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The faith in man, between enlightenment and Republic day

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Every phenomenon or fact has its own beginning, in recent times and easy to locate, remote and sometimes for this difficult to trace or to remember. If today, 2 June 2016, We are celebrating the Republic day a beginning we must trace. It was a Republic, our, founded on the blood of a civil war in the mid-20th century has disrupted our country leaving him poor, destroyed and reduced to fame. It was thanks to the merit of men who, by rolling up your sleeves, together they have decided to rebuild a country, brick by brick, House after House, hope after hope. Within a few years, the Italy has been able to give himself a Republican form, a Constitution and restart the economy of the State. There was the desire not to forget, to remember, to learn of what happened because in the future, the new generations are not fighting the same wars and to relive the same fears. Was hope in the power of man United with the idea of freedom. It was as if that wind of hope and liberty had returned to blow on Europe after decades of totalitarianism and oppression. It was a wind from ancient origins. It was the same belief, in the same strength and same freedom, that had pushed, a century before, our people to fight for freedom of the country from "foreign oppressor.". In The 19th Century, convinced of being right, believe in the power of man and the idea that freedom was the most valuable asset at man's disposal, We won back those that we believed to be our lands and we created a State. A State that had joined with territorial, but not humanly, It was like geography, but not as a people. Once again the strength of hope together with the idea of freedom was enough to hold the destiny of this state until the advent of fascism. But if even in the second half of the nineteenth century vigevano the ideals of hope in man and in the idea of freedom, to investigate the sources we have to downgrade again over time. In this route backwards we find many industrial revolutions, social and political. The strength in the hope of man caused unprecedented technological advances, the idea of freedom was pushing the poor masses to take up sticks to revolt to absolute monarchs. It's a wind, that of freedom, that blows throughout the nineteenth century, that comes from the 18th century. It's a fresh wind, new, pushing to believing in the potential of man. This is our point of arrival, that is the starting point from which hope and freedom are rooted in the idea that man can be at the center of the world, It can by their own efforts to become judge of your own future. In The Eighteenth Century, was the enlightenment to end the middle ages and open the doors of the modern age. Thanks to this movement of men and ideas he set the focal point man, in its entirety, placing under the scrutiny of reason all aspects of human life, religion including. For the first time the man had no more excuses, excuses of a God that predestined her future, I was driving along a path already written. The end of the dark age, the man had the idea of himself, ends when you turn on the light of enlightenment. Enlightenment is the man with the light of reason. The secularisation that followed and which involved the appropriation of man in the world, in the century just, with the crisis of religious movements has come the times with the winds of hope and freedom giving way, only in modern times, to globalisation. The latter phenomenon, like the previous mass, caused the unification of man-mix spegnando standard hope and reducing the freedom of a space on social networks. But the winds of hope and freedom in humans continue to expire, driven by an ideal that in the 18th century it never faded, just today rather than continuing to ride them you prefer to close them out the window.

Roberto Rossetti

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Will is power: the woman who won the "top of Europe"

 

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September 1838. Chamonix. Like all day, stands out in the open sky the huge Mont Blanc, the massif of the Alps, "Top of Europe" with its 4.810 meters of altitude. The village is in a tizzy, something's up again and bizarre: a French woman, a Countess, want to reach the Summit of Mount, and he wants to do it alone, Thanks to their strength and stubbornness only.

In 1811 already another French woman, Marie Paradis, He attempted the ascent of the Massif, arriving at the Summit. Failed to accomplish the feat only thanks to their strengths, but he had to, halfway, beseech the help of guides who brought the woman to shoulders, seeds passed out, to the top.
Henriette of Angeville, our protagonist, He was a passionate of mountains. Born in Burgundy in 1794, He moved with his family in the Rhône, in Southern France – Eastern. There the contessina fell soon of nature and of the Alps; from an early age Henriette took it into his head that one day would attempt the climb, and that would be the first woman to reach the Summit without the help of a man.
So the 02 September 1838, at 6 in the morning, the woman and the guides began in March. The path was up to 4.300 meters of altitude, When the cold was almost unbearable, as well as fatigue. Henriette threatened several times to fall on deaf ears, but he always refused to take her shoulders, stubborn and obstinate in his purpose. The party reached the Summit the next day at 13,25. The Countess, at the peak of satisfaction and happiness wrote in the snow: "Willpower", as if to say that nothing is impossible if coexist determination and efforts to achieve their goals.
Nicknamed "the girlfriend of Mont Blanc", Henriette and her story are quickly fallen into oblivion, Although the effort completed by the woman can be regarded as a real company. Mountain climbing as we understand it today, extension of Alpine tourism in addition to joy of discovery, did not exist in those years, and mostly the activity at high altitude was practiced by men for scientific purposes, as the measurement of pressure and temperature. Henriette was not only the first woman to reach their own feet the highest peak in Europe, But even ahead of the times and the passions that would then distinguished many women centuries.

