Overland literary journal > Articles by: Giovanni Tiso

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Giovanni Tiso

Giovanni Tiso is an Italian writer and translator based in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the editor of Overland’s online magazine. He tweets as @gtiso.

Articles by Giovanni Tiso:

Published in Overland Issue · Cartoons

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Giovanni Tiso

24 January 202325 January 2023 · Aotearoa / New Zealand

The end of the politics of care

Giovanni Tiso

The daily spectacle of televised briefings was not unique to New Zealand, and it may simply be the case that Ardern thrived when given the opportunity to speak to the public directly—in other words, that she was better than others at it. Alternatively, we could say that her rhetoric found in the pandemic the ground on which to turn into concrete action. Either way, the benefits we derived in terms of lives saved from the remarkable extension of that social license are literally incalculable.

26 September 20223 November 2022 · Politics

What’s in a flame? Giorgia Meloni’s Italy

Giovanni Tiso

Instead of asking if Giorgia Meloni is a fascist, then, as everyone seems to be frantically doing, we may ask what kind of non-fascist would run under a symbol that was crafted in order to avoid falling afoul of anti-fascist laws, or adopt one of Mussolini’s most famous slogans—‘For God, country and family’—as the tagline of her election campaign.

21 June 20228 August 2022 · Film

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with Lightyear

Giovanni Tiso

If, as Andrew Todd has written, Sony’s recent Morbius was the triumph of intellectual property over storytelling, Disney’s Lightyear is intellectual property as storytelling. It is the story of a toy, written by people who don’t know that toys come alive. It is a movie that exists solely because of its franchise yet narrows its imaginary boundaries.

19 October 202025 November 2020 · Aotearoa / New Zealand

Ardern’s world

Giovanni Tiso

Usually, when we say that a politician has immense charisma, it is taken to imply that they have no substance, which wasn’t true of Key just as it isn’t true of Ardern. You don’t occupy the centre of politics just by flashing a smile. You occupy it by articulating a set of values in which the social bloc that determines the outcome of elections wants to see itself reflected.

Published in Overland Issue 237 Summer 2019 · Education

On the school as utopia

Giovanni Tiso

A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation about the first attempts at universities in Australia to support the inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities. Laudably, these programs aren’t limited to vocational paths but allow participants to study the subjects they are most interested in.

Published in Overland Issue 236 Spring 2019 · Technology

On hiding your screwdrivers

Giovanni Tiso

For years now, I have listened to first-hand accounts of the dangers of being overly connected: strangers, acquaintances and friends who either lament their troubled relationship with the internet and its various contributing technologies – email, social media, smartphones, connectedness in general – or who report great benefits to their complexion and psychological health after spending time offline. I believe all these feelings to be plausible and true, even as I am sceptical about the sometimes tacit, often explicit claim that social activities carried out online are inherently less authentic.

Published in Overland Issue 235 Winter 2019 · Immigration

On not moving to Australia

Giovanni Tiso

I couldn’t move to Australia even if I wanted to, due to having two children with autism.

29 April 201912 June 2019 · Reviews

‘The world is corpsed’: Marvel’s dazzling adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Giovanni Tiso

The Russo Brothers have redefined what it means to ‘take liberties’ with the source material. Beckett said the play should be set in a single interior? Then we’re going to use the whole universe. He ordered that there should be only four characters? Then we’re going to use hundreds, possibly thousands of them.

Published in Overland Issue 234 Autumn 2019 · Language

On the forgetting cupboard

Giovanni Tiso

There is a word I love in Italian for which there is no equivalent in English: dimenticatoio, the place for things you want to forget, or have forgotten already. You might say, for instance, that an old, cherished custom has ended up in the dimenticatoio, a concept you would likely render in English with the phrase ‘has fallen into oblivion’.

19 March 201917 April 2019 · Christchurch

How to talk to your politicians and your media about the terrorist attacks in Christchurch

Giovanni Tiso

Even as the country was grieving with its Muslim community, a quiet process of revision began.

1 February 201919 February 2019 · History

The Riace model, climate change and the social imagination

Giovanni Tiso

In 1998, nearly thirty years after the discovery of these ancient shipwrecks, another boat left Greece for Italy and ran aground near Riace. This time its cargo was human beings: nearly two hundred Kurdish asylum seekers whose journey had begun in northern Iraq. They walked into the town along the highway, in single file, and the people of Riace did their best to welcome them.

Published in Overland Issue 233 Summer 2018 · Science

On learning French while you sleep

Giovanni Tiso

This is your bedtime ritual. After playing a tune at 528 Hz – a frequency billed to ‘release inner conflict and struggle’ – you settle into a simple weightlifting routine. Then you drink a casein shake, put on your headphones and turn on the music player. For the next several hours, the player will recite a list of words in French for you to absorb while you sleep, as you lay your head on a pillow that smells faintly of vanilla. In eight or preferably nine hours, you will wake up slimmer, energised and slightly more fluent at French.

Published in Overland Issue 232 Spring 2018 · Column

On remembering to back-up grandpa

Giovanni Tiso

You won’t even bother to call it a funeral. ‘We are disposing of my grandfather’s body today,’ you will say. ‘Family only.’ Later that evening, on the car ride back home, you will switch on the digital copy of grandpa and the two of you will resume the conversation you were having the night before on his deathbed.

25 September 201817 July 2023 · The internet

That time Louise Mensch claimed I’m a Russian spy

Giovanni Tiso

It started quite innocently, as these social media collisions always do. A friend and I were discussing on Twitter Ed Whelan’s bizarre conspiracy theory in defence of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, remarking – as many people have – that it was reminiscent of Eric Garland’s infamous 120-tweet long ‘game theory’ thread of late 2016.

14 September 20188 October 2018 · Reviews

Fear but mostly loathing in Washington DC

Giovanni Tiso

Even as a workplace drama, Fear is a disappointment. We are promised in the prologue the story of the ‘nervous breakdown’ of the executive branch of the US government: a story of insubordination and sabotage, of documents removed from the president’s desk and orders to the military flatly disobeyed.

Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018 · translation

On writing while foreign

Giovanni Tiso

Often, when asked what I do for a living, I say I am a writer as well as a translator. It is not a word that I would use in my native language: the Italian ‘scrittore’ is far too grandiose. It implies that you have published at least one book, probably more, whereas the English word ‘writer’ covers a larger semantic field, encompassing people who write habitually for a public in various media domains, such as this journal.

22 June 201823 July 2018 · History

A brief (fascist) history of ‘I don’t care’

Giovanni Tiso

This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’.

17 May 20183 July 2018 · Reflection

Restoring the future: on the closure of Italy’s asylums

Giovanni Tiso

This week forty years ago, Italy became the first country in the world to legislate the closure of its asylums. The law was drafted by a psychiatrist and member of the governing Christian Democratic party, Bruno Orsini, but was known from the outset as ‘Basaglia Law’, after the leader of the movement that pushed for that radical and in some ways paradoxical reform.

Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018 · The internet

On the passing of internet time

Giovanni Tiso

I used to think that internet time was flat, and that the internet was an engine for stripping texts of their temporal context. I can see now that internet time is infinitely looped, labyrinthine.

6 February 20181 March 2018 · Main Posts

When you ban a song against Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Giovanni Tiso

‘Bella Ciao’ is both the most popular and the least political of all partisan anthems. It has a jaunty, upbeat tune and a very simple plot: the first-person singer wakes up one morning to discover that the country has been invaded. He wishes to join the partisans, for he doesn’t fear death. Should he in fact die, he only asks that he be buried by the shadow of a nice flower.

Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017 · astronomy

On living under a hyperreal sky

Giovanni Tiso

On the morning of 11 August 1993, my partner and I took a train and then a bus from Milan, where we lived, to Courmayeur, an alpine town near the French border. We didn’t book any accommodation, but headed with our blankets a little way up Mont Blanc, in search of an open space protected from the lights of the city.

19 December 20175 February 2018 · History

The story of Laika, who was just a dog

Giovanni Tiso

Speaking at a Moscow press conference in 1998, Oleg Gazenko – a scientist attached to the mission – expressed his regret in sombre and sympathetic tones: ‘The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.’

6 December 20175 February 2018 · Main Posts

On polite Nazis and the violence of speech

Giovanni Tiso

It was, in the words of far-right parliamentarian and former minister of youth policy Giorgia Meloni, ‘intimidation at worst’, and nothing compared to the actual violence of far-left demonstrators ‘who destroy entire cities and burn down our cars’.

24 November 201722 December 2017 · History

Against anti-fascism: Amadeo Bordiga’s last interview

Giovanni Tiso

An important figure in Italian and European communism, Bordiga was every bit as prominent as his friend and rival Antonio Gramsci in the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As leader of the abstentionist faction of the Socialist Party, he was at the centre of the split that led to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, of which he served as secretary while Mussolini seized power.

Published in Overland Issue 228 Spring 2017 · terrorism

Dynamite for the people

Giovanni Tiso

The La Dynamite pamphlet of 1 May 1892 included the official program of explosions organised to coincide with the May Day celebrations in Paris. Dawn would be greeted with a volley of dynamite over the police station at Clichy, followed by the gathering of the marchers. At nine o’clock, the procession would visit the home of magistrate Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, where they would give an ovation to nitro-glycerine.

20 October 201718 November 2017 · Aotearoa / New Zealand

New Zealand has a new government – where to now?

Giovanni Tiso

These unusual circumstances reflect the difficulty our political system still has in adjusting to mixed proportional representation – a difficulty echoed by today’s Australian headline ‘NZ shock: losers take power’. We are a full 21 years and eight elections into the current constitutional arrangements, but the thought that the party with the second highest vote might be better placed to form the government still baffles some.

2 August 201722 August 2017 · Politics

A fresh approach no more: the return of politics in New Zealand

Giovanni Tiso

It’s hard to predict what will happen from here. The Greens and Labour could spend the next seven weeks fighting over that 4% of the left-wing vote which will make a great deal of difference to their respective post-election fortunes, but none over who gets to form the next government

Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017 · Column

On the books I kept

Giovanni Tiso

You shall know me by the books I kept. I realise that it is a romantic and questionable notion, applying only to some people and in limited ways. But I live by the example of my parents, for whom books and reading were tools of emancipation.

4 April 201722 May 2017 · Writing

Tale of a haunting: Jeff Sparrow’s search for Paul Robeson

Giovanni Tiso

While Sparrow’s admiration for his subject is palpable (and amply justified), the book is never triumphalist or hagiographic – or, worse still, nostalgic – nor are the central claims concerning the relevance of Robeson’s political thought uncomplicated. The book reads rather like the story of a haunting. What is it that moved a white Australian writer to travel the world in search of the ghost of a black American artist? And what did he learn?

Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017 · The internet

On the unbearable closeness of others

Giovanni Tiso

We live in literal times. Far too literal. Hell’s vestibule in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit was supposed to be a metaphorical, metaphysical place. Now we’ve gone and invented it. A virtual space. An enormous room.

Published in Overland Issue 225 Summer 2016 · The internet

On the limits of Google’s gaze

Giovanni Tiso

You find yourself in the middle of a long stretch of road. On either side, fields of what looks like young wheat. There are no cars in sight. The sun is shining – isn’t it always? – but of course you aren’t warm. You can choose to proceed in either direction. Eventually you will come to a road sign, or cross paths with a vehicle whose markings might shed some light on your whereabouts.

5 December 201610 January 2017 · Politics

The man without a legacy

Giovanni Tiso

In specular fashion, Key offered instead a paradoxical continuity: putting the Tories in charge of Labour’s house, and making them the custodians of Clark’s achievements. Not a new thing in the country’s political history, but done so well that the public barely noticed. It was not so much an election as a wonderfully executed burglary.

22 November 20168 December 2016 · The media

Truth: executed by political consensus

Giovanni Tiso

Of all the improbable things that we are being asked to believe, it seems a growing number of people are settling for the idea that Macedonian teenagers posing as journalists and agents of Vladimir Putin posing as internet commenters swung the US presidential election for Donald Trump. It was fake news who done it, making commentators declare that Mark Zuckerberg could well be the most dangerous person on the planet.

