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The paper surveys the Italian historiography (various generations of authors) on the communist regime in Romania during the time of Nicolae Ceauçescu, from the apologists of the regime to its critical analysts. It could be argued that the negative historical judgments on the regime are definitely in the majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the socio-political and religious dialectics of spirituality in post-communist Romania. Starting from a statistic evaluation of the distribution and subdivision of the Churches on Romanian territory, the paper studies the religious factor as a systemic element for understanding the deep relationship between people and "national belonging", understood as a relevant key of social self-representation. The close link with the historic-religious past of Romanians, partly obscured during the years of socialism, re-emerges after the collapse of the communist regime through specific forms: the monastic life, studies on the lives of saints, the history of Romanian Orthodoxy, are used for strengthening the bond between people and tradition in a new context, coinciding with the entry into the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims at revealing the historical value of one of the mass media used by Romanian elites in their effort of redefining the roles women and family should have in the Romanian society of the 19th century. Two were in fact the main objectives we aimed at achiving: first to stress the importance that printed press has as an historical resource for the study of women and family history and, secondly to reveal how press perfectly mirrored some of the great debates of the Transylvanian society during this century. As a society has at its basis the women and the family, what we intended to point out is how the Romanian journals, such as Gazeta Transilvaniei, Familia, Amicul Familiei were used as disseminating and formative tools for educating the women or correcting some bad habits caused by the modernity in the family areal. Moreover, our intention was also of studying the journals form a gender perspective as they represent indeed a major media in which the debate over women's condition and role in the society developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines the historical context in which, during the First World War, the Romanian Legion in Italy was created in June 1918, at Avezzano. Led by Brigadier General Vittorio Zuppelli, the Legion consisted of Romanian prisoners of war who had previously belonged to the Austro- Hungarian army. The three Romanian companies integrated into the Italian army distinguished themselves in the battles that led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian forces and brought about the end of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a close reading of two recent novels by the German-Romanian writer Dieter Schlesak: Capesius der Auschmitzapotheker (2006) and Transylwahnien (2011). Born in 1934 among the German community of Transylvania, Schlesak deals in his novels with the tragic epic of the Holocaust, seen from the particular point of view of the transylvanian Saxons and their involvement in the Nazi crimes. More precisely, he depicts the "little homeland" of the Saxons and his dramatic dissolution, while History painfully reveals the existence of the Evil within the reassuring transylvanian Heimat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconstruct the traces that romanian folklore left within the works of three prominent italian writers and intellectuals of the second-half of the twentieth-century: Franco Fortini, Ernesto de Martino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his first book of poetry, Foglio di via (1946), Fortini translated, from a french version made by Ilarie Voronca, some romanian funeral songs, trying to conceal file folkloric sources, in order to misappropriate them. The same archaic ceremonial songs are used, as historical and ethnographic evidences, by Ernesto de Martino in his great anthropological survey on european funeral laments, Morte e pianto rituale (1958), and then by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a soundtrack for his movie Oedipus Rex (1967). In all of this cases, the fascination for the romanian popular poetry is tangled with reticences and ambiguities, that reveal the complex relationships existing between intellectuals and popular traditions in twentieth-century culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]