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Abstract
The article seeks to establish a dialog, from a semiotic point of view, with the grand cartography of methods in literary criticism proposed by Prof. Zhang Jiang in his famous essay "Imposed interpretation." While acknowledging that Prof. Zhang Jiang identifies the most crucial weak points of the semiotic methodology, the article nevertheless takes these criticisms as occasions to improve the approach of semiotics, as regards especially the following oppositions: diagrammatic over-schematization versus quest for a more judicious application of the method; overenthusiastic adoption of mathematical formulas versus cautious cross-fertilization between humanities and scientific thought; frantic pursuance of theoretical uniformity versus humble acceptance of literary idiosyncrasies; fundamentalist proclamation of the self-reliance of the text versus thoughtful consideration of the evident links between the text and its contexts. This new theoretical approach, wherein traditional semiotics improves itself in dialog with Prof. Zhang Jiang's criticisms, is exemplified with reference to the concept of interpretive fidelity, which is categorized into different levels and dimensions of adhesion between the textual structure and the discourse of the meta-language interpreting it: hi-fi, low-fi, no-fi, and wi-fi interpretation.

Abstract
The Casa da Nostalgia, or "Nostalgic house," in the Taipa area of the special administrative region of Macau, is a museum devoted to temporary exhibitions reconstructing everyday life in the city, especially in the epoch of Portuguese ruling. Just opposite the museum, on the other side of a large pond, a giant casino, the Venetian Macau, reproduces Venice both with its external architecture and its interior design. The article analyzes these two urban settings in order to develop a semiotic understanding of as many ways of symbolically reconstructing cities. On the one hand, cities can be reconstructed in a nostalgic form; the essay inquires on the origin and the consequences of urban nostalgia; on the other hand, cities can be reconstructed as ersatz. The article further investigates the dialectics between predominantly temporal or prevailingly spatial urban reconstructions, with reference to the socio-cultural dynamics that have changed Macau in the last decades. The article concludes with the methodological suggestion that the study of urban re-constructions requires the combined efforts of several disciplines, jointly investigating why, how, but also to what effect cities are re-built.

AbstractThat which is usually called "common sense" is nothing but the complex deposit of implicit cognitive, pragmatic, and emotional rules through which the members of a society interact with each other and, simultaneously, affirm their belonging to the group. This sense is called "common" both because it is current – meaning that it permeates the daily life of the group in all its manifestations – and because it is shared: it is something that belongs to the community as a whole and something through which, at the same time, the members of the community can belong.What is the relation between "sense" and "common sense"? This question is extremely relevant to semiotics, hermeneutics, and the other disciplines and philosophies of interpretation.

La pensée du XX e siècle a mis l'accent sur l'opposition entre spirituel et matériel. La religion a été étudiée comme produit socio-économique ou comme instinct. Mais la pénétration du matérialisme dans la sphère irrationnelle de la croyance a laissé quelque chose d'inconnu. Notre réflexion se focalise sur ce que nous n'avons pas encore compris du notre sentiment religieux à partir de la dématérialisation des relations humaines, façonnée et encouragée par la communication informatique, télématique et via le web.

AbstractScholars have mostly focused on "positive materiality," studying the meaning of materials and techniques in the production of artifacts. Matter, however, means not only when it is shaped into materiality but also when it is destroyed. The essay that follows is meant to represent a first tentative enquiry into the meaning of anti-materiality. The study of destroyed artifacts aims at pointing out that matter is always materiality. It always conserves a shadow of meaning, independently from how profoundly its earlier form was disintegrated. The crepuscular significance of damaged materials has mostly escaped the attention of scholars. The essay attempts an initial exploration of it, proposing a condensed cultural history of broken glass. It therefore seeks to combine, in the same exposition, a chronological and a structural overview of broken glass, from Greco-Roman antiquity until early modernity.

AbstractThe neurophysiology of vision and cognition shapes the way in which human beings visually "read" the environment. A biological instinct, probably selected as adaptive through evolution, pushes them to recognize coherent shapes in chaotic visual patterns and to impute the creation of these shapes to an anthropomorphic agency. In the west as in the east, in Italy as in Japan, human beings have identified faces, bodies, and landscapes in the bizarre chromatic, eidetic, and topologic configurations of stones, clouds, and other natural elements, as though invisible painters and sculptors had depicted the former in the latter. However, culture-specific visual ideologies immediately and deeply mold such cross-cultural instinct of pattern recognition and agency attribution. Giants and mythical monsters are seen in clouds in the west as in the east; both the Italian seventeenth-century naturalist and the Japanese seventeenth-century painter identify figures of animals and plants in stones. And yet, the ways in which they articulate the semantics of this visual recognition, identify its icons, determine its agency, and categorize it in relation to an ontological framework diverge profoundly, according to such exquisitely paths of differentiation that only the study of culture, together with that of nature, can account for.

AbstractPresent-day economically developed societies devote unprecedented attention to food. The culinary discourse, in all its facets, gains increasing centrality in cultures. Institutions, media, and common people are obsessed with what they eat. In Italy, a country already aware of itself with regards to food, gastronomy turns into the main concern, the most debated and cared of system of norms. Social phenomena like Slow Food and Zero Kilometer originate in Italy and then conquer the world, claiming that improving the quality of food is the way for a better planet. But what is the deep cultural meaning of this massive trend? What lies behind the culinary reason? Aesthetic neutralization of socioeconomic conflicts, chauvinistic marketing of stereotypes, and anti-intellectual subversion of sensorial hierarchies, the article contends.

Abstract
Why did semiotics develop as a discipline that concentrates on the concept of sign, and that sees and interprets the world through this concept? Why was the idea of a science that systematically studies signs welcome in a certain epoch of humanity, and why does it seem so abstruse to most nowadays? Should it be given up, like something that belongs to a remote, vanished past? Or is there something, in semiotics, that still offers answers that no other discipline can provide?

AbstractNot all religious proselytizing is conducive to violence, yet some is, and adopts specific words, images, sounds, and other signs in order to convey its message. Defying frontiers among historical epochs, confessions, and disciplines, the essay develops a cross-cultural, trans-historical, and comparative reading of violent religious propaganda, focusing on messages and media that promote radicalization and the consequent mission to defeat the enemy disbeliever. In particular, the essay puts the current phenomenon of jihadist online propaganda into historical and comparative perspective.