In the Catholic Church’s regulation, the heroic practice of virtues is one of the main criteria for the canonisation of saints. This article explores the complex concept of heroicity as it is used both in normative-theological literature and in texts regulating the judicial practice of causes for canonisation. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the idea between early modern formulations (with a focus on Prospero Lambertini’s
seminal work) and its 20th-century re-elaboration, before and after the Second Vatican Council. Analysis integrates the historical perspective with a method based on semiotic theories. It looks into the meaning, values, and qualities associated to heroicity over the centuries, and points out changes in the aspectuality, semiotic axiology, ideas of gradualness, and personal maturation associated to this multifaceted concept. It thus
highlights and contextualizes continuities and discontinuities within the Church’s teaching and judicial practice concerning the saints’ heroicity.

In the relationship between two political leaders such as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, both the hairstyles strike attention for their originality. In this article I have tried to perform a semiotic analysis of the two hairdos, considered as texts constructed and enunciated as elements of self-presentation in public. In the case of the North Korean leader, I highlighted the fact that the reading of his image entails problems of trans-culturality. The hairstyle is an element of the dress, according to the definition of Barthes and the sociology of clothing. In my analysis I adopted the concepts of interpretive semiotics in the following steps: expressive level; paradigmatic dimension; interpretant level in the three phases of Peirce’s theory. I have adopted an approach to dress as a predominantly phatic discourse according to the positions of Malinowski/Jakobson/Goffman. I propose the theory of exposed deception to explain the agreements of mutual recognition of masking such as hair dye and make-up in general. Trump's hairstyle is explained as the adoption of an idiolect of self-presentation, while Kim's is a case of dynastic language. He is interpreted in very different ways in North Korea and the West. Trump's hair suggests a kind of 'autism in self-presentation', while in Kim's case the separation extends to his culture as a whole. In conclusion, the combined consequences of these characteristics of the two personalities lead to the hypothesis that the dialogue they have undertaken may remain less a true substantial confrontation than a mere display of contact.

The aim of this article is to examine in the context of today a theory put forward by Umberto Eco in 1968 (in his book La struttura assente [The Absent Structure]). Eco stated that advertising does not increase public understanding and is simply a consolatory art. In this paper I shall analyse a number of advertisements (made between 2009 and 2014) for 5 different models of people carrier to see what type of families are portrayed and how, in order to see if Eco’s theory still holds true. The analyses in fact show that the way families are portrayed in advertising continues to favour traditional models and values, even though there are some indications of social changes that are taking place. In addition, as recent sociosemiotic studies have shown, advertising communication has a dual social and commercial status that obliges it to move slowly: so while it can portray innovations and increase public understanding, this must be done without any destabilizing effects and therefore must always take place very gradually.

This article studies the features of the visual enunciation involved in the production of works of art with a complex media status. It will confront the traces manifested within these works to their perceptual input by an enunciatee, an instance that perceives and interprets what he learns from the senses. Therefore, we propose to turn to the “forms still impregnated by the doing,” to consider the textual production of the work and make it dialogue with perceptual mechanisms generated by the footsteps of the productive doing. So we aim at highlighting the dynamics
of the perceptive semiosis aroused by such works.

To the question “what does translation mean?”, Eco responds translating. In Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Saying Almost the Same Thing) he resorts above all to his own “experiences in translation,” as recites the subtitle of his book. Of his experiences particularly important is his translation of Nerval’s Sylvie. The central problem is what the translating text must render. In Sylvie Eco contends with “rendering” its specific chronotope. The story begins in the imperfect recounting an irreparable loss which is only communicated to the reader at the end. Translation must experiment with this special temporal organization of the story. This is presented in first person and by naming the “narrating voice” Je-rard Eco ingeniously distinguishes it from the author Gérard Nerval. “Almost” in the title announces Eco’s position formulated towards the end of his book: fidelity in translation consists in recognizing that it is never final. In fact, the translated text is always the same, but other: the same other.

The article, by proving the importance of the analogy in the diagrams, aims to refute some of Jacques Bertin’s reflections within the field of graphics, with specific regard to what he stated in Sémiologie Graphique. It will be made use of the theoretical model provided by Louis Hjelmslev about the strata of the language, in order to better understand the scientific approach held by the French cartographer while studying the graphics. A section of the essay will therefore focus on the premises at the core of Bertin’s argumentation, according to which every graphic is based upon a symbolic relation to its content (sign as equivalence). Practical consequences depending on such a view of the discipline will be also taken into account and discussed. By referring to the topic of the analogy, a new interpretation of the discipline will be submitted in attempting to emancipate it from a theory which appears to be too strict, especially on the practical side. Once the iconic nature of the diagrams will be proven, as Charles Peirce argued, an alternative terminology will be introduced. The aforesaid terminology, coherently defined from what discussed, is intended to become an effective tool to (i) implement the means available to study and critique the graphics and (ii) to identify and widen the expressive potentiality of the diagrammatic language.

L’articolo propone un’analisi semiotica dello spot della campagna ministeriale #ioleggoetu, operando un confronto tra i valori messi in scena nella narrazione audiovisiva con quelli proclamati dalla comunicazione a stampa. L’analisi delle strutture semionarrative del messaggio pubblicitario, assieme a cenni di marketing esperienziale e al commento di alcuni dati significativi estratti dal rapporto AIE 2016 sulla lettura, ci consentirà di verificare l’efficacia e la coerenza valoriale della campagna promossa dal MiBACT.