Ligurian Dreams

May 26, 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano

The gods had a dream, and the dream’s name was Liguria. Dolceacqua (Liguria, Italy). 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

When I was young, there was always something missing in me.

Everywhere I went, I felt like I didn’t belong, like I couldn’t belong. My father left his seaside hometown in Liguria for Turin, a huge industrial city at the foothills of the Alps, in the 1970s, and from there he went abroad in the 1980s. When I was three years old my family decided to come back to Turin but, by that time, my father had already started globetrotting for work. We started spending give or take half a year in Turin and half a year in Liguria, some time in my father’s seaside town and some time in my mother’s mountain village.

The toxic legacy of Michael Crichton

February 15, 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano

“I’m telling you, *this is the way modern society works* – by the constant creation of fear.” The cover of Michael Crichton’s fourteenth novel, *State of Fear* (2004), courtesy of my local library. London: HarperCollins (cit. from Prof. Hoffman’s tirade on p. 456).

When Crichton addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999, he gaslighted the scientific community by saying that stereotypical portrayals of mad scientists and other negative tropes in the movies were absolutely normal (“Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently?”).

Religion 101: How I Would Design a Kick-ass Course

July 7, 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano

Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. Source: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck. — Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. **Source**: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck.

Introduction to the Critical and Interdisciplinary Study of Religion 101: A work in progress.

A Pirandellian History of Religions

September 21, 2020 Leonardo Ambasciano

The first page of the English translation of Pirandello’s novella L’eresia catara, included in The Medals and Other Stories, New York: Dutton & Co., 1939, 177-188, and published without any indication of the translator. Oddly enough, here Lamis … — The first page of the English translation of Pirandello’s *novella L’eresia catara*, included in *The Medals and Other Stories*, New York: Dutton & Co., 1939, 177-188, and published without any indication of the translator. Oddly enough, here Lamis becomes a “Professor of Ecclesiastical History” [Copy kindly provided by L. H. Martin]

In 1905, Italian novelist and future Nobel prize laureate Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) published a short story entitled L’eresia catara (“The Cathar Heresy”). In his novella, Pirandello follows the pitiful personal and professional misadventures of Bernardino Lamis, a shy and modest Full Professor of History of Religions (professore ordinario di storia delle religioni) in an unnamed Italian University.

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