ABSTRACT Amongst the Italian exiles who arrived at the Canton of Ticino following repression perpetrated by the Di Rudinì and Pelloux administrations – after the popular uprisings of 1898 – are Enrico Bignami, Giuseppe Rensi and Arcangelo Ghisleri, who, in Lugano, created a sort of secular symposium for fostering spiritual values. This gave birth to Coenobium, the ‘international journal of independent studies’, which remained in operation between 1906 and 1919. This periodical distinguished itself due to the diversity of the issues (...) addressed: from science to law, from history to philosophy, from literature to spiritualism, philosophy and psychology. With the beginning of the First World War, however, Coenobium’s focus was on the spiral of violence triggered by the war; hence a series of denunciations entrusted to the column ‘War to war!’, which marked a dramatic change in the editorial policy of the magazine edited by Bignami, who was determined to turn it into a strong instrument of pacifist propaganda. Several prestigious figures in Europe’s cultural and political milieus participated in this venture, notably Norman Angell, Romain Rolland, Angelo Crespi, Raffaele Ottolenghi, Claudio Treves, Filippo Turati, Henri La Fontaine, Nicholas Murray Butler and Enrico Bignami. (shrink)

Nos sumus Romani, qui fuimus ante Rudini, “We who once were Rudians are now Romans”. One of the most known in the Annals of Quintus Ennius, this fragment explicitly refers to the citizenship granted to the poet, probably in the year 184 BC, one of the dates accepted as terminus post quem for the beginning of the composition of his epic poem. Even in other fragments, although less explicitly, Ennius shows this sense of belonging, as he calls himself a (...) Roman, besides being the bard to Rome’s res gestae. By means of a combined study of these fragments, this text aims to analyze the image the poet creates of himself as a Roman citizen within the Annals and, therefore, how his persona is self-represented. (shrink)