CIAC – XLIV INTERNATIONAL COURSE OF ‘ALTA CULTURA’

As evidenced by the long tradition of studies done in the twentieth century (from Mauss to Benveniste to Starobinski), societies and the rites of exchange intersect with those of the gift, the economy of reciprocity and pact intertwines with that of oblation and the gratuitous. This is true for the economic system, for that of ethical values and for the ambit of the symbolic, which range over the long term from theology ("Qui salvando salvas gratis…"), to knightly honour – all the way to the phantasms of Don Quixote -, from ‘subventio pauperum’ to the decadent and anarchic ‘beau geste’ to the current forms of volunteering.
Studying a wide chronological and disciplinary span (from economics to aesthetics, from ethics to social history and literature), the "forms and values of the gratuitous" make it possible to interpret a conspicuous part of Western and Eastern history from which, at times, emerge – like linguistic flotsam and jetsam – the formulas that once governed life: noblesse oblige.