This special edition is a form of pride. It is a celebration of thirty years since the birth of queer theory. Of course, being queer, this was no normative conception or birth. More of an artificial insemination and fusion of gene pools, characterised by anarchy, activism, subversion, deconstruction, alongside identitarian and non-identitarian…[Read more]

Art forms in Troy’s city walls, and Schliemann’s awareness thereof.

Syllabus for Japanese Mythology Spring 2021

This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the S…[Read more]

This study is a fresh analysis of a collection of scrolls and fragments grouped under the rubric, The Community Rule or Serekh ha-Yaḥad. As part of the manuscripts discovered in the Judean Desert, the Community Rule manuscripts are all fragmentary to various degrees, yet attest to important issues of legal dispute and community formation in the S…[Read more]

A didactic poster (written for schools) presented on the occasion of the conference “La città com’era, com’è, e come la vorremmo”, organized within the project “Pavia 100 Torri – Osservatorio Permanente sull’Antico”, held at the UNIPV on February 8th, 2013.

Review of: I. von Bredow 2017, Kontaktzone Vorderer Orient und Ägypten. Orte, Situationen und Bedingungen für primäre griechisch-orientalische Kontakte vom 10. bis zum 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.”, Stuttgart

Review to: R. Parker (ed.) 2013, Personal Names in Ancient Anatolia, Oxford

Niğde-Kınık Höyük: Excavation Report of Season 2017

Report of excavation at Kınık Höyük (Turkey), season 2016 (specifically, paragraph “Operation B”, together with L. d’Alfonso, pp. 591-592).

The paper presents the report about the excavation campaign at Qumran cave 11Q, carried out from 9th to 19th March 2017 by the Istituto di cultura e archeologia delle terre bibliche of the Facoltà di Teologia di Lugano (ISCAB-FTL) and by the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Previous archaeological excavations, undertaken by Roland de V…[Read more]

The present paper analyses the mutual influences between Egypt and the city of Karkemish (present Jarabulus) during both the 2nd and the 1st Millennium BC. This Syrian city was indeed an important site located on the Euphrates river, along the border between modern Turkey and Syria and is surely better known for its strong relationship with the…[Read more]

A brief reflection on the concept of pre-classical antiquity square, analyzing some archaeological and textual sources.

In this essay, I consider the ideal ascetic leader depicted in the Life of Moses attributed to Gregory of Nyssa: that leader is not a bishop, but a leader who has more experience with the day-to-day struggles of monks, particularly the kind of struggles described by Evagrius and writers influenced by him.

This article proposes a new understanding of the etymology of histrio. It is likely that it originally came from Greek histor, as has been demonstrated by Szemerényi 1975. However, the conclusions presented by this scholar must be slightly revised, in particular the distinction he establishes between histrio and ludius. While the second word has…[Read more]

Johann Joachim Winckelmann not only idealized Greek Classical art, but also the whole ancient Classical Greek world in a way that went well beyond what could be envisaged as historical knowledge. His influence on the history of contemporary literature and on classical scholarship, however, is not an obvious topic to scrutinize, since he was almost…[Read more]

In this episode of The History of European Theatre, Phil Rowe interviewed me on the evolution of Greek theatre after the Classical period and the existence of dramatic performances in Greek in Roman Italy.

The article shows that the character of Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes constitutes a crucial element for the redefinition of the concept of ‘nobility’. This figure has already been seen to promote a new definition of the concept, but previous analyses have tended to focus only on one or the other of the two plays, as Odysseus appea…[Read more]

This paper looks beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria to consider the literary dynamics of another Hellenistic kingdom, Attalid Pergamon. I offer a detailed study of the fragmentary opening of Nicander’s Hymn to Attalus (fr. 104 Gow–Schofield) in three sections. First, I consider its generic status and compare its encomiastic strategies with those of T…[Read more]

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the caliphal status and the legitimacy of the Ottoman sultans were constantly and increasingly challenged. One of the most effective and powerful tools that they utilized in order to strengthen their diminishing image in the eyes of their subjects was the re-appropriation of sacred places, either by…[Read more]