7 November 201610 January 2017 · The future

On nationalising Facebook, or perhaps just its architecture

Giovanni Tiso

Over the past few years I have been diligently collecting public pledges to abandon Facebook, a subset of the equally interesting genre of people saying they will quit the internet altogether. While I seldom agree with the arguments, I look for the sentiments hidden behind these declarations. What these pieces often don’t say but invariably mean is that the swift rise of the networked society has had a profoundly unsettling effect on people’s daily lives.

3 October 201610 November 2016 · Writing

Her real name: on the unmasking of Elena Ferrante

Giovanni Tiso

The lives of many women I have known in my own life and countless others would have been greatly improved if real Italian men with real names had behaved in more satisfyingly nuanced ways, making the work of authors like Ferrante (and Morante) truly seem like lazy social satires. Now, I find myself despairing at the plausibility of Claudio Gatti and Roberto Napoletano, and how well they could fit within Ferrante’s cycle, with their needy, greedy, narrow worldview, and their belief that they are naturally entitled to a woman’s life.

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016 · The internet

You can’t have your revolution

Giovanni Tiso

When Lavrentiy Beria, the former head of Stalin’s secret police, fell out of favour with the Soviet government and was executed, the authorities proceeded to expunge his achievements and very existence from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The publishers created four extra pages of the closest alphabetical entry – the Bering Sea – and sent them to every one of the encyclopedia’s subscribers so they could replace the entry for Beria. For people who lived in the Soviet Union, compliance with this kind of request wasn’t optional: being in possession of banned or unrevised texts implied criticism of the regime and carried with it a range of unpleasant consequences.

Published in Overland Issue 223 Winter 2016 · Writing

On the things I can say in 800 words

Giovanni Tiso

One can praise succinctness, and opine that more words don’t always equal better words. (Karl Kraus: ‘There are writers who can say in as few as twenty pages what it takes me as many as two lines to express.’) But what if you don’t have enough to say? The wikiHow page entitled ‘How to Make an Essay Appear Longer Than It Is’ contains many useful suggestions aimed at the US college student who has trouble completing an assignment, but its wisdom is more widely applicable and would have impressed old man Dumas himself.

Published in Overland Issue 222 Autumn 2016 · Reading

On only reading old books

Giovanni Tiso

‘A book changes by the fact that it does not change when the world changes.’ Roger Chartier wrote this in The Order of Books, although he knew it not to be entirely true: just a few pages earlier, he had remarked how the practice of dividing the Bible into chapter and verse, originating in the seventeenth century, ultimately modified its mode of interpretation, a fact that troubled the English philosopher John Locke at the time.

23 March 201622 May 2016 · Main Posts

Sugar taxes and porridge gospels

Giovanni Tiso

These days if you enter a McDonald’s restaurant in Australia or New Zealand and order a medium frozen Coke, they ask you if you wouldn’t rather have a large one, since they both cost $1 anyway. And why would you have the smaller one, when after all you can stop drinking it whenever you want? This basement price for the beverage – part of a promotion that began two years ago – could well be below cost, and seems designed to get you into the restaurant in the hope you will be persuaded to consume something else as well.

21 February 201618 April 2016 · Writing

Vale Umberto Eco

Giovanni Tiso

Other than penning some columns for L’Espresso, as he had been doing on a weekly or fortnightly basis for over thirty years, and releasing one more novel, Year Zero, his final public act was to found a new publishing house. He and his collaborators called it the ‘ship of Theseus’, after the vessel that produced the ancient paradox by the same name – could an object still be considered the same object if you replaced all of its parts with identical ones? – and set its course to collide with ‘Mondazzoli’, the corporate behemoth created by the merger of the two largest Italian publishers, Mondadori and Rizzoli.

12 February 201622 March 2016 · Art

Venus, censored

Giovanni Tiso

This is the Capitoline Venus, the Roman copy of a second-century BC Greek original which ordinarily graces the hall of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. She’s in the so-called ‘modest’ position as per the canon of the Venus pudica, the left hand covering the groin, the right hand doing a rather poor job of concealing the breasts. However, even this proverbial modesty was deemed insufficient last month, when it was decided to place the Venus in a box – or rather, to build a box around her – to protect the sensibility of visiting dignitaries.

2 February 201615 March 2016 · Main Posts

Scola’s A Special Day

Giovanni Tiso

One of precious few Italian films to deal with the pre-war Fascist period, and most especially with the acme of Mussolini’s popularity, Ettore Scola’s Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day) takes place entirely within the confines of a tenement complex known as Palazzo Federici in Rome. Watching the film again during the week of Scola’s death in late January, and being familiar with the story, I find that my attention is drawn not to the characters but to the buildings themselves.

22 January 20163 March 2016 · Technology

Sincerely, Solutionist of Sydney

Giovanni Tiso

In the real world, of course it is quite possible to have a high degree of interest in or even knowledge of a problem and yet come up with truly terrible solutions. But even this reasonable objection loses sight of the larger issue: for the inventors of Flux, politics, or policy-making, is a sum of individual decisions, as somebody in economic or game theory might see it, and not the coming together of different and sometimes opposite viewpoints and interests.

Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015 · Technology

On boredom

Giovanni Tiso

Here is a typical, timeless complaint: nowadays we have lost the capacity to enjoy moments of calm or to engage in quiet contemplation. Bertrand Russell once wrote that children should be spared excessive trips to the theatre. Later it became comic books or pulp fiction. Then cinema and television. Then the internet. Now it is smartphones and the iPad.

16 December 20154 February 2016 · The internet

Shame on you

Giovanni Tiso

This is the story of three white men who lost their jobs. SBS sports reporter Scott McIntyre, for a series of critical tweets on Anzac Day; British lawyer Clive O’Connell, for a tirade captured on video against fans of the Liverpool football club, and people from Liverpool generally; Sydney hotel supervisor Michael Nolan, for posting abuse on the Facebook page of feminist writer Clementine Ford. One of these things, of course, is not like the others.

17 November 20159 February 2016 · Main Posts

In the name of invisible monsters

Giovanni Tiso

Terrorism operated on children as much as it did on adults. It formed us, growing up in this fear, and seeing fear on the faces of the grown-ups. It must have. However, I don’t recall ever being asked to draw those feelings.

