Do you love dogs?

Revise the If-clauses with your pet. Watch this veeeery nice clip from BuzzFeed:

Today it's Earth Day!

The Earth Day is celebrated on April 22nd each year to promote awareness of environmental issues. since 1970. The first celebration  represented the culmination of a decade of discussions triggered by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962). It was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson, American environmentalist, and was attended by 20 million Americans. Today it has become the Earth Week, celebrated in approximately 200 countries, with educational activities, conferences, events, encouragement to environmentally sustainable behaviour.

The Earth seen from NASA expedition Apollo 17, 1972

The Earth Day is the first "truly human" celebration according to anthropologist Margaret Mead, since it exceeds the national, ethnic, cultural, religious limits of other celebrations.

Theis year's Earth Day is devoted to Climate Change. The Earth Day Network encourages you to upload your photos to document the changes you detect in your area. 

In our Country, the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) supports the annual concert for the Earth Day in Milan.

Yet, even if we're not there, we're all here on this - so far - unique Planet and can calabrate the Day raising awareness of global issues like the use of renewable energy sources, the necessity of education to new behaviors ranging from recycling and energy efficiency, to reduction and reuse consumption objects. 

Jonathan Swift: a very special social reformer

* It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. [...] their helpless infants [...], as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.   

The "great town" is Dublin, Ireland, where Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) was born of English parents.

His most famous prose work is the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726), but he was also an essayist and a pamphleteer**.

A Modest Proposal (1729) is the social pamphlet in which he exposes a shocking suggestion to solve the problems of Ireland. Read the passage in which he exposes his proposal in detail.

[...] But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars: it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age, who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand our charity in the streets.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years, upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of our projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It is true, a child just dropt from its dam, may be supported by her milk, for a solar year, with little other nourishment: at most not above the value of two shillings, which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging; and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner, as, instead of being a charge upon their parents, or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall, on the contrary, contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing of many thousands. [...]

The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children, [...] but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand, for those women [...] whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, How this number shall be reared, and provided for? which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive at six years old [...] .

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that [the children of parents too poor to bring them up] may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. [...]

I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend, or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants, the mother will have eight shillings neat profit, and be fit for work till she produces another child. [...]

* This and the following extracts: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, 1729. Web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide. Rendered into HTML by Steve Thomas. Published by eBooks@Adelaide, 2012. Licensed under Creative  Commons Licence.

** An unbound publication (that is, the pages are not stitched the one to the other), made of one page, printed on both sides, or of a larger page folded in half, thirds, fourths, and without a cover. Especially in the 16th-18th century they were used to diffuse political, social, religious ideas in a more rapid and extensive way than books.
Girl with a Basket of Pamphlets, oil on paper, by French School.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_with_a_Basket_of_Pamphlets.jpg

The Industrial Revolution

http://www.ltisdschools.org/cms/lib/TX21000349/Centricity/Domain/287/Chapter_25.pdf

Cheltenham, UK - a virtual tour

At the end of August thirty students with four teachers will leave for Cheltenham, England UK, to attend a four- week course of English (European Structural Funds 2007-2013, C1).
                                                           

      

Cheltenham is 150 km west-northwest of London. Here you can take a virtual tour here and learn about the town and its sorroundings in the slideshow here.

What's the weather like today in Cheltenham? There you are:

Curious about food- fashion- history- famous people born in Cheltenham, etc. etc.? We will post more here on these subject in the next days. Stay tuned!

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters from Naples

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, never returned to England after his second visit to Italy in  1818, which he travelled extensively and where he wrote several of his important poetical works (Ode to the West Wind). Here you can read a more detailed biography.

By Amelia Curran (1775-1847)

As every traveller in that time, P. B. Shelley has left a number of letters to friends, telling his experiences and thoughts in the places which he visited - Bologna, Ravenna, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, and others. In a letter from Naples to a friend, he explained that "I keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I send you".

The poet wrote an  Ode to Naples, while these verses from the Ode to the West Wind

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,	30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay...

hint to the Gulf of Pozzuoli and its islands.

Bacchus and Agathodaemon with Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, House of the Centenary.

Now at Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale

To have an idea of Shelley's impressions on the places, the people, the cultures he met in our region,  read both the letters from Naples - here and here -, where he tells of his visits to Pompeii, Paestum and the Vesuvius.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

« Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought  Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’ ».

So runs one of the most famous incipits in the Victorian  literature about the most famous little girl in her age. 

The hint to the need of "pictures" and "conversation" in books might lead us to think to a children book - and this is what Alice in Wonderland, 1865, is often supposed to be. But, though  full of pictures and conversation, Alice's kid jokes  get to the adult mind.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898) was a mathematician and a university professor. He  wrote books like The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically or Symbolic Logic, he invented mathematical and language games. Alice is not simply a scherzo on the fantastic adventures of a ten-years-old girl. Jokes were a serious matter to the author. To know more on this aspect of his activity, give a look at the Lewis Carroll Society of North America:  you will find as much mathematics and logic as fiction.

Consider Alice and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, 1872, weird cases and character list: a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat, obsessed by time, the girl Alice becoming disproportionately tall or short after having a cake or a drink (objects appear different to us as we change our viewpoint), Alice discussing with a parrot in a "queer-looking party" of birds and animals. The parrot states he is right because « ‘I am older than you, and must know better’... ».  Yet, Alice is a reflexive little girl, so she  « "would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said" »  (how to solve a problem if one or several data are missing?). Not to say of the puns. The Mouse about to tell Alice a tale says  « ‘Mine is a long and a sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice... ». 
I will stop here for the moment (the list is very long) and make a few considerations. Strange animals, illogical assertions. Alice is always the voice of logic, she faces the strange adventures feeling the strength of logical thinking. Whenever she renounces to rebut to absurdities, that is simply because she chooses to do that, she's too polite and she knows it would be no use.

*   *   *  

The chapter Advice from a Caterpillar is especially exemplar of the tone of the whole book: a queer character, a weird picture, a poem resembling an ancient ballad in the form, but quite absurd in the content, Alice challenged in her convictions.

                                                    Illustration by John Tenniel, 1820-1914

« ‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I— I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’»

Then  « ‘What size do you want to be?’ »  it asked. In order to go back to her familiar height, the Catrpillar suggests Alice to eat a piece of mushroom: « ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter’ ». But the mushroom "was perfectly round" so Alice "found this a very difficult question". 

... to be continued