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Profound socioeconomic changes affected mountains of Central Italy during the last century and many traditional agro-pastoral activities were abandoned. A few ethnobotanical studies in this area have specifically documented local wild plants used decades ago, but without analyzing in-depth how and why Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) has eroded or changed over time. In this study, we 1) document ethnobotanical uses of four high-altitude remote villages of Central Italy, 2) discuss how these uses have changed over time, comparing them with fieldwork that was conducted 40 years earlier; and 3) assess how plant uses have changed across space, particularly whether the remoteness of villages or the occurrence of Sacred Natural Sites (SNS) have affected TEK linked to wild plants. Sixty semi-structured interviews revealed the use of 83 taxa belonging to 35 families. We did not find any relationship between SNS and the richness of TEK, as these SNS were not inhabited by monastic communities that could have shared their scholarly knowledge. There was not a relationship between remoteness and richness of TEK. The common statement emerging from the field, "We became rich and lost everything", revealed how socio-economic changes resulted in the rapid abandonment of traditional practices, while the ubiquity of pharmacies may have contributed to the erosion of ethnomedicinal knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workers' wellbeing at work is a central theme for the development of institutions and enterprises. Within this debate, a central issue relates to the search for the best ways to organize lunch-breaks and food services for employees. In the past, canteens had a crucial role for workers, yet the last twenty years have marked a profound transformation of the European economy, with the effect of diversifying workers' foodways and their food-related practices while at work. Based on the research "Eating at Work" conducted by the University of Gastronomic Sciences in 2015–2016, this paper analyses the consumer behavior at lunch of almost 9400 workers, from ten different European countries. By exploring the workers' foodways during lunch-breaks and how they answer to their individual needs in terms of nutrition, socialization, productivity and overall satisfaction, the paper points out that the lunch-break has major implications in boosting wellbeing at work, thus suggesting the essential role canteens have the potential to carry out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Sacred Natural Sites (SNSs), found in all inhabited continents, are cultural landscapes of spiritual significance for local communities. As they are believed to influence Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), we documented the use of wild and semi-domesticated plants for food and medicine in four villages located at different distances from SNSs in Central Italy. Results may indicate that SNSs, which have been managed and inhabited for centuries by monastic communities, have had a restrictive impact on local TEK, as the communities located near SNSs reported fewer traditional uses for plants than those living further from the same SNSs. One possible explanation is that the Scholarly Knowledge (SK) held by the monastic communities of SNSs competed with the TEK of the surrounding villages and this resulted in a smaller body of plant-related folk knowledge, practices and beliefs retained by the people living in the vicinity of SNSs. Further studies should address the past and current mechanisms of competition and/or osmosis between TEK and SK in terms of both daily practices and beliefs/theoretical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility, nomadic pastoralists’ main adaptive strategy, has been compromised by agricultural expansion and rangeland fragmentation, among other factors, in many pastoral contexts. Among nomads’ coping strategies, is re-shaping mobility in shrinking grazing grounds. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine adaptation and resilience to the effects of increasingly intensive land use and marginalization focusing on Alpine nomadic pastoralists in Piedmont, Northwest Italy. Our results show that Alpine nomads access a wide variety of grazing grounds through a web of social relations with multiple stakeholders, acting in the interstices of mainstream society and navigating marginal contexts: geographically, they use fallow, abandoned, and post-harvest plots; economically and socially, they interact with other marginal groups (e.g., migrants) and are stigmatized by diverse sectors of society. This use of interstitial spaces is in itself a form of adaptation that is taking place in diverse geographical contexts as nomads reconfigure their mobility and social relations to access the scattered pieces of land left unused by industrial, agricultural, and conservation land uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most problematic issues that characterize western society is the crisis of the subject and the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, leading to situations of deep distress and increasing the fragility of human beings. This behavior of the contemporary man also depends on flexibility rules in all areas of society and particularly inside the work, causing a significant impact on the character of individuals, reducing the expectations and hopes for the future, making flexible affective relationships. It is a fragile, insecure, unsatisfied self that waits all the year round for holiday and concentrates on it great expectations and hopes: the conquest of a new social identity, the self-realization, the development of communicative relations. Tourists prefer places with a strong link with nature, where it is possible to do open air activities, play sports and enjoy the beauties of the surrounding landscape. But in practical terms it must be said that holidays not always turn into such a perfect experience: individuals can barely satisfy their wishes and needs because of the difficulty in cutting themselves off from the routine life; moreover the pervasive machinery of tourist facilities tends to wrap in the consumer spiral even holidays' places and times. Furthermore, the relation with the otherness reveals not to be exclusive only to the festive or vacation time, but it rather involves the whole existence of a person in his ethical and social dimension. The difficulties in fulfilling the wish for happiness through tourism depend perhaps on the impossibility of completely telling everyday life from spare time, which means that acting changes its modes, but not its substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]