13 November 201516 December 2015 · Writing

We are all Umberto Eco now

Giovanni Tiso

This belief that online is ‘free’, that it doesn’t take anyone’s paid writing job away or stifle anyone’s voice – while unspoken and in most respects probably true – needs to be measured against the crisis of magazines and of formally-edited selections of content more generally.

4 September 201524 September 2015 · Culture

A new flag for New Zealand, Inc.

Giovanni Tiso

During a visit to Wellington by John Howard in 2003, two antiwar protesters – teacher Paul Hopkinson and Overland’s own Dougal McNeill – burned a New Zealand and an Australian flag in protest. The case ended up in court as it was a crime at the time to destroy or damage the New Zealand flag ‘with the intention of dishonouring it’, and Hopkinson was sentenced to pay a fine of more than $700. The conviction was overturned a year later in the High Court, leading subsequent flag-burners to being charged with disorderly conduct instead of the more contentious crime of desecration.

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015 · Dignity

On wilful amnesia

Giovanni Tiso

When my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease, she started to get me confused with her son, who had moved to Brazil at what was then my age. As a result of this, and of the feelings of guilt she still harboured towards him, seeing me had the effect of making her anxious. It was only through conversation that she became calmer to the point where we could enjoy each other’s company.

28 August 20154 September 2015 · Technology

Tales from the compliance unit

Giovanni Tiso

It is not totally clear whether the ghastly name given to the operation – ‘Ice Pick’, as in the weapon used to mortally wound Leon Trotsky – originates from inside the party or was thought up by an especially sardonic critic, but the contention that its ultimate aim may be to root out radicals has some intuitive merit: given the presence among the candidates of an insurgent with considerable appeal among disaffected voters and activists, trawling for past declarations of criticism in order to disqualify new members would have precisely that effect.

Published in Overland Issue Aotearoa online ·

The Aotearoa nonfiction issue

Giovanni Tiso

This digital collection complements the special Aotearoa issue of Overland and is a testament to the response that our call for submissions received. These four essays shouldn’t be regarded as the ‘next best’, but rather as other directions in which the print issue could have gone, and which our writers wanted to explore.

15 July 20151 August 2015 · The internet

At war with the rank and file

Giovanni Tiso

As is frequently the case in these matters, I wonder idly how Gramsci would feel about his writings being used as articles of faith, as opposed to starting points for a critical engagement with the present. Were he alive today, I like to think that he would search for new answers to some of these old questions, or at least attempt to reframe them. For the problem of how to enforce party discipline in the age of social media is not the exclusive preserve of democratic centralists.

Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 ·

Editorial

Giovanni Tiso

This special Aotearoa issue of Overland is not about who we are. It is not about the experience of living on the other side of the ditch or being of this place. It is rather the continuation of the intellectual project that Overland has undertaken – to engage with contemporary questions and ideas, to look outward rather than inward – by a different set of writers, driven by the belief that this difference, this shift in perspective, can be a value in itself.

2 June 201512 June 2015 · Writing

New Zealand dreams

Giovanni Tiso

I value blogs and small magazines that can’t afford to pay for contributors, and all of the informal mechanisms that allow people to produce culture outside of the traditional channels, take risks, learn their craft. I’m quite convinced I wouldn’t be writing at all if I hadn’t been blogging first, and it’s a form that continues to give me pleasure and in which I believe. But equally I recognise the value of the other layers, of literary magazines and serious general interest publications that promote and organise new writing according to a logic that is not that of the author alone.

20 May 201530 June 2015 · Reflection

Those lost in the Mediterranean Sea

Giovanni Tiso

The language itself is a blanket, or a white sheet thrown over those bodies. It suffocates any debate or talk of alternatives. What does it even mean to distinguish between economic refugees and the regular kind, when those who flee poverty are driven to attempt such a dangerous crossing? ‘No one would put their children in boats unless the sea is safer than land,’ as the phrase attributed to Somali-British writer Warshan Shire goes.

1 April 201516 April 2015 · Politics

Why we spy

Giovanni Tiso

Over the past four weeks, both of the organisations that operate the vast majority of New Zealand’s newspapers published reports by Nicky Hager and Ryan Gallagher on the nation’s role within the Five Eyes network. These reports are based largely – though in Hager’s case not exclusively – on the analysis of documents obtained by Edward Snowden in mid-2013 and subsequently leaked to selected investigative journalists.

Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015 · Culture

On criticism as a form of living

Giovanni Tiso

If – as Matthew Arnold claimed in the nineteenth century – poetry is ‘a criticism of life’, the twentieth century has broadened the domain of the critic to include all forms of human expression and, ultimately, expression itself – that is to say, how we communicate experience to one another.

17 February 20152 March 2015 · Main Posts

The digital dark age

Giovanni Tiso

In a widely reported presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Cerf expressed last week the belief that we live ‘in a digital Dark Age’ in which ‘an information black hole’ threatens to create ‘a forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century’. You couldn’t frame the problem in more alarmist, apocalyptic terms. But is true? Yes and no. Consider a written English text that exists in two formats: as an analogue document printed on paper and as a digital document written in Word Perfect 2.0 and stored on a 3½ inch floppy disc formatted by a 1989 Apple Macintosh.

10 February 201517 February 2015 · Reflection

Citizenfour and the end of intimacy

Giovanni Tiso

Citizenfour (2014) is a film that seems to unfold in real time. It is as if the plot were revealed to the filmmaker at the same time as the audience. The filmmaker is in the story and while never shown is directly and intimately involved. In the film’s opening sequence, she reads aloud the electronic communications sent to her by her source. The filmmaker is Laura Poitras. The source is Edward Snowden.

27 January 201511 February 2015 · Writing

On life before and after Auschwitz

Giovanni Tiso

It may be incorrect to say that Primo Levi was a chemist before he was a writer, but possibly no other writer has ever owed more to his or her other profession than he. Not just life, in the literal sense of surviving the Lager, then later the vocation to write in order to bear witness of those atrocities, but a worldview: a method for understanding both chemistry and writing as meaning-making activities.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014 · Culture

On the end of the internet

Giovanni Tiso

The internet is the future we seldom imagined. It eluded generations of science fiction writers, only to suddenly appear, fully formed, some time in the mid-1990s, and from then on quickly become an essential part of how most people communicate, research, write and work. Our new present.

