Fermentation in Italy

As Bluetongue virus (BTV) spread in Italy following its first incursion in 2000, it soon became apparent that, besides Culicoides imicola, additional species of the subgenus Avaritia were involved as vectors, namely one or more of the species that belong to the so-called 'Culicoides obsoletus group', which comprises C. dewulfi, C. chiopterus, C. obsoletus sensu stricto, C. scoticus and C. montanus; the three last named species are considered generally as forming the Obsoletus complex. This study presents the findings made over the last decade and more, within the Italian entomological surveillance program for Bluetongue. It describes the integrated morphological and molecular approach used to identify the species of the 'C. obsoletus group', maps in detail their relative abundances and geographic ranges in Italy, clarifies the hitherto unknown comparative seasonal abundances of C. obsoletus s.s. and C. scoticus in a site in Central Italy, and provides further details on the potential vector status of five species of the 'C. obsoletus group', with emphasis on C. obsoletus s.s., C. scoticus and C. montanus. Unlike the situation in Northern Europe, Culicoides dewulfi and C. chiopterus are uncommon to rare in Italy. In contrast, the Obsoletus complex occurs abundantly throughout Italy, with C. obsoletus s.s. being the most prevalent and ecologically adaptive of the three species making up the complex. A longitudinal study conducted at a site in Central Italy revealed that: (i) species of the Obsoletus complex prefer horses to sheep; (ii) their parity rates range from 10% (March) to 56% (November); (iii) throughout the year C. scoticus is consistently more abundant than C. obsoletus s.s.; (iv) abundances in both, C. obsoletus s.s. and C. scoticus, peak in May-June, with the peak of the latter species being more evident. Bluetongue virus was first isolated from wild caught midges of the Obsoletus complex in 2002. Thereafter, pools of selected parous midges collected across Italy, and during multiple outbreaks of BT, have been found consistently PCR-positive for the virus. More recently, viral RNA has been detected in field specimens of C. dewulfi, C. obsoletus s.s., C. scoticus and C. montanus.

Species diversities and similarities of lichen floras from Italy via Austria, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway to Greenland are compared for the complete floras and separately for bark, wood, rock and soil, the latter two also for acidic and calcareous. Lichen species diversity declines about 15% from Italy to Norway but 50% from Italy to Greenland, a much lower percentage than for vascular plants (92%!). The Sorensen coefficient and an NMDS-ordination display geographic groups well: Italy, Austria and Germany, Finland, Sweden and Norway and finally Greenland. Denmark as the only country without mountains lacks saxicolous species and differs from the other countries. About half of the lichen species grow on rock, followed by bark, except for Greenland, there soil. Diversity and composition of lichen floras on bark and wood are rather homogeneous from Italy to Scandinavia, on soil even from Italy to Greenland. Diversity is higher on acidic than calcareous rock and soil, a contrast to observations from vascular plants. The diversity loss in “southern” calciphytic species in the northern countries is compensated by additional “nordic” species on acidic substrate. From Greenland even more acidophytic terricolous lichen species are known than from Italy. The reasons for the pH dependent diversity patterns are, same as for vascular plants, not known.

This Technical Note 'Case Study ¿ Italy' is part of a series of case studies within the ¿Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation¿ (SoCo) project. Ten case studies were carried out in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom between spring and summer 2008. The selection of case study areas was designed to capture differences in soil degradation processes, soil types, climatic conditions, farm structures and farming practices, institutional settings and policy priorities. A harmonised methodological approach was pursued in order to gather insights from a range of contrasting conditions over a geographically diverse area. The case studies were carried out by local experts to reflect the specificities of the selected case studies.

