Contributors

Giovanni Di Leo is an architect who graduated with honours from the University of Naples Federico II, where he went on to pursue further studies through Master’s programmes in Urban Management (Domus Academy) and in Technical Management of Public Works (Oikos), together with research in Sustainable Urban Design (Roma Tre University) and Environmental Reconversion Techniques (University of Campania). After working as a partner at Pica Ciamarra Associati, where he was responsible for environmental quality, he founded GDLA Studio di Architettura in 2005. His work focuses on urban regeneration, sustainability and the quality of living environments, through projects in architecture, urban planning and interior design. Alongside his professional practice, he maintains an intense activity in research, scientific coordination and dissemination on urban policy and design culture. He served as IN/Arch scientific coordinator for the European Windat network (European Commission – DG Energy and Transport), coordinated working groups for the National Centre for Bioclimatic Architecture (ENEA), and acted as a Federcasa consultant on the ecosystemic quality of Neighbourhood Contracts. He has contributed to defining codes for the environmental quality of buildings and living environments, including the code developed for the SEED Festival. He currently coordinates the “Architecture, Europe, Living Environments” programme and is a member of the Scientific Committee and Legislative Commission of the National Institute of Architecture. He also carries out editorial work for the international journal Le Carré Bleu and for L’Industria delle Costruzioni, and has given evidence to the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate on architectural quality, urban regeneration and demographic transition.

rchitect, designer and PhD, Annalisa Dominoni is an international point of reference in the field of design for extreme and space environments. She teaches at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano, where she heads ESA_LAB@PoliMi_Design, a research laboratory developed with the European Space Agency (ESA). She devised and teaches the Space4InspirACTion programme, the first academic course in space architecture and design supported by ESA, and X-Habitat, dedicated to design for extreme environments. Her research integrates neuroscience, behaviour and design to develop solutions for confined environments, high-criticality systems and emergency scenarios. She has also devised the Use & Gesture Design (UGD) methodology, applied to the systemic and behavioural dimension of design.

Founder of the Millennium Charter of Space Architecture (Houston, 2002), she has coordinated and developed research projects for space exploration with ESA, NASA and ASI, contributing to equipment tested on the International Space Station. She collaborates with aerospace industries such as Thales Alenia Space, Virgin Galactic and Argotec, with research bodies and government institutions, and with leading Italian design and industrial companies. She has received numerous international awards over the course of her career, including the Compasso d’Oro, the ESA Scientific Award for Young Researchers, the ADI Design Index, the BIG SEE Product Design Award, and the Premio Focus Raymond Zreick for Technology and Innovation.

Her projects have been exhibited at international institutions and events, including the Triennale di Milano, the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia “Leonardo da Vinci”, the London Science Museum and the Frankfurt Messe. She is also curator of Design Spaziale Italiano, a touring exhibition project promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dedicated to the contribution of Italian design to innovation in space exploration. An Italian Design Ambassador and visiting professor at prestigious international universities, she has published more than 200 scientific contributions and numerous monographs, contributing decisively to establishing space design as a recognised international discipline.

Edicola 518 is the rebel newsstand for lovers of fine paper. We, the artists of Emergenze, founded it on 1 June 2016 on the site of a historic newsagent’s in Perugia, and have made it a bookshop without equal anywhere in the world. Its selection offers a range unique in Italy of independent magazines, artists’ books, anarchist ephemera, fanzines and self-produced works under our own publishing imprint, Emergenze Publishing. We have defined the space of Edicola 518 as four square metres of infinite space.

A graduate in Architecture from the University of Florence, after early professional experience with the practice of Alfio Barabani Architects (1997–2004), Gianluca Falcinelli founded his own practice, focusing on architectural design with particular attention to the recovery, restoration and transformation of existing heritage. His practice stems from a profound sensitivity to the historical, material and environmental character of places, developed through long experience in conservation and architectural regeneration. He conceives of recovery not as a simple restitution of original form, but as a process of interpretation and re-signification that brings memory and contemporaneity into dialogue, through careful research into materials, construction techniques and the relationship between the existing fabric and new intervention. Even in new-build projects, the relationship with the past remains central: architecture arises from engagement with the history of places and the search for a balance between building and landscape, between constructed space and natural environment. His work thus explores a dimension of design founded on continuity, careful attention to transformation, and the capacity of architecture to create new ways of dwelling that respect local identities. He is currently working on a digital twin of the monumental complex and its historical and artistic heritage.

Neuroscientist and Full Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Parma, having previously served for many years as Full Professor of Human Physiology at the same university. A graduate in Medicine specialising in Neurology, he was part of the research group that discovered mirror neurons in 1992 — the most-cited Italian discovery in the international scientific literature — together with Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi and Rizzolatti. He has also developed a neuroscientific model of intersubjectivity known as “embodied simulation”. From 2016 to 2018 he was Professor of Experimental Aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and he is Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of more than 300 international scientific publications and of volumes such as La nascita della intersoggettività, co-written with Massimo Ammaniti.

