Itinerari Issue 1, 2027
Between the intimate and the public Space. The Life of Cemeteries
This issue of ‘Itinerari’ (which originated within the research project PRIN 2022 - Making Space for the Other. Cemeteries as performing Places for inclusive, safe, resilient Societies: an interdisciplinary Project) endeavors to examine cemeteries as unique places that, on one hand, highlight the contradictions inherent in social life, and, on the other, provide the conditions necessary for envisioning more equitable and inclusive societies.
The liminal nature of cemeteries—serving as a transitional space between life and death, public and private spheres, as well as sacred and profane domains—offers a coherent theoretical framework for interpreting various contexts. For instance, they reveal social inequalities through their spatial configuration and modes of access, manifest political and racial conflicts via practices of ‘necroviolence’ and desecration to which they are subjected, and are influenced by economic pressures related to land use and property values. These developments demonstrate the capacity of cemetery culture to articulate individual biographies, mentalities, religious beliefs, and social structures, thereby creating meaning and identity, as well as fostering acceptance or separation.
Three fundamental tensions continually emerge. Firstly, the duality between the public and private realms: cemeteries are required to fulfill collective civic functions while concurrently respecting individual mourning processes. Secondly, the temporal tension: cemeteries maintain the memory of the deceased as well as broader historical memory, all the while adapting to evolving funeral customs, urban pressures, and shifting societal norms. Thirdly, the political tension: cemeteries may embody and legitimize prevailing inequalities—such as class segregation, racial violence, and spatial marginalization—or alternatively serve as spaces where such disparities can be challenged and potentially remedied.
In cemeteries, serving as public burial sites, both a collective dimension and a unique reference to individual intimacy are encountered, as if personal memories are integrated into public history. These spaces facilitate a negotiation of behaviours and emotions, acting as a medium that mediates between public and private spheres through a distinctive articulation of both aspects. The conditions enabling this interplay remain to be investigated in greater depth and complexity.
Cemeteries serve as designated spaces for religious and civic functions, reflecting the social values and the significance that a society attributes to concepts of life and death. Cultural practices observed within these sites generate meaning and foster both personal and collective identities in complex ways. While their character is shaped by the manner in which individuals experience their relationship with death, their architectural and decorative features—such as formal ornamental elements and spatial organization—address themes of mourning and remembrance, thereby mediating between public and private functions. Furthermore, these spaces maintain a complex relationship with urban development, with their integration or marginalization mirroring broader planning priorities. Historically, European cemeteries evolved from burial sites within churches to locations outside city walls, ultimately transforming into park cemeteries during the 19th century. Presently, emerging trends reflect the influence of increased cremation practices, individualistic and holistic philosophies, and digital innovations. Practices such as storing cremation urns at home, scattering ashes in natural environments, publicly marking sites associated with tragic deaths, and establishing burial spaces intended not only for humans but also for other beings demonstrate diverse ways of experiencing and expressing loss, thereby transforming the concept of the cemetery. The boundary between public and private spheres appears increasingly blurred, affecting the ways in which humans conceptualize and design cemetery spaces.
Cemeteries serve as publicly accessible urban spaces due to their availability and utilization by the community. However, they represent a distinctive category of public spaces, existing in tension with the broader context of other civic areas. The civic functions they traditionally fulfill are currently experiencing transformation; in addition to their primary purpose of burial, they are increasingly hosting events—including private functions such as concerts, theatre performances, and weddings. This multifunctional usage has consequential implications for the significance and performative nature of these sites, prompting critical reflection on whether such diversity undermines their intrinsic association with death.
Considering the liminal nature of cemeteries, which link diverse meanings, provides a valuable opportunity to question rigid interpretations. Cemeteries serve as spaces where contradictions become apparent, yet also negotiable and open to reinterpretation. This potential is driven by the anthropological universal of death to which they refer, as well as by the questions raised by the experience of loss and emptiness it causes; these can serve as spaces from which to envision alternative, more equitable societies.
Many questions arise, beginning with the basic one about why cemeteries exist. This volume aims to address these questions:
- Do cemeteries contribute to memory? And in what way to its personal, social, collective and public dimensions?
- The cities of the dead reflect the cities of the living, but how do they, in turn, shape social interactions?