to estimate the number of deaths from noncommunicable chronic diseases (NCD) attributable to behavioural risk factors (tobacco smoking, unhealthy nutrition, physical inactivity, overweight, and excessive alcohol use) in 2016 for Italy and for the Italian regions. descriptive study. mortality data were obtained by the Italian National Institute of Statistics. Causes of deaths from NCD associated with the five RFs were selected. Italian attributable fractions were obtained by the 2016 estimates of the Global Burden of Disease Study and applied to the mortality data. Regional prevalence of risk factors was obtained by the national surveillance system PASSI for the years 2013-2016. absolute number of attributable deaths, joint attributable fraction, proportion of total deaths attributable to RFs (MAprop). about 191,000 out of 614,307 deaths occurred in Italy in 2016 were attributable to combined RFs (about 37% in males; 26% in women). Joint MAprop was between 33% in men (24% in women) from Val d'Aosta and 40% in men (31% in women) from Campania. In Italy, 17% and 6% of the total amount of deaths were attributable to smoking in men and women, respectively; 6% and 3% to alcohol abuse; 7% and 8% to overweight; 13% and 12% to dietary RFs, and 2% and 3% to low physical activity. The higher proportion of attributable deaths by age-group was recorded in people aged 40-59 years (43% in men; 28% in women). Regional differences in attributable deaths are confirmed by regional RF prevalence recorded by the PASSI surveillance system for the years 2013-2016. these are the first estimates of the number of deaths due to NCDs attributable to behavioural RFs estimated for each region and for Italy as a whole. Effective primary prevention policies should be reinforced, since these RFs are potentially modifiable.

Few empirical studies have sought to ascertain the propensity with which Italian researchers return to Italy after a period spent abroad. Research into this question mainly draws on generalized databases (macro data), often with only dichotomous variables (returns vs. does not return). The main objective of the paper is to fill the information gap and to create a database of contacts of Italian researchers abroad, with a view to studying the brain drain in Italy and the propensity to return to the country of origin after a period spent abroad. Our main finding is that the propensity of Italian researchers to return to Italy is very low. This result is crucial to identify the effects of the brain drain in Italy: if the high-skilled migrant does not wish to return to his/her country of origin after acquiring knowhow abroad, migration effects are very likely to be detrimental to Italy's economic and social growth. This finding leads into important policy implications: the Italian brain drain is not only due to wage differences offered by other countries, but it is caused by employment difficulties and other factors characterizing the job market and the Italian university system. It is not enough to carry out a salary review: an appropriate solution needs to be created to attract researchers and convert the brain drain into a brain exchange

In this thesis I discuss how the subaltern roots and counter-hegemonic messages of reggae have resonated rhizomatically across linguistic, cultural, and geographical frontiers to connect with marginalized groups and inspire counter-hegemonic forms of communication and social engagement ‘from below’. Using this ‘connective marginalities’ framework, I argue that the transculturation and glocalization of reggae in Italy during the 1980s and early-1990s led to new and creative forms of inclusive, grassroots, and non-institutional political practice and cultural opposition, which resisted and challenged the social and political disengagement of the so-called ‘riflusso’, and reinterpreted and reinvented Italy’s counter-cultural youth practices of the 1970s. Through an analysis of personal interviews with key figures and other primary textual and contextual data, I establish a historic and thematic narrative focusing on the socially and politically tumultuous period between 1980 and 1994. I maintain that, during this period, which represented the most innovative and influential phase of reggae’s evolution in Italy, reggae was used as a means of challenging the nation’s hegemonic politics, culture, identities, and racisms. To this end, I pay particular attention to the profound resonance of reggae in Italy’s South, where it was synthesized with local dialects, perspectives, and cultural elements to create a ‘resistance vernacular’ that resisted Southern marginality. Despite the particular significance of these Southern connective marginalities, I also discuss the translocal and ‘national popular’ posse era of the late-1980s and early-1990s, when reggae and rap were popularized throughout Italy, within both non-hegemonic and hegemonic contexts, as a form of counter-information, social commentary, and intercultural/interregional solidarity.

