as quantified by multinomial regression with LASSO. Our results show that SOMs are effective in separating the areas of a sample containing benign cells from those containing malignant cells. Moreover, they allow to overlap the different areas of cytological glass slides with the corresponding proteomic profile image, and inspect the specific weight of every cellular component in bioptic samples. We envision that this approach could represent an effective means to assist pathologists in diagnostic tasks, avoiding the need to manually annotate cytological images and the effort in creating labeled datasets

Infections after Allogenic Transplant with Post-Transplant Cyclophosphamide: Impact of Donor HLA Matching

ABSTRACT Incidence and outcome of infections after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) with post-transplant cyclophosphamide (PT-Cy) as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) prophylaxis are largely unknown. Study aims were to estimate the incidence of pre-engraftment bloodstream infections (PE-BSIs) and viral infections (VIs; cytomegalovirus [CMV], adenovirus [ADV], human herpes virus 6 [HHV6], and BK-polyomavirus hemorrhagic-cystitis [BKPyV-HC]), their predictive factors, and infection-related mortality (IRM) after HSCT with PT-Cy. We analyzed 235 patients: 62%, 21%, and 17% received haploidentical (haplo), matched-unrelated donor (MUD), and matched-related donor, respectively. Overall, 72 patients had 77 PE-BSI episodes at a median time of 13 days after HSCT: cumulative incidence function (CIF) at 28 days was 32%, without differences among donor types (P = .988). By multivariate analysis, CIF of PE-BSI was higher in patients with severe neutropenia before HSCT (adjusted hazard ratio [AHR] = 2.90) and in multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria rectal carriers (AHR = 2.68). IRM at 30 days was 5%, without differences by donor type (P = .106). Overall, 208 patients experienced ≥1 VIs (first occurrence among CMV, HHV6, ADV, BKPyV-HC) at a median time of 20 days after HSCT: CIF at 90 days was 91%, significantly higher in MUD and haplo (P = .0089). By multivariate analysis, also acute GVHD grade ≥2 (AHR = 1.32) and host/donor CMV-serology mismatch (positive/positive versus negative/negative: AHR = 2.95, positive/negative versus negative/negative: AHR = 2.41, negative/positive versus negative/negative: AHR = 2.35) affected VIs occurrence. IRM at 180 days was 8%, without differences among donor types (P = .106). In conclusion, study results did not show a significant impact of donor type on PE-BSI incidence; conversely, MUD and haploidentical transplants retained a higher occurrence of VIs in the early phase after HSCT

Surgical site infection after caesarean section. Space for post-discharge surveillance improvements and reliable comparisons

Surgical site infections (SSI) after caesarean section (CS) represent a substantial health system concern. Surveying SSI has been associated with a reduction in SSI incidence. We report the findings of three (2008, 2011 and 2013) regional active SSI surveillances after CS in community hospital of the Latium region determining the incidence of SSI. Each CS was surveyed for SSI occurrence by trained staff up to 30 post-operative days, and association of SSI with relevant characteristics was assessed using binomial logistic regression. A total of 3,685 CS were included in the study. A complete 30 day post-operation follow-up was achieved in over 94% of procedures. Overall 145 SSI were observed (3.9% cumulative incidence) of which 131 (90.3%) were superficial and 14 (9.7%) complex (deep or organ/space) SSI; overall 129 SSI (of which 89.9% superficial) were diagnosed post-discharge. Only higher NNIS score was significantly associated with SSI occurrence in the regression analysis. Our work provides the first regional data on CS-associated SSI incidence, highlighting the need for a post-discharge surveillance which should assure 30 days post-operation to not miss data on complex SSI, as well as being less labour intensive