Somma Lombardo

Somma Lombardo is a town and comune in the province of Varese, Lombardy, Italy. It received the honorary title of city with a presidential decree on June 16, 1959. The airline Neos has its head office in the city. Education The community has a library. People from Somma Lombardo Niccolò Sfondrati, Pope Gregory XIV Valerio VALERI professore di antropologia (Somma Lombardo, 1944, è morto nel 1998, a 53 anni a Santa Monica, Los Angeles). Nel 1966 si era laureato in Filosofia alla Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. I suoi interessi si rivolsero poi all'antropologia, disciplina nella quale conseguì due dottorati (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, e alla Sorbonne di Parigi). In seguito la sua attività si sarebbe divisa tra l'insegnamento alla University of Chicago e la ricerca sul campo (in particolare presso gli Huaulu di Seram, nell'Indonesia orientale), Hawaii, Micronesia, Malaysia. Scrisse due importanti volumi "Kingship and Sacrifice" (1985), e "Hunting, Identity and Morality among the Huaulu of the Moluccas" (1999) e, per l'Enciclopedia Einaudi, curò alcune voci antropologiche. "Valeri was also the author of Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (1985), which Marshall Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Anthropology, called, "the best book ever written on Polynesian ethnology. It offers an innovative theory of sacrifice, as well as a theory of divinity, that engages with the best Western writings on comparative theology and takes its place among them. "Valerio Valeri was a man of great erudition and broad scholarship," Sahlins added. "He knew nearly 20 languages, and he had a broad philosophical background and a wide knowledge of art and literature. Everything he touched in his particular discipline of anthropology was thus informed by a more general intellectual significance. If anthropology is a project of finding universals in particulars, human significances in relative differences, Valeri was a master of it." Much of Valeri's work will be published posthumously, most notably two major volumes on the Huaulu, the first from the University of Wisconsin Press, The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting and Identity Among the Huaulu of the Moluccas, and the second, Blood and Money. Berg Press of Oxford will publish Rituals and Annals: Between Anthropology and History, a collection of Valeri's essays that deal with diarchy, history, cosmogony and ritual, with a regional emphasis on Oceania. Also scheduled for publication are Fragments from Forests and Libraries (to be published by Carolina Academic Press), a collection of his essays dealing with feasting, belief systems, exchange and sacrifice, with a regional emphasis on southeast Asia. Also forthcoming is an extended essay on opera and sacrifice in pre-revolutionary Europe, co-authored with Martha Feldman, Associate Professor in Music. References http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/980430/valerio.shtml External links Official site of Somma Lombardo Municipality (Italian) The Visconti Castle - Somma Lombardo