As it is known since long, firms’ framework conditions (external economies and diseconomies) strongly influence their competitiveness.The average firms’ dimension and the strong and rooted territorial diversity make the presence of external economies and diseconomies significantly important in Italy, a country which is losing competitiveness in the last years. To strengthen its competitiveness, Italy needs correct macroeconomic policies, a proper regulation (liberalization and market reforms) and the generation of new external economies for firms. Some external economies depend on national policies while others depend on territorial ones; consequently, good territorial development policies are essential for Italy’s competitiveness raising. Starting from this point, this article tries to examine new territorial policies which are the result of a huge debate on the regional policies (implemented since the second half of the last century, in Italy and other European countries), on their varying effects in time and space and on the growing cultural and political opposition to them, in the nineties. Actually, the new policies are based on the definition of territorial development programs at sub-regional level. Consequently, the paper suggest that nowadays it may be better to substitute the term regional policy with territorial development policies, whose implementation has brought significant results, both in Italy and other European countries. However, good territorial development policies need to be intended not only as local matter but supported by a strong and coherent national policy.

This PhD Thesis includes five main parts on diverse topics. The first two parts deal with the trophic ecology of wolves in Italy consequently to a recent increase of wild ungulates abundance. Data on wolf diet across time highlighted how wild ungulates are important food resource for wolves in Italy. Increasing wolf population, increasing numbers of wild ungulates and decreasing livestock consume are mitigating wolf-man conflicts in Italy in the near future. In the third part, non-invasive genetic sampling techniques were used to obtain genotypes and genders of about 400 wolves. Thus, wolf packs were genetically reconstructed using diverse population genetic and parentage software. Combining the results on pack structure and genetic relatedness with sampling locations, home ranges of wolf packs and dispersal patterns were identified. These results, particularly important for the conservation management of wolves in Italy, illustrated detailed information that can be retrieved from genetic identification of individuals. In the fourth part, wolf locations were combined with environmental information obtained as GIS-layers. Modern species distribution models (niche models) were applied to infer potential wolf distribution and predation risk. From the resulting distribution maps, information pastures with the highest risk of depredation were derived. This is particularly relevant as it allows identifying those areas under danger of carnivore attack on livestock. Finally, in the fifth part, habitat suitability models were combined with landscape genetic analysis. On one side landscape genetic analyses on the Italian wolves provided new information on the dynamics and connectivity of the population and, on the other side, a profound analysis of the effects that habitat suitability methods had on the parameterization of landscape genetic analyses was carried out to contributed significantly to landscape genetic theory.

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the likelihood of a nexus between economic growth and defense spending in Italy. With the US urging its NATO allies to stop “free-riding” through diminishing budget allocations to military expenses, and European policymakers hard-pressed by populist tail-winds, the debate on the effects of military expenditure on the economy is more current than ever. I briefly review the literature supporting each of the three possible effects: positive, negative, and insignificant. Scholars use various economic models like the Feder-Ram model ( Biswan & Ram, 1986 ), the augmented Solow model ( Mankiw, Romer, & Weil, 1992 ), and endogenous growth models to investigate whether military spending affects economic growth and the degree and direction of causality. In this paper, Ido notutilize econometric models to establish a relationship between the two variables, but rather leverage on existing research and my analysis to formulate an educated guess. The relevant studies, on countries similarly industrialized, lean towards a negative or insignificant relationship between economic growth and defense expense. Based on the evidence presented in the paper, I postulate that the role of military expenditure on economic growth is insignificant in Italy. Nevertheless, investing in the national defense industry to consolidate and advance Italy’s ninth position as a global exporter of arms, would bring benefits regarding both balance of trade and strategic long-term partnerships. Keywords. Defense spending, Economic growth, Italy. JEL. H50, H56, H60, H63, O40, O49.

