Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World [Idioma Inglés] - Softcover

D'Epiro, Peter; Pinkowish, Mary Desmond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038572019X ISBN 13: 9780385720199

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A witty celebration of fifty Italian cultural accomplishments that had a significant influence on Western civilization, ranging from Maria Montessori's concepts of early childhood education to the development of full service banks and the modern orchestra. Original. 35,000 first printing.. NOTA: El libro no está en español, sino en inglés.

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Peter D'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish are the authors of What are the Seven Wonders of the World?: And 100 Other Great Cultural Lists--Fully Explicated. Peter D'Epiro is also the author of The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Queens College and his M. Phil. and PH.D. in English from Yale University. He has taught English at the secondary and college levels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.  Mary Desmond Pinkowish is the author of numerous articles on medicine and general science for physician and lay audiences.  A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she studied biology and art history, she also earned a master's degree in public health from Yale University.  She works for Patient Care magazine and lives in Larchmont, New York.

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dite celebration of fifty great Italian cultural achievements that have significantly influenced Western civilization from the authors of What Are the Seven Wonders of the World?

“Sprezzatura,” or the art of effortless mastery, was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. No one has demonstrated effortless mastery throughout history quite like the Italians. From the Roman calendar and the creator of the modern orchestra (Claudio Monteverdi) to the beginnings of ballet and the creator of modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), Sprezzatura highlights fifty great Italian cultural achievements in a series of fifty information-packed essays in chronological order.

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One

Rome gives the world a calendar--twice

Caesar called in the best scholars and mathematicians of his time and, out of the systems he had before him, formed a new and more exact method of correcting the calendar, which the Romans use to this day, and seem to succeed better than any nation in avoiding the errors occasioned by the inequality of the solar and lunar years.
--Plutarch, Lives, "Life of Julius Caesar" (c. a.d. 100)

Despite current use of about forty traditional or religious calendars (such as the Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese), it is the calendar of Julius Caesar, as slightly modified by Pope Gregory XIII, that functions as the worldwide civil norm. Yet it was a long, tortuous road that led to nearly universal adoption of this rational and elegant tool for measuring the length of the year.

In its earliest known form, the Roman calendar had only 10 months and 304 days, leaving 61 days in winter uncounted and unaccounted for. This peculiar method of reckoning time was attributed to Rome's legendary founder and first king, Romulus (traditionally reigned 753-717 b.c.). In those days, January and February didn't yet exist (at least in the calendar), since Roman farmers didn't have much fieldwork to do in that dead part of the year after the last crops had been harvested and stored. After a two-month hiatus, the new year began in March with preparation of the ground for the next season's crop.

Although Ovid, in his long poem on the Roman calendar, the Fasti, quips that Romulus was better at war than at astronomy, at least some of us might wish that "the year of Romulus" had prevailed, with all those discretionary days at the end. It was too good to last. The religious lawgiver Numa Pompilius, legendary second king of Rome, was credited with introducing, in about 700 b.c., the months of January and February at the end of the Roman year, lengthening it by 51 days. However, this 355-day year of what came to be called the Roman republican calendar was more probably brought to the city by the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus (616-579 b.c.), traditionally Rome's fifth king.

The main purpose of this calendar was to ensure proper observance of forty-five religious festivals and to indicate on which days public business could or could not be conducted. Four months had 31 days, February had 28, and the rest had 29. In the attempt to rectify the discrepancy between this lunar 355-day year and the solar year, an extra month called Mercedonius, which had 27 and 28 days alternately, was intercalated every other year after February 23. (February 24 through 28 were apparently not observed in years with intercalations.) This meant that any four-year cycle contained 1,465 days, with the year averaging 366.25 days. First way too short, now a tad too long.

Compounding the problem, the intercalations were often haphazard, as a result of ignorance or political motives. (An artificially short year meant less time in office for magistrates who had made themselves unpopular with the pontiffs, the priests responsible for ordering the intercalations.)

Lunar calendars like early Rome's are notoriously troublesome. A year of 12 lunar months, or lunations, each averaging 29.5 days, consists of only 354 days. (The Roman republican calendar added an extra day to its year, since the even numbers were considered unlucky.) For a lunar calendar to remain in sync with the solar year of roughly 365.25 days and the turning of the seasons, a month of various lengths must be intercalated every few years.