11 November 201417 November 2014 · Politics

The invention of racism

Giovanni Tiso

While the victims of the Lampedusa shipwreck were still being fished out of the water or extracted from the charred remains of the lighter that took them to within miles of the coast of Italy before going up in flames, the 155 survivors were processed by the police and put under investigation for the crime of illegal immigration. These proceedings were triggered automatically by the ‘Bossi-Fini’ Law of 2002 – the most draconian set of anti-immigration measures in Europe – and were dutifully followed even as 368 migrants lay dead.

16 October 20146 November 2014 · Reflection

We can remember it for you wholesale

Giovanni Tiso

Two months ago I received an unexpected notification form Google+. I barely use the service, so I was surprised to hear that they had a story for me to review. I clicked on the link. It said ‘Trip to Camogli and Genoa. A story by Giovanni Tiso.’

17 September 201425 September 2014 · Politics

The global surveillance picture show

Giovanni Tiso

Edward Snowden! Julian Assange! Glenn Greenwald! Kim Dotcom! Also starring: your metadata! Whom you talk to, when, how and for how long. And introducing: the content of your conversations! Everything you say or write to people using electronic and telephone networks, analysed by algorithms and rendered searchable, then archived on a secure database.

29 August 201411 September 2014 · Main Posts

Digging the dirt

Giovanni Tiso

‘Dirty politics’, for many, is a tautology. Isn’t all politics dirty politics? Whatever one might think of that proposition, as of this month the phrase has acquired a far more specific meaning in New Zealand, following the release of the latest book by investigative journalist Nicky Hager.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Reading

On the right to oblivion

Giovanni Tiso

In English it’s called the right to be forgotten, but the French, who were the first to legislate it, call it le droit à l’oubli – the right to oblivion – evoking not just the state of being forgotten but also forgetting, not merely being overlooked but also ceasing to be.

14 August 201421 August 2014 · Reflection

Signs of the times

Giovanni Tiso

The news even reached Australia, via the local chapter of Buzzfeed: ‘New Zealanders Are Vandalising Their Political Billboards And It’s Awesome’. Except, it’s not.

25 July 20144 August 2014 · Reflection

Wishing upon a star: solidarity, real and imagined

Giovanni Tiso

Last night’s actual, courageous gesture of solidarity towards Gaza by Malaysian cyclist Azizulhasni Awang was preceded by a raft of false ones.

4 July 201415 July 2014 · Reflection

The hyperreal football dive

Giovanni Tiso

Were it possible to suspend Greek statuary in the air somehow, Phidias himself might have sculpted Arjen Robben as he launches himself skyward ...

19 June 201426 June 2014 · Politics

To boycott, or not to boycott, that is the question

Giovanni Tiso

When the World Cup came to my country, in 1990, it was preceded in very predictable fashion by large-scale corruption and massively wasteful public spending.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 · Reflection

On resisting speed

Giovanni Tiso

It’s finally here: a radically new technology of reading. The hypertext wasn’t quite that. It was a way of connecting texts to one another, weaving them into a larger whole – potentially as vast as the culture itself.

1 May 201413 May 2014 · Reflection

Making real a Fascist puppet

Giovanni Tiso

There is something especially abhorrent about propaganda aimed at children. You don’t need to share in the belief that hatred must be taught in order to recoil when it is peddled to young minds. Yet the manner in which this is done is deserving of careful attention and study. Consider for instance how gender discrimination was – and is – perpetuated in school texts even in relatively liberal societies.

9 April 201423 April 2014 · Politics

Free to move, forbidden to live

Giovanni Tiso

For capitalism to work, it is necessary for goods, capital and services to always be moving. For people, on the other hand, to settle often means to achieve security, loosely defined as ‘not having to move again’. In the language of decades of European treaties, therefore, we can see the tension that is being played out now against the backdrop of the ongoing currency crisis and the union’s expansion into less economically advanced regions.

Published in Overland Issue 214 Autumn 2014 · Politics

On measuring our future

Giovanni Tiso

Karl Marx once expressed the belief that the end of the capitalist era and the advent of communism would signal the end of human prehistory and the beginning of history proper. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists, for their part, wanted to destroy museums and libraries ...

28 March 20148 April 2014 · Reflection

Luke Harding and the spy as editor

Giovanni Tiso

It’s a wonderful image, that of a paragraph deleting itself in the act of being written. That it belonged to a book about spies and surveillance only adds to the frisson, like when Amazon deleted copies of a book from thousands of its customers’ Kindles without so much as a warning or an explanation, and the book in question turned out to be George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I believe that’s where the phrase ‘you couldn’t make this shit up’ originally comes from.

11 March 201425 March 2014 · Reflection

Vale Alain Resnais

Giovanni Tiso

That pattern of setting the past critically against the present would be repeated in his subsequent documentary work, particularly in the important and celebrated Night and Fog (1955), a devastatingly clinical documentary on the Holocaust, framed by contemporary footage shot by Resnais at some of the camps. These – not yet memorialised or turned into museums – lay in a state of desolate abandon, surrounded by mud and unkempt grass.

19 February 201427 February 2014 · Reflection

In search of found time

Giovanni Tiso

Three different projects dealing with presence, absence and the passage of time. The first one is straight photography: no tricks. Irina Werning’s Back to the Future features adults posing as their childhood selves in replicas of old pictures that they sent in ahead of time.

4 February 201418 February 2014 · Culture

Woody Allen and the history of False Memory Syndrome

Giovanni Tiso

The allegations that Woody Allen sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan were first raised and investigated in 1993. In May of that year, the New Yorker published a report by Lawrence Wright entitled ‘Remembering Satan’. This concerned an investigation of prolonged and horrific abuse in a Satanic cult which had to be abandoned after it became apparent that the detectives had heavily manipulated the witnesses and their testimonies.

