Itinerari della fede in Sicilia con un'analisi della comunicazione online

Itineraries of Faith in Sicily. With an analysis of the online communication - Facing the ongoing strong growth of religious tourism, the Sicilian Region has funded the development of diverse religious itineraries, aiming at offering new tourism opportunities. These itineraries encompass places already popular within other kinds of tourists, gathering them along dedicated routes embracing sacred places, sanctuaries, ceremonies, celebrations and traditional rituals. This paper aims at analyzing the tourist experience of travelers, tourists and pilgrims through the detection of the traces of their experiences they left online, namely on the Internet. Travelers while using web tools are actually building relationships with actors of tourism, telling the value of destinations to their social networks, providing the key for interpreting the travel experience and tourist product. Doing this, they actually provide a way for identifying effective tools for interpreting the practical components of the tourism activity, thus contributing to the co-creation of final products. A sound consideration of even few qualitative elements, i.e. the small-data interpreting, becomes crucial to activate the co-creation processes, allowing tourist operators to design the proper tourist product, by managing the whole marketing strategy, and not only defining promotional goals of tourist destinations and products

EFFECTS OF SHIFT WORK ON CARDIOVASCULAR ACTIVITY, SERUM CORTISOL AND WHITE BLOOD CELLS COUNT IN A GROUP OF ITALIAN FISHERMEN

We analyzed the effects of working activity and working shifts on the circadian rhythmicity and circadian phase relations of serum cortisol level, white blood cells count, resting heart rate and systolic/diastolic blood pressure in a group of italian fishermen. We observed a shift-induced displacement of cortisol secretion and a modification in leukocyte count. Moreover, systolic/diastolic blood pressure and resting heart rate were markedly influenced by the night shift, whereas no appreciable changes were observed after the morning and afternoon shifts, compared to pre-working values. These data suggest that the human circadian system is greatly influenced by shift work, and serum cortisol level, leukocyte count, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and resting heart rate are sensitive indicators of the biological responses to a stress workload in shift workers, especially after a night shif

Saint Agatha Religious Festival in Catania: Stakeholders’ Functions and Relations

The purpose of the paper is to develop an explorative analysis of the functions and relations among actors involved in the organization and implementation of the Saint Agatha Religious Festival in Catania attracting nearly one million presences during the first week of February. The research is based on the survey of different sources of information, such as literature, news, media, and deep interviews with key informants pertaining to civil and religious institutions. The survey is designed to profile the Festival in terms of history, the character of the stakeholders, size, origin of assets, venues used, decision-making structure, and programs. The Festival’s use of volunteers and sponsors is specifically addressed. Empirical research sketches the network of stakeholders, the relationship between organizations, the importance of local social actors and strategies in enhancing local culture and sustainable tourism, regarding, in particular, the socio-cultural impacts of religious tourism. The local society has historical peculiarities which impose prudential considerations in generalizing about findings, and a comparative study with other Sicilian and/or Italian religious festivals will be important, mainly in order to delineate the actual sustainability of Festivals. The framework developed in this study can be helpful in the application of local social policies and also help comparative festival studies

New Frontiers on Seismic Modeling of Masonry Structures

An accurate evaluation of the non-linear behavior of masonry structural elements in existing buildings still represents a complex issue that rigorously requires non-linear finite element strategies difficult to apply to real large structures. Nevertheless, for the static and seismic assessment of existing structures, involving the contribution of masonry materials, engineers need reliable and efficient numerical tools, whose complexity and computational demand should be suitable for practical purposes. For these reasons, the formulation and the validation of simplified numerical strategies represent a very important issue in masonry computational research. In this paper, an innovative macroelement approach, developed by the authors in the last decade, is presented. The proposed macroelement formulation is based on different, plane and spatial, macroelements for the simulation of both the in-plane and out-of-plane behavior of masonry structures also in presence of masonry elements with curved geometry. The mechanical response of the adopted macroelement is governed by non-linear zero-thickness interfaces, whose calibration follows a straightforward fiber discretization, and the non-linear internal shear deformability is ruled by equivalence with a corresponding geometrically consistent homogenized medium. The approach can be considered as "parsimonious" since the kinematics of the adopted elements is controlled by very few degrees of freedom, if compared to a corresponding discretization performed by using non-linear finite element method strategies. This innovative discrete element strategy has been implemented in two user-oriented software codes 3DMacro (Caliò et al., 2012b) and HiStrA (Historical Structures Analysis) (Caliò et al., 2015), which simplify the modeling of buildings and historical structures by means of several wizard generation tools and input/output facilities. The proposed approach, that represents a powerful tool for the structural assessment of structures in which the masonry plays a key role, is here validated against experimental results involving typical masonry monumental substructural elements and numerical results involving real-scale structures

