Medea 

Abstract: This paper focuses upon some manipulation/invention practices of the prehistoric past in Sardinia in relation to the dynamics of construction of memory identity. Within the framework of global economic processes, linked to cultural tourism, it will be examined the relationships between the forms of historiographical imagination conveyed by these products, the identity rhetorics of the political-intellectual field and the cultural heritage management policies promoted by local authorities.

Abstract: The cult of Saint Isidore the Labourer, Spanish national saint canonized in 1622, was introduced in the second half of the seventeenth century in the Kingdom of Sardinia and used by the Spanish monarchy to root the feeling of hispanidad in Sardinian society. This contribution illustrates the diffusion of this cult in the island through the production of wooden sculptors, who reinterpret the cultivated models of the motherland in a folksy way.

Abstract: In classical myth Phaedra plays a particular role: a main figure in ancient literature (Euripides, Ovid, Seneca write extensively about her vicissitudes), she occupies a very limited space in the artistic repertoire of the classical world. In the Greek world, Phaedra’s figure is unknown to the Hellenic artistic repertoires. There is however an interesting exception: the pictures painted by Polygnotos for the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphoi, where Phaedra is on a swing. The annotation of Pausania is by no means secondary: it is common knowledge, as the myths of Erigon or Charila show, that there is a very close symbolic connection between the swing and the hanging, which is also how Phaedra chooses to kill herself. But the binomial swing/hanging, mainly related to sexual relations by ancient sources, also represents symbolically the kind of death enacted in female puberty rituals.

Abstract: The myth of the ancient Rome is an effective tool of propaganda, through which the Fascist regime justifies its political programs, especially the construction of the national identity and the colonial aspirations of the Italian Empire. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the Fascist visual and linguistic rhetoric deforms the original meaning of the most popular symbols and rituals of the Roman world, such as the fasces, remodeled by the archaeologist Giacomo Boni, and the feast of Natalis Urbis. They are employed to ideologically legitimize its authority.