17 January 201423 January 2014 · Politics

Contesting the ‘Internet Electorate’: on the troubled roll-out of Kim Dotcom’s political party

Giovanni Tiso

No sooner was the party announced, that it had to be cancelled. The massive launch in Auckland of internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom’s much-awaited political vehicle – which he dressed up as an album launch in order not to run afoul of electoral law – was hastily called off yesterday due to fears that the disguise might be too obvious after all, and the Electoral Commission would likely take exception.

16 December 201320 January 2014 · Politics

Do you remember the 1981 Springbok Tour?

Giovanni Tiso

If the historical footage is any indication, the protesters who demonstrated in the streets, clashed with police and attempted to disrupt the games during the 1981 Springbok rugby union tour of New Zealand didn’t chant Nelson Mandela’s name. They chanted Steven Biko’s and Amandla Ngawethu.

25 November 20139 December 2013 · Reflection

‘I’ll report them tomorrow’ – the rape of Franca Rame

Giovanni Tiso

Franca Rame belonged to a generation of actors and playwrights in the popular theatre tradition that became politicised after 1968. My parents used to see her perform in the theatres and cabarets of Milan in the late fifties, before they got married.

8 November 201321 November 2013 · Politics

This is what rape culture looks like

Giovanni Tiso

The story broke over the weekend on television: a group of Auckland teenagers had engaged in a prolonged campaign of rape, which they documented on Facebook for the added pleasure of shaming their victims. They called themselves a name that I’m not going to repeat, to avoid glamourising these crimes in the very terms that these young men chose to describe them.

4 November 20139 November 2013 · Main Posts

‘We need a revolution’: Carla Ravaioli interviews Guido Rossi

Giovanni Tiso

As Russell Brand Fortnight draws to a close, I thought it might be useful to add another call for revolution, spoken in a different but in many respects just as unlikely voice: that of an aging law scholar, interviewed by an aging Marxist journalist and author. Carla Ravaioli spoke to Guido Rossi exactly three years ago, in the early stages of the eurozone’s great unravelling.

18 October 201324 October 2013 · Writing

The big prize: Eleanor Catton, NZ and the Booker

Giovanni Tiso

There is something deeply absurd about competitions between artists, and yet they’ve existed for a very long time. We implicitly recognise their value. And the Booker is such a big prize. A big prize for a small country. We felt it. A sense of friendship for Eleanor but also of identification with that excessively simple idea, the New Zealand writer.

7 October 201316 October 2013 · Writing

The story of a man who is reunited with his trousers

Giovanni Tiso

I am not ordinarily interested in behind-the-scenes accounts and authorial meta-analyses, and studiously avoid for instance the director’s commentary tracks on DVDs, but lately the convergence of Gilligan’s show-after-the-show, and of the torrent of viewer commentary and critique on the web became an irresistible spectacle, every bit as absorbing as the show proper.

23 September 201330 September 2013 · Reflection

New Zealand Labour chooses its new leader

Giovanni Tiso

David Shearer, the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party didn’t lose his job after an electoral defeat, but a mere twenty months into his term as Leader of the Opposition.

5 September 201318 September 2013 · Main Posts

God can see you, Stalin can’t!

Giovanni Tiso

It is a well-known trope of modern politics that every election is the most important election in a generation, if not a lifetime. In Western democracies, in particular, the chief function of election campaigns is to dramatise and magnify the ideological differences between the two main parties or coalitions that represent the interests of the elites, until the choice between them resembles an existential struggle of good versus evil, evil versus good. This is essential both to drive voter turnout and to legitimise the electoral result.

19 August 201327 August 2013 · Politics

Scenes from a mall that doesn’t exist

Giovanni Tiso

Two stories, this past week. In the first story, the Israeli Defence Forces published a blog post aimed to show that Palestinians in Gaza – far from living in a state of permanent military siege and economic deprivation – are ‘out in force, enjoying themselves in sparkling new malls, beautiful beaches and hotels, and doing their shopping in pristine grocery stores and markets heaving with fresh produce’.

2 August 20139 August 2013 · Politics

Berlusconi’s guilty sentence: all you need to know

Giovanni Tiso

The first thing you need to know is that the sentence is final: Silvio Berlusconi is guilty of tax evasion and has been sentenced to four years imprisonment with no further chance of appeal. He is also to be banned from holding public office for a period of time yet to be established.

22 July 201331 July 2013 · Culture

Google wants to live forever

Giovanni Tiso

It used to be Microsoft that had the inside track on immortality. After Bill Gates wrote his vision of a documented life, one of the company’s senior executives – a man by the name of Gordon Bell – was charged with turning that vision into reality.

10 July 201315 July 2013 · Polemics

The Common Man’s Front

Giovanni Tiso

What are the political antecedents of Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star Movement?

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013 · Politics

The Net will save us

Giovanni Tiso

Italy’s The Five Star Movement and the lure of internet ‘solutionism’.

25 June 20136 December 2022 · Reflection

The fake shop and nostalgia capitalism

Giovanni Tiso

When I first visited London, in the summer of 1991, I was struck by the unfamiliar spectacle of boarded-up shops, and of shops that had been hollowed out and were now occupied by temporary stalls selling imported clothing or knick-knacks.

10 June 201314 June 2013 · Culture

PRISM and Bill Gates’ ‘documented life’

Giovanni Tiso

The future changes so quickly that Bill Gates had to write the same book twice. When The Road Ahead was first published in November 1995, he was still tepid about the internet, not quite prepared to make it synonymous with the ‘information highway’ that he hyped throughout the book. He had, in fact, changed his mind at least six months earlier, when he released the company memo in which he charted a new course for Microsoft centred around networking and the internet. But it was too late to change the book.

28 May 20136 June 2013 · Culture

Are we running out of poems?

Giovanni Tiso

According to the Daily Telegraph, the Hope Bourne prize is a prestigious poetry competition whose chief requirements are that the each entry be ‘original’ and ‘inspired by Exmoor’. Determined to fulfil at least one of these requirements, a chap by the name of Christian Ward took a published poem by Helen Mort entitled ‘The Deer’ and handed it in as is own under the title ‘The Deer at Exmoor’.