A procedure for the identification of multiple cracks on beams and frames by static measurements

In this work, a model of the Euler-Bernoulli beam in presence of multiple-concentrated open cracks, based on the adoption of a localized flexibility model, is adopted. The closed-form solution in terms of transversal displacements due to static loads and general boundary condition is exploited to propose an inverse damage identification procedure. The proposed identification procedure does not require any solution algorithm, on the contrary is formulated by means of simple explicit sequential expressions for the crack positions and intensities including the identification of the integration constants. The number of possible detected cracks depends on the couples of adopted sensors. Undamaged beam zones can also be easily detected in relation to the sensor positions. The analytical character of the explicit expressions of the identification procedure makes the inverse formulation applicable to damaged beams included in more complex frame structures. The proposed procedure is applied for the identification of the number, position, and intensity of the cracks along simple straight beams and also to more complex frame structures with the aim of showing its simplicity for engineering applications. In addition, the robustness of the methodology here described is shown through an accurate analysis of the basic assumptions on which the theory relies and by means of a study of the effect of noise on the identification results

Potenzialità e criticità dell’Area Marina Protetta Isole Ciclopi

Abstract Potentialities and Criticalities of the Isole Ciclopi Marine Protected Area The paper analyses the Isole Ciclopi Marine Protected Area facing the hamlet of Aci Trezza within the municipality of Aci Castello in the Province of Catania, Italy. It aims to describe emerging potential and critical issues, posing the question of which actors are involved in the governance. Employing a qualitative methodology, the research revealed that the main problem is the non-implementation of the so-called command-and-control method. After establishing rules and prohibitions, resources for control and imposition of sanctions are lacking. A positive note is the increase in youth volunteer activities of cleaning the sea from plastics, showing a sound interest in the environmental education proposed by cultural and environmental associations

Retail in Sicily: an Overall View

In Sicily, the retail sector shows changes both from a structural point of view, with an increase in large-scale distribution at the expense of small businesses, and spatially, through the transfer of many commercial activities to the suburbs of cities or to extra-urban areas. This is a phenomenon that can also be observed in the rest of the country. The analysis of the most recent statistics in the sector, however, seems to highlight a significant flexibility of a part of the fabric of Sicilian commercial enterprises due to the widespread presence of small commercial businesses on the regional territory

Preservation of Abandoned Historic Centres — The Case of Poggioreale antica (Sicily)

Among the fourteen towns most damaged by the earthquake that struck western Sicily in 1968, Poggioreale was subjected to total relocation a few kilometres away, and to the transfer of its whole population. More than half a century later, the damaged settlement is still largely recognisable and has been experiencing a new season of interest for some years now, both from the local community and various kinds of outsiders who imagine economic spin-offs of an uncertain nature in its enhancement. The research we present questions the chance of survival for the settlement, forgotten for decades, in the context of interventions aimed at its reuse. Alternative strategies are discussed: on the one hand, that of bringing the ancient centre back to life, even in part, with a limited inclusion of collective functions and without claiming to inhabit it again; on the other hand, and in the authors’ opinion, more likely, that of reusing the ruins as an archaeological area preserving their memory in a different form. In either case, the kinds of operations to be carried out on the body of the ancient buildings for their physical preservation play a key role. These issues are addressed as a whole through the canonical procedure of correlating the phases of knowledge, interpretation, and definition of minimal and compatible intervention criteria