2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

ships hypothetically linking the following: preaching (oral forms
and written texts); the iconic representations of the Passion in their
canonical forms, encoded in a broad tradition that includes figures of
artists young and old; the radical interpretation of the Passion, from
an ethical, emotional, cultural, and social point of view as realized in
Simoni’s depiction; and its reconstruction through contemporary living
drama, with its repercussions on the foundation of the local world
mentioned above.
Francesco Faeta returns to his position at the Department of Cognitive
Sciences of the University of Messina, where he is full Professor of Social
Anthropology and Director of the Ph.D. Program Anthropology and
Historical-Linguistic Studies.
Federica Favino
During my time at the Italian Academy (Fall 2011), I worked on
my book on the political use of science, and especially of Galilean
cosmology and physics, in early modern Rome.
At the time, Rome was many different things at once: the leading
center of the Catholic Church with a universalistic ambition;
the capital of a territorial state with its own “politics of science”; the
site of many different centers of production and consumption of
culture—courts of cardinals, colleges, seminars and general-houses
of religious orders—which were linked both to the Curia and to the
papal monarchy. Sharing Habermas’s opinion concerning the “literary
pre-forming of the public sphere with political aims,” I assume
that in all these centers science was bent to purposes that went well
beyond mere culture: it answered political and micro-political goals
that we can often explore only at a local “scale.”
When I arrived in New York, I had already gathered a lot of
primary sources, and I had already written some articles on selected
aspects of the “politics of science” in the Roman Curia and court, and
a couple of chapters of this book. The stay at the Academy gave me
the chance to look at my subject in new respects, or perhaps I should
say that searching among the extraordinary bibliographical resources
of Columbia University—both on paper and on-line—gave my research
new directions. I began to inquire into the possible contamina-
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