The Fascist model of exhibiting power and placing it in museum settings had its origins in the Liberal exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, and in the first exhibitions devoted to the Risorgimento. However, the regime's museum initiatives were numerous, innovative and varied, and many of them have not yet been adequately investigated; those launched in Italy's colonies, in particular, remain largely unexplored. This article highlights the surprisingly extensive network of museums and temporary exhibitions that Fascism initiated in Italian possessions abroad, involving prominent figures from the regime and contemporary culture, and shows how science, culture and nation-building (in both the colonies and the mother country, and between them) were interwoven in the Fascist museological project for the colonies.

Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss a number of interpretational phenomena of which the analysis proposed in the literature makes crucial use of rich meanings. The phenomena in question are cases where the assignment of truth-conditional contents to utterances seems to follow rules that do not operate on simple stable denotations or any other kind of ‘thin’ meanings but where composition takes rich structured representations as input. We also discuss problems for such accounts, which are mostly based on the inability of extant rich meanings accounts to explain many other interpretational phenomena, and we discuss the solutions that have been proposed to solve them. Furthermore, we address the discussion whether the informationally rich meanings are part of semantics, and more specifically part of the lexicon, or whether this information should be ascribed to more general world knowledge.

This article reconsiders the development of Fascist architecture throughout the late interwar period. It pays especial attention to the structures erected for the most significant international expositions held, or planned to be held, between 1933 and 1942, in order to identify significant trends in Party-sponsored design. It argues that the ‘dynamism’ of Fascist design was a consequence of the regime's preference for an increasingly imperial tone which developed in direct proportion to its increasingly imperial identity. It points to Piacentini and Pagano's Italian Pavilion built for the 1937 Paris Exposition, the first national pavilion constructed following the May 1936 proclamation of empire, as a significant flashpoint in the tension between Fascist interpretations of modern and classical design. This article concludes that the often-overlooked world's fair buildings can be viewed as crystalline distillations of the stylistic experimentation which defined the broader Fascist building programme both in Italy and abroad.

Infrastructure is often viewed through global and promotional lenses, particularly its role in creating market connectivity. However, infrastructure is heavily dependent on and constitutive of local spaces, where ‘frictions’, or disputes, emerge. Drawing on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a case study, we examine in detail two cases of BRI-related climate change litigation – one in Pakistan, and one in Kenya – that shed light on the frictions arising from what is deemed the most significant transnational infrastructure project of our time. In doing so, this study demonstrates how infrastructure can be made more visible in environmental law and how environmental law itself provides an important mechanism for stabilizing friction in the places where infrastructure is located.