sabato 7 Dicembre 2024

Sale la tensione tra Russia ed Occidente

La tensione tra Russia e Occidente sta per raggiungere un punto di non ritorno. Venerdì, dopo una riunione in video-conferenza, i ministri delle Finanze del G7 hanno annunciato l’intenzione di mettere un tetto al prezzo del petrolio. Mosca minaccia sfracelli. In prima pagina • A Cernobbio Salvini e la Meloni hanno tenuto due discorsi antitetici sulla crisi ucraina: lui è contro le sanzioni, lei favorevolissima. Ma sono davvero in disaccordo? O è solo una strategia per raccattare più voti?• A Bruxelles stanno preparando un piano per l’economia di guerra. Sarà presentato a metà mese• Un ragazzo di 13 anni di Gragnano,...

Searching for the Light at the End of the Tunnel

If we want to say something and be listened to, we have to wear a mask.Banksy We are living in a time of paradoxes. Words can take on meanings diametrically opposed to their original ones, without most people realising it. For populists, mystifiers, evangelical prophets, and snake oil salesmen, all that matters is success. The purest ‘credible realities’, that serve as a reference for most citizens, are turned into ‘alternative realities’. To understand the perilous situation in which humanity finds itself, one must break free from the “dogma of immaculate perception” (Nietzsche), by questioning appearances, looking outwards and to ourselves from the...

Lusitanian Chronicles. A8. The UNESCO Highway

This year I am celebrating the date of a famous trip to Italy, in the end of the glamorous 90s, a time when the country experienced the assumption of a notoriety as a tourist destination worldwide, in fact, for me Italy has always been the cradle of Europe, in which we could taste its world renowned gastronomy inloco in a beautiful and cosy trattoria, and without being through a culinary TV show; the excellence of the design  with all the rigor of the detail, and whose quality contaminated an urban and sophisticated way of life, all in a tourist...

Tutto il mondo è paese

In the near future, we will remember the year 2020 for all the implications it has had on our lives. It will be remembered for both absurdity and common sense. In Athens, Christmas is celebrated discreetly. In Greece, as in other Orthodox countries, the biggest celebration takes place around Easter. Even so, there is Christmas. There are exchanges of gifts and families also get together. This year, however, and as in most Western countries, everything is different. A big part of the businesses, by order of the Government, have been closed since mid-November. Restaurants and cafés can only operate on a take-away...

Tutto il mondo è paese

English Version here. Nel prossimo futuro ricorderemo l'anno 2020 per tutte le implicazioni che ha avuto sulle nostre vite. Sarà ricordato sia per assurdità che per buon senso. Ad Atene, il Natale viene celebrato in modo discreto. In Grecia, come in altri paesi ortodossi, la festa più grande si svolge intorno alla Pasqua. Eppure c'è il Natale. Ci sono scambi di doni e anche le famiglie si riuniscono. Quest'anno, tuttavia, e come nella maggior parte dei paesi occidentali, tutto è diverso. Gran parte delle attività, per ordine del Governo, sono state chiuse da metà novembre. Ristoranti e bar possono operare solo da asporto. Anche le scuole sono chiuse e...

The soul of a people around a pot

Leggi l'articolo in italiano "L'anima di un popolo intorno ad un tavolo" I return to you, looking for this little space of mine in Moondo, and I think, what initially opened this window for me, turns out to be the same reason that makes me return now, the digitalization of my emotions, the need to share. I write from a Latin brother country, from the land of good stews and conventual sweets, from a UNESCO creative city in the center of Portugal, Caldas da Rainha, where conviviality in the street, socialization around a table with family and friends, are the...

Scheduling the unpredictable*

The current crisis represents a process break. The most important innovation does not concern individual choices but the approach in analyzing and selecting the objectives to be tested. The complex systemic dimension is the unavoidable option that decision-makers too, in economy, politics and social re-planning, must take to direct the development of events. A real number is a complex number with zero imaginary part The entire bibliography of science fiction, until the birth of the trend Cyberpunk included, failed to anticipate an interconnected society through a network based on the Internet. Many futures had been imagined, many dystopian, others capable of...

Milestones for a new tourism in the post Covid-19 era

It is tempting to dream of two distinct moments in the history of tourism: Tourism B.C. and Tourism A.C. ("Before" and "After Covid"), marking 2020 as the year of the rebirth. In the first period, tourism would be described basically as a predatory industry of natural and cultural resources, responsible for a huge global carbon footprint, generating socio-economic imbalances in the receiving communities, strongly based on intensive labor and precarious jobs, and causing various types of paroxysms such as gentrification, so-called "overtourism", enclave tourism, etc. And, as if that were not enough, it was tourism that, most of the...