Parallel, distributed and network-based computing is a continuosly evolving field, driven by progress in microprocessor architecture and interconnection technology, as well as by the needs of computing- and data-intensive applications in science and engineering, and, more recently, in business. This field is currently undergoing a significant change, because of the development of multicore and manycore processors, GPUs, and FPGAs, which are the new building blocks of parallel architectures. At the other end of the parallel and distributed computing scenario, computational grids are far from being a mature infrastructure and are evolving toward cloud computing, to get a higher level of virtualization. The availability of programming models, algorithms and software tools capable of harnessing the processing power offered by the new technologies is a key issue to make them usable by application developers. This special issue provides a view of the efforts carried out in this direction. Barlas introduces an optimization approach for reducing data communication and load imbalance in medical image matching on Grids. Binzenhofer et al. present a distributed and scalable algorithm to monitor a p2p network. Cesario and Talia discuss the use of data mining models and services on Grid systems for analysis of large data repositories. Danelutto et al. describe a performance model for component-based applications with stream communication semantics running on Grids. Danese et al. describe a FPGA-based coprocessor to accelerate double precision floating point operations in high-performance applications. Gross and Marquardt introduce a graphical editor providing abstractions from base technology for user-friendly configuration of Ubiquitous Computing environments. The papers collected here are selected extended versions of papers presented at PDP 2007, the Fifteenth Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-based Processing, held in Naples, Italy, in February 2007. The conference was organized by the Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in collaboration with the Second University of Naples, the University of Naples Parthenope and the University of Naples Federico II. We thank the editors of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience for providing us the opportunity of publishing this issue, the authors for their contributions, and the referees for their precious help in selecting good-quality papers. Pasqua D'Ambra Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), CNR Naples, Italy pasqua.dambra@cnr.it Daniela di Serafino Department of Mathematics, Second University of Naples Caserta, Italy daniela.diserafino@unina2.it Mario Rosario Guarracino Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), CNR Naples, Italy mario.guarracino@cnr.it Francesca Perla Department of Statistics and Mathematics for Economic Research, University of Naples Parthenope Naples, Italy francesca.perla@uniparthenope.it

Family/work reconciliation and societal governance: New chances for Italy coming from Equal Initiative (By Daniele Ventura) - ABSTRACT: The concept of family/work reconciliation by now defines all the policies that try to harmonize the times, spaces and relations of working life with the times, spaces and relations of family and personal life. The modern organization of European welfare systems, centred (above all the national categories that many times have been focused) on the Private-Public dialectics, has made up a reconciling policy system based upon the incentives & sanctions model. This policy framework for reconciliation is becoming less sustainable every day for it is showing efficacy and efficiency problems, especially in Italy. The essay we’re presenting is an application of the relational framework of analysis to the cultures, politics and policies of work-family reconciliation, as they have developed in Italy in the last years. The relational analysis upon the politics of fam219 ily/work reconciliation allows us to underline the presence of some paradoxical trends that frequently lead to perverse effects of the policies. But it also focuses on the occasions and the valuable points in them. The critical analysis of the present of reconciliation policies in Italy is based on a relational-normative assumption: in order to generate an effective and positive reconciliation a welfare system needs to build and sustain networks and governance models between public, private and societal dimensions involved in the problems. These networks should be oriented to the valorisation of family relations and family/work relations as relational goods and social capital generators (this is, in synthesis, what we mean by societal governance). The empirical section of the essay presents a synthesis of two case studies made upon two experimental and local models of family/work reconciliation. Both of them were developed in the first phase of the EU Equal Initiative, a wide policy program that for the first time brought in Italy the occasion to project and develop reconciliation policies through the interaction of public, private and societal actors. The case studies aim to highlight the features of these partnership models, the family/work reconciliation cultures they were bringing on and the resources, chances and obstacles they had in order to move towards societal governance systems.

This research develops from a set of basic geographical questions about the outbreak of Covid-19 out of China in Europe The questions dealt with why and why with such strength Italy has been seriously hit, one of the most important cases in terms of death toll out of Hubei Province and mainland China, in the world, making the country a worldwide study case for epidemic concentration and diffusion Questions were also related to geographical similarities among the areas hit, and particularly the Po Valley region and Wuhan metropolitan region in Hubei province, and also related to why such a divide of the virus spreading was identified in Italy between Northern and Central and Southern regions and provinces In order to try to give an answer these questions, authors realized a vast and articulated database of indicators at provincial level in Italy, performing several geographical analyses - ecological approach - based on Spatial autocorrelation and Geographical Weighted Regression, coming to the conclusion that aspects such as land take, pollution can seriously influence the phenomenon and justify a pattern as that observable in Italy The analyses and observation of the phenomenon also suggests that policies based on urban regeneration, sustainable mobility, green infrastructures, ecosystem services can create a more sustainable scenario able to support the quality of public health