- Can cemeteries contribute to the development of pluralistic communities while fostering social justice and respectful cultural inclusion? What characteristics might enhance their significant and performative role in creating more just, equitable, supportive, and hospitable societies?
- What is the purpose of cemetery spaces dedicated to specific events such as wars, massacres, and genocides, and what connection do they establish with collective memory?
- What is the significance of expanding the functions of cemeteries beyond mere burial sites to include entertainment opportunities or ecological contributions through their integration into urban green structures and their role as biodiversity corridors?
- What does it imply to recognize their cultural role as heritage sites?
The various methodological approaches to cemeteries reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the research. One challenge is their transformation into an effectively inter- and transdisciplinary investigation. This also involves addressing, in a novel manner, the qualitative approaches necessary to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of lived experiences and socio-political contexts.
Articles that contribute to analysing and understanding the cemetery in its many dimensions, from different points of view, are welcome.
For example:
- contributing theoretical and conceptual insights (including those related to the philosophical capacity to interpret the cemetery space in relation to a reflection on death and the related categories of presence/absence and memory/oblivion);
- providing analyses of cemetery spaces, including their associations with specific historical events such as wars, massacres, and genocides;
- emphasizing the practices of memory and the underlying power dynamics that influence them.
- linking the cemetery to urban studies;
- proposing alternative architectural forms or practices of experience;
- suggesting a methodological framework for their analysis or construction;
- imagining the conditions of possibility for a performance of inclusiveness of cemetery spaces.
OVERALL INFORMATION
Proposals must be sent via email to the editorial board and editors (rivistaitinerari@gmail.com; carla.danani@unimc.it; sergio.labate@unimc.it; s.pierosara@unimc.it; specifying in the e-mail subject: CFP CEMETERY.) by April 10, 2026, and should take the form of a concise presentation (within 3000 characters, including spaces) of the investigation.
Accepted proposal notifications will be communicated by April 30, 2026.
Accepted contributions should adhere to the following criteria:
- They must be original;
- They should be written in Italian, French, German, or English following the journal's guidelines;
- They should have a length ranging between 25,000 and 40,000 characters, including notes and spaces;
- Contributions must be submitted via email to the editor by August 1, 2026, accompanied by an abstract (between 250 and 500 characters) in English and five keywords in English.
All contributions will undergo anonymous evaluation.
The publication does not require a fee from the authors.
This “Itinerari. Annuario di Ricerche Filosofiche” is classified as A Anvur Category for three disciplines: Theoretical Philosophy (11/C1), Moral Philosophy (11/C3) and History of Philosophy (11/C5).
C: https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/itinerari/code-of-ethics
Editorial rules: we adopted the American-style bibliography
In the text, bibliographical references must be enclosed in round brackets.
The author's surname must be followed by the year of publication, without a comma; then, separated by a comma, the page number, if any.
As has been recently stated (Severino 1992, p. 34)
In the case of multiple works by the same author, the years should be separated by a semicolon.
(Severino 1985; 1987; 1990)
If the author has published several works in the same year, the publications must be ordered with the letters a, b, c, etc.
(Severino 1987a; 1987b)
If several authors are cited within the same round brackets, in this case too, a semicolon is used.
As has been stated recently (Severino 1992; Verdi 1991).
Finally, in the case of a volume translated into another language, follow this order: original year of publication, translation year of the translated edition, pages of the tranlated edition.
(Weber 1921; Italian translation 1968, p. 72)
The final bibliography should be composed according to the following model. For the space between the year of publication and the title of the work, use the tab key (tab) and not the space bar:
Alberoni, F.
1977 Movimento e istituzione, il Mulino, Bologna.
Ampolo, C. (a cura di)
1980 La città antica, Laterza, Bari.
1981 La politica in Grecia, Laterza, Bari.
Bartolomei Vasconcelos, T., Calloni, M. (a cura di)
1990 Etiche in dialogo. Tesi sulla razionalità pratica, Marietti, Genova.
Parsons, T., Bales, R.F.
1955 Family Socialization and Interaction Process, The Free Press, Glencoe; tr. it. Famiglia e socializzazione, Mondadori, Milano 1974.