What philosophy to choose for the future of europe?

Leggi l'articolo in italiano We sail on a sea of data—a sea that has always supported us, for without data, creation is impossible in principle. If in this day we wish to design a new European project, we must base this project on a philosophy that understands and values the importance of data. The foundations of geometry studied in primary school and used in everyday life were first articulated for us by Plato's youngest disciple, Euclid. In his work the Elements, Euclid organically derived the rules that have governed triangles, circles, straight lines, cylinders and numbers (even irrational ones) for centuries....

Creative tourism, a global social need

Leggi l'articolo in italiano “The search for meaning corresponds to an intimate impulse that translates into a predilection for more authentic and genuine experiences, a more relaxed sociability, a preference for creative activities and a search for contexts that promote the manifestation of spirituality.” It is with these words that in the reflection “Small scale tourism for more meaningful experiences”, Professor Doutor Francisco Dias, professor and Researcher in Tourism at the Polytechnic of Leiria and Director of ART & TUR, concludes an analysis made regarding the transformation of the tourism sector at the moment Covid-19 powders in the world. As...

Reflecting on Covid-19 and Tourism: the now, the tomorrow and the after?

Leggi l'articolo in italiano The now… Unexpectedly, due to a global pandemic, we were forced to confine ourselves to new forms of work and social isolation. As a result, we change behaviours and routines and reflect a lot, perhaps some more than others, but I suppose we all have some kind of reflections. In the digital age, we resort to teleworking, teachers and students adapt to online education and families contact virtually. We pay more attention to the hygiene, the cleanliness and the way the health systems of the countries reacted to the epidemic began to receive special daily attention. The COVID-19...

Bani Adam (Children of Adam)

Leggi l'articolo in italiano 21 April 2020 - In Iranian calendar, April 21 marks the national day of Saadi "Bani Adam" is a piece of poetry by Saadi, a famous Iranian poet in the 13th century, who won the title of one of the songs in the eighth album of the British band Coldplay, entitled Everyday Life, due to its human-friendly theme in 2019. This poem is declamated into Persian, English and several other languages in this piece. The album includes two sections, Sunrise and Sunset, and the music is performed in the sunrise section. Human beings are members of a whole In...

Germany, UE and the Buridan’s donkey

Leggi l'articolo in italiano The year is 1987. My friend Edzard Reuter, the powerful chief of Daimler Benz (The company owning Mercedes), gives me the high honour of a personal invitation to a secret conference,since I am the head of a great German industry, the Iveco Magirus. It is a type of event that can only be held in Germany. Industrialists, financial experts, politicians, trade unionists and even journalists, about thirty people are present. Sitting around the table all day and discussing about concrete things, speeches and choices are made in such an effective but completely informal way that nothing...

The World and the tourism after Covid-19

Leggi l'articolo in italiano Humanity, as a whole, is experiencing probably the most extraordinary moment of its entire existence. If any historian wants to refute this statement, he/she will certainly not find any other moment in the history of mankind when, on a global level, all over the world at the same time, the daily lives of people of all nations have been suddenly interrupted, discontinued, broken, put in brackets and without a definite date for a return to normality. In fact, the very concept of normality is seriously shaken, challenged, since even before Covid-19 came on the scene, there...

Coronavirus and the ultimate reduced liberty

Leggi l'articolo in italiano We have been at home these days. Inside our seclusion units, we live moments of social isolation. These are necessarily moments that make us reflect on how the leaders we choose to represent us manage to act in a situation of extreme chaos and fight against an unknown enemy. Abstention from voting has never been so useless and cowardly. In countries that directly or indirectly elected populist leaders, these citizens are left to the responsibility of government officials who deceive and deceive their citizens in a selfish perspective of not suffering a recession, and being able...

For an anthology of ideas

Italiano E se domani, e sottolineo il se…all’improvviso, perdessi te..Avrei perduto il mondo interoNon solo te.(Lyric by Mario Calabrese) I have asked myself many times, in these dramatic days, what our countriesin Europe would be like when a vaccine would put mankind safe from thisCovid 19. The first question that comes to my mind is: will mankind haveunderstood how fragile the balance that allows us to share the world in whichwe live is? That's why I was reading some introductory pages of "Epidemicsand Society: From the Black Death to the Present" by Frank Snowden,professor of medical history at Yale. His course...