Search results

How much the myth of Rome and Greek classicism influenced the French revolutionaries has long been discussed and studied by generations of scholars, each of whom has reconstructed the revolutionary experience projecting it on the needs and conflicts of their time. However, the reflection of men (and, in limited cases, of women) appears to be less studied on the role of ancient legislators and more generally on the idea of law that moved from the level of myth to that of political planning, in a context which, par excellence, was that of building a new world. The nascent political and legal architecture was built on the exaltation and at the same time on the distancing from the world of the past: Athens, Sparta and Rome were considered by some as an infinite archive from which to draw from to think about the future, by others as experiences unable to offer a rule or to serve as a model. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries mirror the myth of the ancient legislator as a political weapon to be opposed to their opponents, in an alternation of signifiers of the revolutionary public discourse on the ancients: aristocrats, demagogues and tyrannical ones, in some cases, courageous, bold and far-sighted in others. From a first investigation it appears therefore that not only the French legislator, or rather the constituent, was inspired by Spartan and Athenian myths and legislations, or by the refinement (no less mythological) of Roman law, but it emerges, something less known and above all more stimulating, how much the texts of the moderns overlapped, in a constant conversation made up of references and "inventions", to those of the classics to the point of not distinguishing the former from the latter, and how the "legislation of the ancients" represented, in extreme synthesis, the inclined plane on which the "law of the moderns" was maturing.

Marco Fioravanti, Sieyès and the constitutional jury : historical I judicial perspectives.
This article studies the origin of the control of the constitutionality of laws in France, particularly the project Sieyès presented to the National Convention on the 2 and 18 thermidor an III (20 July and 5 August 1795) which culminated in the idea of a constituent power and separation of powers. The authors tries to demonstrate that in the French tradition characterized by the refusal to use instruments to guarantee the integrity of the constitution and to limit the powers of the legislator, the project of Sieyès is an attempt to create a neutral power by the constitutional jury, a politico-judicial organ, responsible for controlling the constitutionality of laws, for proposing the change in the constitution, and for the exercise of an natural equality.

Preventive Conservation (PC) is the sum of the activities needed to protect cultural heritage from damage. Among PC activities, climate monitoring and control are especially necessary for anthropologic and ethnographic collections, which are highly hygroscopic. Knowledge of collection objects and their conservation needs, together with their housing characteristics, is at the base of efficient PC strategies, including the evaluation of potential changes in the environmental parameters. An approach based on international standards is required to make museum indoor climate control activities objectives needs-based, and more economically, environmentally, and energetically sustainable. This approach was implemented for the PREMUDE research project, with the collaboration of DAGRI Department of University of Florence, Sistema Museale di Ateneo (SMA) and Opificio delle Pietre Dure (OPD). In this context, national and international norms, standards and museum guidelines were examined and used to apply innovative technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) for monitoring and climate control of case studies from the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of Florence.