Parsons, T., Bales, R.F., Shils, E.
1953 Working Papers in the Theory of Action, The Free Press, Glencoe.
Itinerari - Issue 2026
Power, Potentiality, Possibility. Perspectives from Italian Thought
Editors: Daniela Calabrò, Giulio Goria, Massimo Villani
Starting from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Italian Thought became a vector of the contemporary philosophical landscape, it highlighted two specific characteristics. Firstly, a clear tendency toward contamination with other perspectives and paradigms (starting with the Foucaultian biopolitical paradigm). Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, a permanent attention to the intertwining of life, politics and history, what is the ‘outside’ of thought. In addition to these main aspects, a further expansion has profoundly impacted the horizon of Italian Thought. In summary, in authors such as Machiavelli and Bruno, Vico and Leopardi, Gramsci and Gentile, as well as de Martino, Pirandello, and Pasolini (to name just a few) it has identified a reflection capable to rediscover in the contemporary dimension an archaic 'repressed' element and thus to reintroduce, in a new light, the question of origin. Categories such as imperium (Negri), sacertas (Agamben), communitas and immunitas (Esposito) represent the most significant outcomes offered by contemporary Italian thought.
Remaining within the historical-theoretical framework of Italian Thought briefly outlined, the 2026 issue of the journal Itinerari is dedicated to power, potentiality and possibility (potere, potenza, possibile). The aim is to understand how these categories - even while acting within the entire Western philosophical tradition - have become ingrained in the Italian Thought and culture and, at the same time, how they can be re-examined and made effective again. The reason for revisiting this conceptual triad lies, once again, in a characteristic of the Italian Thought as a 'thought in action', always actual and active (Esposito, 2016). In this way, if affirmation is the mode that most defines Italian thought, then the category of potentiality (dynamis), inseparable from actuality (energheia), is the spring from which this affirmative capacity is established. This reference to power and potentiality allows us to clarify how that thought in action is permeated by a 'negative' element, which constitutes it and from which it germinates.
Already in the 1980s, Giorgio Agamben identified the idea of power as the significant theoretical resource for inaugurating a 'political archaeology' that, tracing back to the Aristotelian notions of power and potency, questioned the paradigm of sovereign power and, along this path, proposed a re-evaluation of the category of 'impotentiality'. This project is characterized by a radical transition concerning the theme of potentiality, which is assumed within an ontological and political perspective. This is a significant paradigm shift within the contemporary Italian debate (besides Agamben, one might consider Cacciari and Vitiello too), which maintains even today, despite different developments, analogies and partial continuities that deserve to be identified and considered in their theoretical and critical profile. The theme of this issue presents at least four levels of discussion.
1) An ontological dimension: consider how the category of potentiality, understood in this case as 'potency always in action,' can articulate the semantics of the real in terms of an entirely 'modal' and 'transitional' dynamics, not foundational or consciousness-focused, according to a theoretical strategy that finds antecedents in both Spinoza's and Bergson's philosophy. In this case, one focus of investigation could be how life (one of the main issues of Italian Thought) relates to power and potentiality; and how this cluster should be approached today. This line of studies is currently fruitful in Italy (Ronchi) and deserves to be valued.
2) A philosophical-political dimension. To consider political conflict as a power not reducible to a synthetic principle, to a unique and sovereign 'act’, represents a conceptual resource to rethink the profile of the philosophical-political categories of modernity, at first, sovereignty. Starting from this point, it is possible to highlight a genealogy of political modernity that opposed the 'sovereign' line of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel to a different trend that traces from Machiavelli, through Spinoza, at least to Marx, intending to deconstruct and overthrow the theological-political supremacy of the principle of sovereignty. Even in the case of the relationship between order and conflict, between constituted power and constituting power (Negri), what is at stake here is the affirmative autonomy of power, its relationship with the negative (Virno), and thus the nature of the instituting (Esposito) and emancipatory (Cavarero) praxis. On this semantic and political dimension, to which Italian Thought has made an original contribution, it is possible to raise some pressing questions regarding the present. For example, how can we consider the relationship between political conflict and the capacity of institutional forms to express it? Which political and democratic mediations could preserve the charge of 'power' without this descending into power assuming isolationist and nationalistic aims?