14 May 20132 June 2013 · Politics

The cost of living

Giovanni Tiso

Just over one hundred years ago, the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistic, wishing to obtain reliable information on the cost of living in Australia, sent out 1,500 account books to as many householders, asking them to fill them out over the course of the twelve months to 30th of June, 1911.

26 April 20132 June 2013 · Politics

A modest step forward

Giovanni Tiso

When I applied to become a resident ahead of moving to New Zealand, in 1997, I did it under the ‘de-facto partner of a citizen’ category. Since my partner happened to be a woman, the requirement was for us to have been together for at least two years, which we had to scrupulously document. Had my partner been a man, it would have been four years.

12 April 201312 April 2013 · Politics

The death party

Giovanni Tiso

They took his body into the city in the evening of the 28th of April, but it was well past midnight by the time they passed all the roadblocks and reached the particular square they had chosen as their destination. There they unloaded all of the bodies – eighteen in total – and arranged them in the forecourt of the petrol station. Then they stood guard, waiting for the sun to rise.

4 April 20132 June 2013 · Politics

Zip War Airganon

Giovanni Tiso

It is entitled ‘Confiscation of politicians’ assets’. The setting is the campervan that Grillo uses to tour the country. The comedian is sitting at the table, a V for Vendetta mask placed at his side and framed in the establishing shot.

18 March 201328 June 2022 · Politics

‘I hate the indifferent’

Giovanni Tiso

Two soldi – that is to say, one tenth of a lira – was the very popular price of La città futura (‘the future city’), a recruiting pamphlet in newspaper form distributed in February of 1917 by the Piedmontese youth federation of the Socialist Party. The publication had been entirely written and compiled by then 26 year-old Antonio Gramsci and is considered the most coherent expression of his early idealist phase.

1 March 2013 · Politics

This is the new Italy

Giovanni Tiso

Forget Berlusconi. Berlusconi is dead. And with Berlusconi dies the right-wing coalition that he didn’t so much cement as embody, with its paradoxical mixture of opposites – fascist corporatism vs Thatcherite neoliberalism, nostalgic nationalism vs regional separatism, moral conservatism vs how the boss liked to spend his evenings.

18 February 2013 · Politics

Traffic

Giovanni Tiso

As for the official rationale, according to Prime Minister John Key it is two-fold: on the one hand, the policy is a way of thanking Australia for sharing its intelligence on the activity of people smugglers in the region; on the other, it is aimed at discouraging asylum seekers from bypassing Australia and reaching New Zealand directly. Neither proposition makes much sense unless you are willing to entertain the possibility that somebody would in fact attempt to make such a voyage, which at over 4,000 miles is equivalent to crossing the Atlantic twice.

1 February 20131 February 2013 · Politics

Mussolini wasn’t so bad

Giovanni Tiso

Mussolini wasn’t so bad. He started out as a socialist, after all, didn’t he? And as director of the party’s newspaper, Avanti!, he was firm in his opposition to Italy entering the First World War, at least until his sudden change of heart of 1914, which may or may not have been facilitated by sums of money secretly paid to him by the French to promote the cause of intervention. As director of the newly founded Popolo d’Italia, following his expulsion from the Socialist Party, Mussolini became one of the most influential pro-war voices in the country, but seeing as the eventual intervention cost Italy a mere 750 000 lives, this wasn’t so bad.

21 January 2013 · Main Posts

The exodused

Giovanni Tiso

The experiment in post-democracy that was the government of the technocrats in Italy ended in December when Silvio Berlusconi announced his intention to once again run for Parliament as leader of a right-wing coalition and withdrew his party’s confidence in Prime Minister Mario Monti.

17 December 201218 December 2012 · Main Posts

Last of 2012: The painted library

Giovanni Tiso

I hold in my hands a cheap, ugly edition of every book in existence. At least that’s what it feels like. An ebook reader is like a portal, a word repository. It’s the world’s literature no longer bound by time and space.

5 December 20125 December 2012 · Culture

Tongan Ark

Giovanni Tiso

With these words, spoken in 1996 by the philosopher, educator and democracy campaigner Futa Helu, begins Tongan Ark, the documentary by New Zealand filmmaker Paul Janman on the last years of Helu’s life and the extraordinary experience of Tonga’s ‘Atenisi Institute.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Culture

Streets of wherever

Giovanni Tiso

Set pieces in foreign locations have always been a hallmark of the spy film genre, but in the current crop of Anglo-American franchises they have reached new levels of baroque virtuosity. The modern cinematic secret service agent is at home anywhere, speaks all languages, walks over everything; he’s a silent drone, a lethal tourist.

16 November 201216 November 2012 · Politics

War is social

Giovanni Tiso

Web 2.0, social media, Facebook and Twitter, the internet itself had all been leading up to this: the IDF livetweeting its latest offensive on Gaza. There is now officially no aspect of human experience that cannot be represented via a series of brief, instant updates. War is social. Death is social. Terror is social.

5 November 201212 June 2023 · Politics

The weariness of the satyr

Giovanni Tiso

If it were made into a film or a play, it would have to begin near the end: from the parties that were held in the weeks and days before the trial, when the girls tried to grab the last of the money and favours whilst talking privately about him with open, at times ferocious disrespect, calling him a ‘flaccid arse’ and other things. ‘He’ was at this time the Prime Minister of what is still formally regarded as the world’s seventh largest industrial power.

23 October 2012 · Main Posts

A portrait of the artist as a thirty-seven-year-old man

Giovanni Tiso

Twice the young Alessandro Del Piero walked back, until he almost had his back to the keeper. And then he twisted his body and hit the ball with the inside of the right boot. He didn’t need to look up to see the spot that he was aiming for. The ball curled around big Jürgen Kohler, climbed up above the keeper standing a few metres off the line, and then dropped into the top-left corner, where it was always destined to go.

9 October 2012 · Reading

The world’s school

Giovanni Tiso

The story of my country is the story of its school system. ‘We made Italy. Now we must make the Italian people,’ said Massimo D’Azeglio, one of the foremost intellectuals of our Risorgimento. The role of compulsory public education for children under the age of 12 – instituted in 1877 – was to be also, if not primarily, this: to forge a unified people with a sense of belonging to a unified nation.

