Usually, when we think of religious orders, these things come to mind: a cloister, an abbey, a library, prayer in solitude, detachment from the world… All this in the cradle of a period defined as "dark" by historiography up to Romanticism: the Middle Ages . In this period the monks - especially the Benedictines of the various orders - were the custodians of Judeo-Christian but also classical culture, since thanks to their patient and meticulous transcriptions as scribes we have received almost all of the Greek and Latin works which we study today. Today we are grateful to them first of all for this. However, many do not know that many products - material and immaterial - that we consume and use every day, come from monks who, using their ingenuity nourished by a profound spirituality, invented them due to practical necessities. Personally, I find it amazing! Let's begin… The heavy plow Plows were a primary agri...
Hi everyone, today I want to talk to you about how cinema was born. Over the centuries, various instruments have been built to project images, such as the "magic lantern" invented in the seventeenth century. Cinema, however, was born only at the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to two previous inventions: photography and film. Exploiting their potential, in 1891 Thomas Edison invented a device, the kinetoscope, which allowed one to see moving images, and a few years later two French brothers, the Lumières, created an instrument which allowed both filming and projection: the cinematograph. Success was immediate, and improvements were gradually made to the equipment, with the introduction of sound in the 1920s, and the ways of "constructing" films changed. Cinema, thanks to its popularity, had a profound impact on cultural evolution and political life. After the Second World War, despite having to face competition from television, it remained one of the most po...