Gabriella Greison is a physicist, writer, actress and narrator of quantum mechanics. For many years she has brought physics out of the laboratory and onto the stage, turning formulae and equations into stories capable of speaking to everyone. She has written fourteen books and created fourteen theatrical productions dedicated to the leading figures of twentieth-century physics, from Einstein to Dirac, from de Broglie to Leona Woods. Her shows have been staged throughout Italy and abroad, including in Cambridge, Washington and at CERN. She contributes to Radio 24 and Corriere della Sera, where she develops science communication projects with an innovative approach. At the heart of her work lies a single idea: physics is not something remote, but a key to understanding human relationships, emotions and the world around us every day. On the Corriere website she has created the successful series “Scintille”, in which everyday problems, from traffic to unliveable cities, are examined through the physics of complex systems.

Architect, PhD and lecturer, Anupama Kundoo is among the most authoritative international voices in sustainable architecture. She graduated from the University of Mumbai in 1989 and obtained her doctorate from TU Berlin in 2008; since 1990 she has developed, in Auroville, India, a research practice oriented towards people-centric architecture, based on spatial and material experimentation with low environmental impact and high socio-economic value. Her work was the subject of the solo exhibition “Taking Time” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. She has taught architecture and urban management at prestigious international universities, including Yale and Columbia, and currently holds a professorship in Architecture at TU Berlin. Her honours include the RIBA Charles Jencks Award, the Auguste Perret Prize (2021), the Building Sense Now Award from DGNB (2021) and the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture under UNESCO patronage (2022). Her research into new forms of materiality in architecture questions building habits inherited from industrialisation, focusing not on scarcity but on the abundance generated by human resources such as ingenuity, time, skill and sense of community. Her studios are based in Berlin, Mumbai and Pondicherry.

Mauro Magatti is a sociologist and economist. His research focuses on the relationship between economy and society, with particular attention to the transformation of contemporary capitalism, understood as a historical-social construct in which techno-economic, institutional and cultural dimensions interact. Following the influence of his mentors — including Zygmunt Bauman, Luc Boltanski and Bernard Stiegler — he has investigated the relationship between individual experience and major economic, technological and social transformations, developing in recent years, together with other scholars, the paradigm of social generativity.

Philosopher, ethologist and zooanthropologist. Founder and director of the School of Human-Animal Interaction (SIUA) and of the Centre for Post-Humanist Philosophy Studies, based in Bologna, Roberto Marchesini is regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of zooanthropology, a discipline he helped to found and develop as an autonomous field of research from the 1990s onward. A graduate in Veterinary Medicine in 1985, he has conducted more than thirty years of interdisciplinary research aimed at redefining the role of animals in society, developing a post-humanist philosophy directed at overcoming anthropocentrism. He is the author of more than one hundred publications in philosophy, ethology and animal bioethics, including Post-human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza, Fondamenti di zooantropologia and Etologia filosofica. He directs the journal Animal Studies and is among the promoters of the International Society of Zooanthropology. In 2016 a group of international scholars dedicated to him the monograph The Philosophical Ethology of Roberto Marchesini (Routledge).

Andrea Margaritelli, an engineer, combines his primary role as an entrepreneur within the family business, the Margaritelli Group, with operational roles in various non-profit institutions engaged in social and cultural work. Attentive to the strong potential of an organic relationship between economics and culture, he participates actively in debate on corporate communication, territorial values and social responsibility. As President of the Fondazione Guglielmo Giordano, he is engaged in promoting design culture in Italy and abroad, through initiatives spanning the fields of art, architecture and design. From 2018 to 2026 he served as President of the National Institute of Architecture, the prestigious cultural body founded by Bruno Zevi in 1959 as a forum for the genesis and diffusion of renewed sensitivity to design in Italy. He teaches Interior Design within the Degree Course in Design of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Perugia.

An art and literature scholar, he taught humanities at high schools in Padua and Venice, and later iconology and iconography at the European University of Rome. He has contributed to numerous journals. His very active career as a lecturer has led him to give lectures and presentations at schools of all levels, at nearly all major Italian universities, and abroad. In Barcelona, he spoke about Giotto to the architects building the Sagrada Familia; in Beijing, he taught a course on sacred art at the National Seminary; he has given presentations in Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Spain, Paraguay, Peru, China, and Israel. He has also delivered remote presentations for enthusiasts in Dubai, Colombia, Brazil, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Russia.
He has curated five educational exhibitions and authored the accompanying catalogs on Giotto’s frescoes in Padua (which attracted over one million visitors in Italy and around the world), Giotto’s frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Assisi, the masterpieces of Caravaggio, the masterpieces of Van Gogh, and the mosaics of Ravenna.

Walter Mariotti has been Editorial Director of Domus since 2017, with responsibility for the entire system. A graduate in Theoretical Philosophy from the University of Siena, with periods of research at Leuven and Harvard, following an Executive Programme at SDA Bocconi he obtained a PhD from the University of Bergamo, dedicating his research to the transformation of society and culture in contemporary life. Over the years he has devised and directed innovation projects for Italian and foreign publishers, including ClassEditori, RCS MediaGroup, Mondadori and Gruppo Media TI, participated in the founding of Renzo Piano’s G124 initiative, and provided cultural and strategic consultancy to public and private institutions. He currently teaches at IULM University in Milan and at the University of San Marino. His books include Alfabeto del postcapitalismo, Bellezza and Il tempo della complessità – Dialogo con Mauro Ceruti.