3) Biopolitics is another paradigm to which Italian Thought has given specific emphasis (Agamben, Esposito, Negri) and that could be profitably revisited through the triad 'power, potentiality, possibility'. The question then becomes: what aspect does power assume today in its relationship with life? Considering such pressing ecological events on the public agenda as the Covid-19 pandemic or the ongoing global climate change, power seems to be undergoing a profound transformation. In this regard, it is worth asking: is it possible a biopolitics that is not merely the dominance of life and biopower, but rather a biopolitics in the 'affirmative' sense of an inexhaustible potentiality beyond the frameworks of power?
4) One final dimension is the anthropological one. On the level of the relationship between history and nature, human faculties such as 'creativity' and 'language,' which have always been decisive in defining the human enclosure, can once again be thematized through the category of power, potentiality and possibility. What does it mean that human faculties have the character of historical praxis, of potential and transitioning faculties? How can these features be maintained in the confrontation between human and artificial intelligence, human and machine production system? At the same time, feminism and gender-oriented questions are involved: how can we investigate which possibilities historically traverse 'human nature' and why they must be explored and cultivated?
In conclusion, starting from the typical coordinates of Italian Thought, categories like power, potentiality and possibility can highlight a framework of open questions in the present debate in ontological, political, anthropological, and aesthetic dimensions. Therefore, while on one hand the issue aims to host contributions focusing on those three categories from a critical-reconstructive perspective, on the other, its leading goal is to revitalize their theoretical interplay through an autonomous philosophical exercise.
Proposals must be sent via email to the editorial board and editors (rivistaitinerari@gmail.com; dacalabro@unisa.it; ggoria@unisa.it; mvillani@unisa.it) by September 15, 2025, and should take the form of a concise presentation (within 3000 characters, including spaces) of the investigation. Accepted proposal notifications will be communicated by September 30, 2025.
Accepted contributions should adhere to the following criteria:
- They must be original;
- They should be written in Italian, French, Spanish, German, or English following the journal's guidelines;
- They should have a length ranging between 25,000 and 40,000 characters, including notes and spaces;
- Contributions must be submitted via email to the editor by March 1, 2026, accompanied by an abstract (between 250 and 500 characters) in English and five keywords in English. All contributions will undergo anonymous evaluation. The publication will incur no costs for the authors.
Power, Potentiality, Possibility. Perspective from Italian Thought
Itinerari - Special Issue 2026
The Discourse of Michel Foucault
Editors: Adriano Ardovino, Chiara Scarlato
Description
On the occasion of the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), the 2026 special issue of Itinerari aims to encourage a rigorous reflection on the Foucauldian notion of “discourse”, encompassing its historical, philological and conceptual extensions. In consideration of the persistent recurrence of the lemma discours within the comprehensive Foucauldian corpus of works, courses, interviews and other materials, contributors are invited to propose possible definitions of this notion, but also to suggest potential definitions and/or to offer critical insights regarding the usage of this lemma in conjunction with other pivotal expressions including formation discursive, énoncé, dispositif, épistémè, récit, parrhesia, aveuglement, dire-vrai. As it is widely acknowledged that Foucault’s reflections on discourse extend beyond the 1960s ‘archaeological phase’, the issue would also encompass Foucauldian further research devoted to the microphysics of the body and the relationship between power and knowledge, as articulated, for instance, in his biopolitics.
Topic areas
Instructions for authors
Submitted papers should be original and should not exceed 35.000 characters, including spaces and footnotes, prepared for double blind peer review, with no identifying references to the author, and accompanied by an abstract (in English) of no more than 300 words, plus 5 keywords. Authors will be promptly informed about the acceptance of the abstract.
Accepted languages: Italian, English, French.
Abstracts should be sent by Wednesday December 31, 2025 to rivistaitinerari@gmail.com, adriano.ardovino@unich.it, chiara.scarlato@unich.it, specifying in the e-mail subject: CFP Foucault. Please include a note in the e-mail text explaining the selected topic area among the four described above. The submission of contributions, following abstract acceptance, is scheduled for May 30, 2026. Each contribution will undergo a peer review process in accordance with the editorial rules of the journal.