Maria

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The cinema is born

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The 28 December 1895 the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière screened for the public at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café Boulevard des Capucines in Paris a series of shots including the exit of workers from their factories in Lyon. This incident marked l’ beginning of cinema as we know it until today, that is how popular show and commercial. Closer study film is son of other inventions, like the phenakistoscope, a device consisting of a rotating disk that were applied with drawings. Putting in rotation that disk, He leered from a window on the images that were on the move. The fathers of this device were Joseph Plateau and Simon Stampfer. Then Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope, that is, a gizmo that allowed for one person at a time to watch from a peephole of a piece of film that was moving at a light. By then the shows multiplied and spread across Europe. Stretching out the timing of the movies were born the stories and the cinematographic language that allowed the film to be a vehicle for messages beyond mere entertainment.
Hector Parker

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The commemoration of the dead

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The cult of the dead and visits to cemeteries became a habit common in the West in the second half of the 19th century. This new practice was facilitated by an arguably side, they believed the cult of the dead an element of civic-mindedness, the other by Catholics, that contrasts with what until previous century, experienced during visits to the cemetery a "rapprochement", a kind of meeting with their deceased loved ones.
In the 19th century was created the form of funeral rite is closest to what we know today: the introduction of rigid patterns of rites and rituals allowed him to accept the idea of death and create a sort of living with it, thus breaking the silence between the living and the dead which existed for centuries and exorcising the fear of death.
Demonstrating the demonization of death, Tomb architecture was modified: the graveyards as we know them today, just outside the city walls, were built in the 19th century, After the issuance of the edict of Saint Cloud (1804). l cemeteries had increasingly large and monumental spaces, rich of statues and buildings. Families began to visit graveyards together, and it is not uncommon for the monumental tombs were just the nuclear family as the main subject of the sculpture.
Another fundamental aspect that was created in the 19th century is the combination of death and female, that is the so-called death-female. This was identified with the "Angel woman", the one that accompanied the "good death" or dying herself for consumption; on the other, Instead, identified with the "femme fatale", the woman who did die, often for shameful diseases as syphilis.
The participation of women to death and burial has very ancient origins, but in the 19th century (and in some areas in Italy until the second half of the 20th century) It was very common figure of professional mourning, or the woman who was paid to cry and complain during the funeral of a stranger.
The omnipresence of the female figure reveals the bond between, more strongly than ever, Eros and Thanatos, the impulse to life and death: the nineteenth century was a century of transition with regard to the processing of death, and despite the "repression" by the Church, many rituals sprung or readapted in that time have survived until today.

Maria

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Winning the right to read

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Today it is almost a foregone conclusion that anyone can read and choose what you want to read. In truth, This social conquest is relatively recent, especially with regard to women.
In the Western world mass literacy was achieved only during the 19th century. However the percentage of female readers was very different among residents in town and country, and especially between capitals and the rest of countries.
The first readings that nineteenth-century women were encouraged to undertake were purely religious mold, what some lives of Saints and the Bible. Over time, however, women were attracted to types of reading so to speak more lay, and there arose new types of texts dedicated to women like cheap popular novels and cookbooks. The novels were exquisitely adapted to women, in turn seen as creatures with limited intellectual ability, frivolous and emotional. Therefore, the popular novel was soon associated with women of poor quality and of dubious morality, women who were carried away by the imagination and fantasies of passion of purely fictional characters, as, to name one only, the famous Madame Bovary by Flaubert.
This type of readings were therefore often, especially in rural areas, prohibited by the breadwinner.
With the advent of World War I the woman could change their social position largely because of the absence of the male figure, commitment on: many women had indeed the opportunity to change their lifestyle and the social environment, extended people exchanges and ritagliarono space to attend cultural clubs and libraries.
If you analyze the illiteracy rates today, There is still an alarming: According to data from the Institute for Statistics of UNESCO, the total number of illiterates is about 771 millions, of which 2/3 of women. This number makes you think and definitely puts an emphasis on gender, still present, and about the different possibilities of access to culture that have men and women.

Maria

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