Although widely known as the so-called anni di piombo, the threat by terrorism in the 1970s was not a genuine Italian phenomenon. In the same time, other European states were struggling with subversive groups from diverse backgrounds; and slowly the mutual interest in the events abroad turned into consultations and reciprocal aid. Apart from West Germany, the United Kingdom was a highly important partner for Italy in these years. Overall, the fight against political left- and right-wing terrorism in Italy was perceived as largely different from the fight against nationalist terrorism in Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, the United Kingdom became an increasingly important partner, when the Italian counterterrorism approach evolved from a rather narrow public order policing towards a proper strategy against terrorism, including cooperation with other states. In this essay1, I will sketch the Italian-British relations regarding the common fight against terrorism during the decade 1972-1982. With a chronological approach, I trace the British perception of political violence in Italy and the correspondence between actors of both countries. Herein, I focus on concrete cooperation regarding problems of public order and terrorism. In the analysis, I concentrate on transfers of knowledge and techniques in counterterrorism, and on the relations between the involved actors. Although official communication occurs between offices and institutions, human characteristics of the signers must be considered in the analysis. The four British and twelve Italian governments included diverse personalities. Two cultures «clashed» at times over their diverse views on statehood and violence. Stereotypes shaped mutual estimations, and heritage from political history could have an impact on political representations.

More than 40 Ulmus minor clones were characterised on the basis of 10 foliar morphological traits and budburst phenology in two successive years. Ramets, 4- and 5-years-old, were obtained by means of self-rooted cuttings from elms located in northern, central and southern Italy and in France. Measurements were taken in an open field in the vicinity of Florence (Italy). The morphological traits were found not to be appropriate for describing the variability between clones of different origins, even if some of these traits indicated a xeric adaptation in clones originating from southern Italy. On the contrary, the phenological traits were valid describers of the origin of the clones. Indeed, the southern-Italian clones flushed earlier than the others, while the French clones were more delated. A comparison of the results of the two years showed that the chilling requirements on the trial site were not satisfied. The actual state of knowledge regarding dormancy in the Ulmus genus does not enable to speculate further on the results of this research. Morphological characters seem to show a greater phenotypic plasticity with respect to phenological traits.

Invasive species are a major threat to biodiversity and alien herpetofauna already caused conservation problems in Italy and in the world. Pelophylax kurtmuelleri (Gayda, 1940) is a water frog native to Southern Balkans, that was introduced in NW Italy (Liguria) in 1941, from where it has spread to Piedmont, Lombardy and recently to Emilia Romagna. Surprisingly, during its expansion, the Balkan frog seemed not to be able to cross the Po River (with a single exception). So, we investigated the reasons for such directional limitation of range expansion, focusing on the potential role of the Po River. Combining ecological niche and connectivity models, we adopted a two-step process in order to assess: (i) if the habitat suitability differs between the two sides of the Po Plain; (ii) if the Po River could act as a barrier in terms of dispersal. Results showed that the northern side of the plain seems less suitable than the southern one, even if many suitable patches occur along the main left tributaries of the Po River and in the hilly part of the plain. The Po River behaves like a barrier for the Balkan frog, but the only known point on the north bank of the river indicates that it may be able to only slow the dispersal and not to completely stop it. So, the most probable interpretation for the absence of the Balkan frog from the Northern Po Plain, is the combination of habitat suitability and connectivity issues: the former makes less probable that new viable populations can establish in the North, the latter decreases the northwards flux of the frogs. Given these findings, the Balkan frog seems able to spread in the whole Northern Italy and the colonization of the northern Po plain could happen shortly.