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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the cultural diplomacy of the two blocs began to focus on countries emerging from the process of decolonisation. The aim was to establish economic relations and influence their future development. Sport remained a privileged field for this cultural diplomacy, especially for the Hungarian People's Republic. Nevertheless, Hungarian cultural diplomacy had clear obstacles, product of the limitations Hungary had at the time: little coordination with the other countries of the Eastern Bloc and and extremely limited spending capacity.

Abstract In this paper we analyse how populist leaders in UK and Italy – namely Nigel Farage, Nicola Sturgeon, Giorgia Meloni, and Matteo Salvini – reacted to the first and second lockdowns on their Twitter accounts, communicating directly to their people. The analysis was carried out following a combined qualitative and quantitative approach to discourse. The qualitative analysis focused on comparing populist leaders’ rhetorical and semiotic choices, while the quantitative analysis observed the response by the community of common Twitter users. This work aims on the one hand at unveiling the strategic use of social media by populist leaders and on the other at investigating conflictual interactional dynamics, especially in times of crisis.

Sullo scorcio tra V e VI secolo, in Nordafrica, Fabio Fulgenzio Planciade scriveva un breve testo dedicato all’Eneide. Entro la struttura di un dialogo drammatizzato tra l’autore e Virgilio, il poema virgiliano viene presentato come un’allegoria “integrale” che, sfruttando precipuamente l’analisi etimo-logica, presenta sub figuralitate historiae la maturazione morale dell’anima dell’Uomo attraverso la progressione fisiologica delle età della vita. In questo percorso, Enea è eroe in formazione, ma diventa anche modello educativo in senso concreto ed entro un più ampio e organico schema pedagogico.

The purpose of this study is to draw a comparison between the realization of requestive speech acts in Italian and in German, and to investigate the different strategies of persuasion in the two speech communities, with a particular attention to the relationship between efficiency and politeness. The empirical part of the study consists in the comparison of 320 requests formulated by Italian and German speakers. Linguistic data were elicited by means of a discourse completion test containing four socio-pragmatic situations. Realizations of requests were analysed according to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project’s (CCSARP) Coding Manual, reported in Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), and discussed at two levels: the cross cultural variation and the situational variation. Results show that both groups of participants are perfectly aware of the differences between the situations proposed and tailor their requests according to the context. It is found that both groups of subjects rely heavily on conventionally indirect strategies. On the whole, German speakers appear to use more indirect request strategies than their Italian counterparts, and at the same time choose with a higher frequency phrasal, lexical and syntactical modificators. Italian speakers tend to select slightly lower levels of indirectness but compensate with a consistently larger use of external modificators. Moreover, both Italian and German speakers seem to recur more often to strategies of Überzeugung, probably because the most used modificator for both groups of respondents is the Grounder. Our results differ in interesting ways from general expectations in the situation in which the face threat is arguably the highest, calling for further investigation of the difference in the perception of the social parameters determining the rated face threat between the two speech communities. Deeper insights into the link between indirectness and politeness in the two cultures at issue are also needed in order to understand the reasons behind the pragmatic choices observed.

The recent urban planning scene in Italy shows lack of balance in planning, aggravated by the unregulation failures and the sparse reforming policy success, devoid of an adequate legal context. This text makes reference to the three possible ways for the italian urban future; the tradicional plan and the Milan model failed already in the past. The author mantains that the only feasible choice is the serious reforming policy of the plan, which suitability lies on the attribute of “planning by doing”: performance of certain decissions in advance of the plan. This is the case of the new Plan for Rome which, despite the difficult circumstances of the italian urbanistic period, overcomes the contradictions of the existing legal context and advances its revision.