24 September 201225 September 2012 · Main Posts

Birth of a nation

Giovanni Tiso

The first ever Italian film had an exceptional premiere: on a giant screen outside of Rome’s Aurealian Walls, on 20 September of 1905, that is to say on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the capture of the city by the army of King Vittorio Emanuele II that completed the decades-long process of liberation and unification of the country. The subject of the film was that epic event: La Presa di Roma, the capture of Rome.

7 September 2012 · Main Posts

No one knows where you are

Giovanni Tiso

‘An ad for drowning.’ This is what Jennifer Mills called the video that Jeff Sparrow posted on Overland last Monday, and that has haunted me ever since. She was right, too: it is an ad for drowning, as opposed to the appeal to beware of people smugglers that it purports to be, for it presents drowning as a consumer choice, albeit catastrophic, which the prospective migrant should refuse to make.

24 August 2012 · Writing

Forecasts of the Past: a launch!

Giovanni Tiso

I hope we timed this right. The idea was to have this post come up on Overland to coincide – ideally, but hopefully literally – with my launching Dougal McNeill’s new book, Forecasts of the Past, in what used to be called the staff club at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

10 August 201210 August 2012 · Politics

The trouble with parliaments

Giovanni Tiso

Mario Monti is in trouble for something he said to the Germans. He has since claimed that he was merely calling for greater ‘flexibility’ in the ‘interactions’ between governments and the parliamentary assemblies of Europe, but politicians across the Bundestag would have none of that: what he really meant, they say, is that executives should have more power at the expense of their legislatures. It was an attack on democracy itself.

30 July 201230 July 2012 · Main Posts

Atlas of the Midday Fund

Giovanni Tiso

A book of maps. One hundred and twenty-seven of them, held together by three brass screw-on bolts. On the hard cover – the dust jacket, if there ever was one, is lost – the words Atlante della Cassa del Mezzogiorno, 1950-1962. The book has no introduction, and no text outside of a table of contents, the customary brief publisher’s information and the title, place names and legend of each of the maps.

24 July 201227 July 2012 · Politics

Good morning, shooters

Giovanni Tiso

In my whole life I have spent a total of seven days in the United States, in 2006, to attend – of all things – a criminology conference. I had to organise my own accommodation and so I spent some time on the internet checking out customer reviews of hotels in downtown Los Angeles. This was a mistake.

12 July 201213 July 2012 · Reading

Fascist grammar

Giovanni Tiso

I’m trying to move on, I really am. Best of intentions. Something current in mind. But then, when it’s time to sit down to write, it is the old material that finds its way to the top of the pile. Perhaps it is the urge to trace some intellectual and historical personal origins. Perhaps I am trying to tell you who I am.

27 June 2012 · Reading

Let’s close down the schools

Giovanni Tiso

We should beware of large tenements where multitudes of people choose or are made to withdraw. Prison, churches, hospitals, parliaments, barracks, ministries, convents. These public architectures are a bad omen: irrefutable signs of a general disease.

8 June 2012 · Politics

Euro 2012

Giovanni Tiso

A look at the chances of the nations taking part in the exciting elimination tourney that is Europe in 2012.

30 May 201230 May 2012 · Main Posts

In Vietnam they killed the Child Jesus

Giovanni Tiso

‘In Vietnam they killed the Child Jesus. This phrase does not come from a cruel modern fable, but reflects instead the tragic truth and cautionary moral of a real event that took place in a Vietnamese village, where, whilst a group of people enacted a nativity scene, a brief battle ensued between Vietnam and Viet Cong troops, and a stray bullet hit the infant who stood for the Child Jesus in the crib.‘

15 May 201215 May 2012 · Politics

A message from Joseph Goebbels

Giovanni Tiso

Against the backdrop of Anders Breivik’s personal theatre, and on the eve of the staggering electoral result in Greece of the party that for reasons of politeness so many media organisations would rather not call neofascist or neo-Nazi (besides, their symbol is not at all a Swastika, it’s a meander, that’s like a totally different thing, don’t you see?), outside the train station in Bologna, I picked up an old film magazine.

26 April 201226 April 2012 · Politics

25 April

Giovanni Tiso

I find it an intriguing coincidence that the 25th of April marks the commemoration of wartime events in both my country of birth and my country of adoption. In most respects, the two occasions couldn’t be more different: Anzac Day commemorates the service and sacrifice of uniformed troops in a global conflict whose rationale is seldom discussed and poorly understood, whereas the Festa della Liberazione celebrates the irregular partisan troops ...

13 April 201213 April 2012 · Culture

The city as memory

Giovanni Tiso

A couple of years ago I acquired a guidebook to Lombardy and Piedmont published in 1914 in which I was especially delighted to discover a map of my native Milan drawn in the distinctive and attractive style of the Touring Club Italiano publications. Looking for familiar places, I came across the road in which my father spent all of his working life and found that a river ran through it.

28 March 201215 October 2020 · Writing

‘What is this coup d’état? I know’

Giovanni Tiso

What follows is a translation of the column that Pier Paolo Pasolini published on 14 November 1974 in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. It is amongst the most quoted and debated opinion pieces in the history of Italian journalism and yet, in spite of Pasolini’s enduring appreciation in the English-speaking world, it has been historically a difficult text to source in translation.

29 February 201228 March 2012 · Main Posts

The social network

Giovanni Tiso

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been variously interpreted as a cautionary tale on the dangers of Communism or an allegory of the stifling conformity of post-war US society. Neither reading concerns me today, except to the extent they both suggest that the strangely persistent myths about the brash optimism and lack of self-reflection of the American Fifties are not to be credited. This is an era that feared not just nuclear annihilation but also social disgregation, and was well aware of its spectres.

Published in Overland Issue Online Occupy Issue · Politics

Europe’s perfect ruins

Giovanni Tiso

On the five, the window of an ancient Roman edifice. On the ten, a medieval Romanesque portal. On the twenty, two slender Gothic windows, one taller than the other. On the fifty, a detail from a Renaissance building. On the hundred, the ornate entrance of a Baroque palace. On the two hundred, a section of a late-nineteenth-century public building, perhaps a train station.