By the time of Julius Caesar, the calendar was several months out of whack with the seasons. But while in Egypt in 48-47 b.c., Caesar discussed the Egyptian solar calendar with Alexandrian savants. As pontifex maximus, or chief priest, of the Roman religion, he was familiar with the responsibilities of the College of Pontiffs to regulate the calendar, including the insertion of intercalary months. But there had been only one intercalation since 58 b.c.

As dictator of Rome, Caesar was planning stupendous military campaigns in the East, and he wanted a single official calendar that would keep in step with the sun. Since January was now occurring in autumn, the harvest and vintage festivals and the proper times for planting and sailing were losing all correspondence with the seasons, and anarchic time-reckoning complicated the empire's legal and commercial transactions.

With his chief consultant, Sosigenes, an Alexandrian Greek astronomer and mathematician, Caesar devised a new calendar for the new Rome he was to rule, from Spain to the Middle East: a purely solar calendar of 12 months and 365 days with a leap year occurring every fourth year. Based on the calendar devised by the Alexandrian astronomer Aristarchus in 239 b.c., this Julian calendar was adapted by Caesar for the Roman world in 46 b.c. The extra day of leap years was worked in by repeating February 23 (which had once functioned as the last day of the Roman year). The length of most months was also changed.

Caesar ordered two intercalations in 46 b.c.: the first, which was normally due to be made that year under the old system, of 23 days in February; the second, the addition of 67 days in the fall to realign the calendar with the seasons. The 355-day year was thus bloated by 90 days, adding up to a truly epic 445 days--"the last year of confusion," as it was called.

The era of the Julian calendar formally began on New Year's Day, January 1, 45 b.c. A little more than a year after this epochal reform, Caesar was assassinated, but not before July was named in his honor (just as August was later named for his successor, Augustus). July was originally Quintilis ("fifth month") and August Sextilis ("sixth month"), harking back to when the Roman year began in March. The Latin names of our other months were handed down from very early Roman times.

The Julian calendar was adopted throughout the Roman Empire and later by the nascent Christian Church. For more than 1,600 years it served as the calendar for much of the Western world, and it's essentially the one we use today, but for the fine-tuning of a late-sixteenth-century pope.

After the Roman world was Christianized, the most significant calendrical developments in the West were the establishment of the modern week and the advent of the a.d. dating system. The ancient Romans originally had an eight-day week. By edict of Constantine the Great in a.d. 321, this was officially replaced by a seven-day week with Sunday (dies solis) as the first day, which was confirmed as the Christian day of worship. The account in Genesis of the first seven days of the world was clearly a major influence on this development.

The practice of dating events in years after the birth of Christ was devised in the early sixth century by the Roman abbot Dionysius Exiguus, although Jesus himself was probably born in 4 or 5 b.c. rather than in a.d. 1, as Dionysius had calculated. Dionysius also neglected to include a year 0, since the concept of zero had not yet been invented. This explains why 2001, and not 2000, actually marked the beginning of the current millennium.

The a.d. system is named for the Latin anno Domini ("in the year of our Lord"). Although the Roman scholar and monk Cassiodorus used a.d. dating in a published work as early as 562, it became widespread in Europe only in the tenth century. The use of b.c. ("before Christ") dating began in the seventeenth century. Before that, Western scholars counted years before the Christian era by using either the a.u.c. system (ab urbe condita, "from the founding of the city [of Rome]," which traditionally occurred in 753 b.c.) or the a.m. (anno mundi, "year of the world") reckoning of the Jewish calendar, which dates events from 3761 b.c., the supposed year of the Creation.

In the meantime, the average length of the Julian year, 365.25 days, kept right on varying from the true solar year of 365.242199 days. Caesar's year turned out to be 11 minutes, 14 seconds too long. About every 11*3 centuries, the surfeit amounts to one day's additional deviation from the true progression of the seasons. By the sixteenth century the date of Easter, which is calculated with reference to the moon and the vernal equinox (then occurring on March 11), had drifted too far from the astronomical beginning of spring.

