Nell'ombra di Dio

In March 2017, the Fondazione Corrente in Milan hosted a round of "Esthetic Conversations" every Wednesday, organized by Roberto Diodato, Elio Franzini, Fulvio Papi and Gabriele Scaramuzza. The cycle ended with a meeting held by Gabriele Scaramuzza and Sabrina Peron, titled The Remains of God, during which the theme of God's existence in the world of culture was tackled, starting from the reflection of the unthinkability of this World without cathedrals, prayer, religious practices, and treatises of theology. Moving from the philosophy of Banfi's religion, confrontation has widened to broader reflections that included Dostoevsky, Mann, Bulgakov and Yourcenar, and the eternal conflict between good and evil. This work is my report to the conference, while Gabriele Scaramuzza's presentation is being published in Filosofia e Teologia

Blu di Prussia

By virtue of an accidental discovery, Prussian Blue has the honor of being the first synthetic pigment created by man. His story is interlaced with the lives of chemists, philosophers, writers and with the eternal question of evil and human stupidity

Hillesum o dell'altruismo estremo

In the Westerbork prison camp Etty Hillesum makes a choice of freedom based on irreducibility of the human being: an irreducibility from every act, fact, human or divine instance - and, even, to every more or less founded value, that is not the human being himsel

Tra tutti questi angoli mi sento in prigione

Recensione: Lucia Berlin, La donna che scriveva racconti, a cura di Stephen Emerson, traduzione di Federica Aceto, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2016, pp. 460, €18,50. Titolo originale: A Manual for Cleaning Woman. Selected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015.Lucia Berlin (12 novembre 1936, Juneau, Alaska, Stati Uniti - 12 novembre 2004, Marina del Rey, California, Stati Uniti), nella sua vita ha pubblicato 77 racconti in tre volumi (Homesick [1991], So Long [1993], Where I Live Now [1999]), la maggior parte dei quali oggi raccolti in A Manual for Cleaning Woman. Selected Stories, appena pubblicato in Italia da Bollati Boringhieri col titolo La donna che scriveva racconti.

Prometeo o della rupe

The myth of Prometeo is proposed by Kafka in four circular versions that from the betrayal to the grief, they merge in the forgetfulness and end in the inexplicable. Inexplicable as the leaving, the suffering and the destiny of the men, of which Prometeo is friend and accomplice.Keywords: Kafka; Prometheus; Myth; Grief

Bellezza del Manifesto di Ventotene

In March 2019, a series of Aesthetic Conversations on "European Souls" was held at the Fondazione Corrente in Milan. This article is my report to one of the conversations dedicated to the birth of the idea of ​​a free and united Europe, in a small island of confinement, during one of the darkest and most dramatic pages in human history

On the gamma-ray emission of W44 and its surroundings

We present the analysis of 9.7 years Fermi-LAT data of the middle-aged supernova remnant W44 and the massive molecular gas complex that surrounds it. We derived a high-quality spectral energy distribution of gamma-radiation of the shell over three decades. The very hard spectrum below 1 GeV supports the earlier claims regarding the hadronic origin of radiation. We also confirm the presence of two extended $\gamma$-ray structures located at two opposite edges of the remnant along its major axis. Based on the high-resolution gas maps, we demonstrate that the gamma-ray structures are caused by the enhanced cosmic-ray density rather than the gradient of the gas distribution. We argue that the revealed cosmic-ray "clouds" suggest an anisotropic character of the escape of high-energy particles from the shell along the magnetic field of the remnant

Probing the Cosmic Ray density in the inner Galaxy

The galactic diffuse $\gamma$-ray emission, as seen by Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), shows a sharp peak in the region around 4 kpc from the Galactic center, which can be interpreted either as due to an enhanced density of cosmic-ray accelerators or to a modification of the particle diffusion in that region. Observations of $\gamma$-rays originating in molecular clouds are a unique tool to infer the cosmic-ray density point by point, in distant regions of the Galaxy. We report here the analysis of 11 yr Fermi-LAT data, obtained in the direction of nine molecular clouds located in the 1.5--4.5 kpc region. The cosmic-ray density measured at the locations of these clouds is compatible with the locally measured one. We demonstrate that the cosmic-ray density gradient inferred from the diffuse gamma-ray emission is the result of the presence of cosmic-ray accelerators rather than a global change of the sea of Galactic cosmic rays due to their propagation