ALBERT

Description: Capodimonte was the first Palace of Neapolitan Dinasty “Borbone”, but it was neglected due to the rise of Portici and Caserta’s Royal Palaces, therefore, it was built very slowly. It was completed only a century after the laying of the foundation stone (1738). After so long times, which saw the succession of several architects aiming the leadership to the royal site, some of them were quite famous among the most representative figures of Architecture and Art History in Naples, across Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. The Royal Site was originally meant as Hunting reserve nearby the Capital and significant place of rest for the young Carlo di Borbone (Charles of Bourbon), who two years later decided to build a Royal Palace too. That decision was intended to amend the territorial aspects of Neapolitan northern hill, also to influence the urban layout before the unification of Italy. This study, based on a careful documentary and iconographic research, highlights the complex development of the palace and its park which are still paying a high price for the most controversial aspects of the project and its execution, emerged since the beginnings.

Description: In this book, the dynamics of a nascent political organization in relation to the question of powers and institutions of the Southern Kingdom during the years of 1943-44 are analyzed. The Southern party of DC, taking advantage of both old and new forms of politics, would soon benefit, in addition to the experience of Luigi Sturzo’s populism, of an emerging political class and of the increased weight of the Church in the material and civil crisis caused by the war. In Naples, one of the foremost political headquarters of the liberated Italy, the Catholic Party faced the difficulty of an unconditional membership carried out by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and large sections of the populace to traditional monarchical authority, while its leading group acted from the inside in the context of the pluralistic political and democracy system going out in Cln.

Description: heories about the origins and developments of modern cities seem to agree, without exception, to a point: the city is the place of maximum concentration of exchange. Activities, in fact, are located into urban and metropolitan agglomerations to minimize the resources needed to meet the growing need for relationships and exchanges with other activities. In recent years, the concentration and specialization of these activities have led to an extraordinary increase in intensity and quality of exchange needs, with the obvious consequence of congestion in most metropolitan areas with predictable consequences on the sustainability of urban areas, on the quality of life of its inhabitants and on the energy consumption associated with the growing demand for mobility. As a result, in recent years, several authors have argued for greater integration between urban planning policies, mobility management and energy efficiency. In this context, this volume aims to provide a contribution in this direction and presents the results of a research project aimed at the development of an integrated city-mobility-energy governance model. In particular, the first part of this work give an overview of the complex relationships between mobility, energy consumption and built environment through a meta-analysis of the recent literature. Specifically, in this section, the two main sources of energy consumption in urban areas (energy consumption in the residential sector and energy consumption of transport) are considered. These sectors represent, according to the latest estimates, respectively 32% and 35% of the final energy consumption. The section introduces several characteristics of the built environment such as density, functional mix or accessibility and described as such factors affect energy consumption in the transport and residential sectors. Understanding these relationships is of crucial importance for the development of a coordinated mix of actions aimed at reducing energy consumption in urban areas. Subsequently, the main models present in the literature for estimating residential energy consumption and urban transport energy consumption are presented, paying particular attention to the strengths and weaknesses of each model, the complexity and the related technical and operational aspects related to the implementation of such models. In the second part of this work, the focus is on the techniques for the representation and classification of energy consumption in urban areas through an application to the case study of Naples. Particularly, this section places particular emphasis on the new opportunities offered by the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and by the increasing availability of new data sources. The work integrates the use of "traditional" data sources such as census surveys, new data sources (in particular open and large data) with spatial analyzes developed ad hoc to provide exhaustive knowledge of energy consumption patterns within the city of Naples. The proposed methodology is validated by comparing the results obtained with the previously available data for the study area and by the implementation of spatial statistical analyzes in a GIS environment. The proposed methodology is a useful tool for public decision-makers and policy makers aimed at defining integrated government strategies for the reducing and optimizing of public and private energy consumption. In particular, the methodology described in this work is useful for classifying and representing energy consumption on an urban scale, for the identification of critical areas in terms of consumption, and for ex post evaluation of interventions on the urban system.

Description: An examination of the literature sources, of the archival documents, of the iconographic and cartographic repertoire to reconstruct the key moments of the fascinating architectural and artistic history of one of the most famous monuments of our city. The Basilica of San Giovanni Maggiore is now the result of often ominous and even criminal events, or of some imprudent interventions, that the recent renovations have been able to remedy only partially. Nevertheless, thanks to the constant care and to the appropriate use by the Engineers Order of Naples, it has been lately given back to the city: not only as an important place of worship, but also as a cultural center and a social gathering site, placed in such a significant area of the historic center of Naples, UNESCO World Heritage since 1995. The architectural and artistic analysis of the Basilica has been preceded by a description of urban history in late Antiquity and in the early Middle Ages; it had its fulcrum in the hill of Monterone, now largo of San Giovanni Maggiore, with an irregular and tortuous web, preserved up to us. This work proposes in the second part an updated summary analysis of existing artistic works in the Basilica, as well as those placed in some other locations in order to be preserved or restored.

Description: This volume is the result of the “Before and After Cavour: the music between Sabaudo State and United Kingdom (1848-1870)” conference, held in 2011 during the celebrations for the bicentenary of the birth of Cavour and the 150th of the Italian unification

Description: This volume collects a series of studies revolving around the edition of Milanese and Florentine diplomatic correspondence from Naples in the Aragonese age, particularly in the years of Ferrante d'Aragona (1458-94). They range from the history of war and territory to prosopography, from the reconstruction of relation networks in courts to international politics, from feudal geography to the conflicts between monarchy and aristocracy. This results in an important increase in our knowledge of the Kingdom of Naples, made possible by the extensive and systematic study of the diplomatic sources, which is evaluated in its different degrees of reliability also thanks to the support of the other sources available − from both within and without the kingdom − used in the full range of its informative potential.

Description: During the First World War, the parliaments of the states involved in the conflict were, in most cases, forced to drastically limit their activity and were often precluded the possibility of fully exercising their prerogatives. More generally the spaces of freedom granted to the citizens, of which the parliamentary institution was the brightest symbol, shrank dramatically. At the same time, the power of military commands expanded, not only in trenches and on battlefields, but also in many areas of civilian life. However, in the final years of the war, the Parliaments succeeded not only in gradually regaining control, but also in pushing for an extension of their functions, initiating a process that in many states coincided with the transition from a liberal order to a full democratic order. The years of the "long" postwar period were however dense with contradictions. Legislative and executive law often grew together, while in some cases the imperative logic imposed for a long time in wartime re-emerged and consolidated. This volume, which examines several national cases, illustrates some of the ambivalent features of this dramatic phase of European history.

Description: The "racial and biological regeneration" of the German people was one of the ideological foundations of the Third Reich. The ideas of ​​an organic improvement and of a racial selection of peoples originated in the utopias of eugenics and racism that were developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany and Europe. Eugenics laws were already in place since the early twentieth century in the United States, and later in Switzerland and Scandinavia. However, it was only in the Nazi Germany that racism and eugenics were able to intertwine and be fully realized into a wide and articulated legislative system aimed at the "defense" of the "racial and genetic integrity" of the German people. Statistics, genetics, demographics, anthropology, and medicine contributed, with their true or alleged scientific nature, to give the discriminatory and racist Nazi ideology an aura of objective certainty. The dangerous combination of these factors was systematically and organically implemented within the proposals of the anti-Semitic, "blood and soil" ruralism. These culminated in the "zootechnical" utopia, consisting of a selective breeding of a new Nordic peasant nobility, the future ruling class of the German racial society. The combination of eugenic and racist instances did not remain confined within utopian projects, but found its dramatic fulfillment in the policies of elimination, namely euthanasia and the Shoah.

Description: The Neapolitan Society of Homeland History was created in 1875 through the will of some Neapolitan politicians and scholars, who borrowed its structure from previously established historical societies. Like the other Italian institutions, the Neapolitan association was also primarily interested in the publication of sources, the defense of autonomy, and the attempt to reconcile the smaller and the larger nation. The objective was twofold: to reinforce the ties between the local people and the Savoy dynasty, and to underline, through historical memory, the local contribution made to the process of nation building. Through the biographical reconstruction of some members of the Neapolitan historical society, it is well understood that nothing that happened in the city took place far from the institution; from the control of public instruction to the protection of monuments, to the administration of charity organizations. Although there were already some prestigious cultural associations, the historical society knew how to create a wide network of relationships, thanks to the policy of open membership and a fairly accessible membership fee. The events which took place at this institution, reconstructed here from its founding to 1946, through previously unpublished documentary sources and a full bibliography, are thus useful for those who wish to learn about the cultural dynamics of southern continental Italy and the period following the Unification.

Description: Cities are in a state in which two opposing forces are acting on them: on the one hand the unabated urbanization process, on the other the evergrowing demand for real sustainability. The book proposes an urban planning response focused on the transformations of urban sectors to be achieved using innovative operative tools; for this aim the book defines the main features of this operative tools. The goal is to include in the cities innovative actions that can provoke a domino effect with repercussions on the entire urban structure. The book is devided in 5 sections. The first one addresses the issue of urbanization and the development of the urban systems, with the related implications in terms of resource consumption and concentration of people and functions. The second part discusses some models that explain the mechanisms of urban sprawl and the derived scenarios. The third part deals with one of the key nodes of the relationship between urban systems and environmental resources, namely the energy. The fourth part analyzes some international case studies to extrapolate recurring characteristics that can affect the operative planning. The fifth section focuses on the features of this new type of plan.