When the canon lawyer Ugo Boncompagni became Pope Gregory XIII (reigned 1572-85), he inherited a mandate from the Council of Trent to do something about the scandal of the dating of Easter, the most important Christian festival. In true modern style, Gregory appointed a committee to study the question. Among the proposals for revising the calendar was one from a physician and astronomer, Luigi Lilio (1510-76), who hailed from Calabria and later studied in Naples and taught at the University of Perugia.

In 1576 Lilio's manuscript was presented to the committee by his brother Antonio, also a physician, since Luigi had died earlier that year. Four years later, the pope's blue-ribbon panel welcomed Ignazio Danti (1536-86), a versatile Dominican friar who was a mathematician, astronomer, mapmaker, artist, and university professor. Danti had constructed a gnomon, a kind of gigantic sundial, in the church of San Petronio in Bologna, which confirmed the precise discrepancy of the Julian calendar from the true solar year.

The most prominent committee member was a Bavarian Jesuit astronomer and mathematician, Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), who became convinced of the soundness of Luigi Lilio's proposals and apparently wrote the bulky final draft of the panel's recommendations. To secure a more accurate length for the year over the long term, Lilio had suggested that century years not divisible by 400 should not be leap years. This would shave off 3 days of excess Julian-calendar accrual every 400 years, since Caesar's calendar had stipulated a leap year every four without exception. To correct the Julian calendar for its drift over more than sixteen centuries, Lilio had proposed either omitting the extra day from all the leap years slated for the next 40 years or just dropping 10 days from an upcoming year.

On February 24, 1582, the white-bearded octogenarian Gregory XIII issued the papal bull Inter gravissimas, which instituted the Gregorian calendar reforms. To catch up with the sun, that year was shorn of 10 days: The day after October 4 was declared to be October 15. This measure brought the date of the vernal equinox into conformity with what it had been in the days of the First Council of Nicaea, which in a.d. 325 had authoritatively ruled on how to use the beginning of spring to determine the movable feast of Easter.

Aside from the 10 days deleted from 1582, the major change of the Gregorian calendar was its requirement that years like 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2100 should not be considered leap years. In addition, New Year's Day was definitively established as January 1 (there had been many local variants), and the extra day of leap years was to be inserted after February 28.

The Gregorian calendar was soon adopted in the Catholic world but resoundingly rejected in all Protestant territories. Only more than a century later, between 1699 and 1701, did Denmark and the Protestant regions of the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland accede to the reasonableness of the "popish calendar." Great Britain and its colonies proved even more stubborn, retaining the Julian calendar until 1752. By that time 11 days had to be dropped to catch up, since 1700 had been a leap year in Britain but not according to the Gregorian calendar. Thus Parliament decreed that in 1752 the day after Wednesday, September 2, was to be Thursday, September 14. The beginning of the year was also moved from March 25 to January 1. To avoid all reference to Pope Gregory, the British had christened his calendar the New Style calendar (N.S.), while Julian reckoning was dubbed Old Style (O.S.).

Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, Eastern Europe and Russia between 1912 and 1919, Greece in 1924, Turkey in 1927. China accepted Pope Gregory's calendar in 1912--but not throughout the entire country until 1949--and its traditional lunar calendar is also used. The Eastern Orthodox Churches still rely on the Julian calendar for determining Easter and thus celebrate it on a different day from Roman Catholics and Protestants.

But the average Gregorian year of 365.2422 days still runs almost 26 seconds faster than the true year. Since 1582, the surplus has amounted to about 3 hours. A further refinement--that of omitting a leap day from all years exactly divisible by 4000--will keep the Gregorian year accurate to within 1 day in 20,000 years.

Our official year is no longer measured in days, minutes, and seconds but in the number of atomic oscillations (290,091,200,500,000,000) of the rare metal cesium. Before humans were capable of feats like that, however, it was the determination of Julius Caesar and, much later, Luigi Lilio and Pope Gregory XIII that provided the world with a relatively uncomplicated and scientifically respectable method for keeping track of all-important time.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 038572019X
• ISBN 13: 9780385720199
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar