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This book is about the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. It analyses the triumphs as visually emphatic events that both conveyed and constructed Roman views of the world. Aiming at approaching issues of identity, the book analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on triumphal display. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions strive to establish both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? Arms, ships and rams, coins and bullion, sculptures and paintings, art and valuables, golden crowns, prisoners, hostages, animals, and trees are all examined in separate chapters, as are the representations that were made specifically for the occasion: models and personifications of cities, peoples, rivers, and vivid tableaux staging scenes from the war. To be able to engage in issues of processional contents and sequence, acted roles, visual interplay, spectator participation, and emotional effect, the study embraces the complete corpus of ancient sources of the historical triumph, literary and pictorial. The approach includes discussions of the triumph as a religious rite and as a political act. But performance is the key word, and attention is in the first place paid to the visual expressions and schemes of the parade, and the interplay between these and the spectators.

Dionysius’ account of God’s processions has been interpreted in a range of ways. Thomas Aquinas interprets divine processions as created likenesses of God. The Byzantine tradition interprets them as ἐνέργειαι in God. Neoplatonist readers of Dionysius read them as both divine self-differentiations and activities performed by creatures. Each reading can accommodate some of Dionysius’ claims, but not others. After considering reasons for and against each interpretation, I show how Dionysius’ texts on beauty, which present a phenomenological metaphysics of beauty, provide grounds for synthesizing significant aspects of each. The paper closes with a presentation of that synthesis.

During the parliamentary elections in Italy after World War II, rumours spread in the public sphere about the occurrence of “miracles.” These “miracles” were interpreted as warning messages from the divine about the danger posed by the Communist Party. This was considered part of a strategy to promote Christian Democrats by representatives of the Catholic Church and was viewed with concern by communist countries in Eastern Europe as the phenomenon began to spread. In the second half of 1948, the Romanian authorities initiated measures to abolish the Greek Catholic Church and persecute the Roman Catholic Church. In this context, rumours spread in Catholic circles about “miracles” intended to stimulate the resistance of believers in the face of persecution. The phenomenon of “miracles” also spread among Orthodox believers, who were dissatisfied with the elimination of religious education in schools and the beginning of the collectivization of agriculture. For this reason, this phenomenon was considered a danger by the communist authorities in Romania. In this study, we aim to examine how the authorities dealt with the issue of “miracles,” what measures were taken, which institutions were involved, and what the consequences were for long-term religious policy in communist Romania.

Event tourism is increasingly recognized as a vital segment of the travel industry, with cultural festivals providing valuable tourism opportunities. Madurai, an ancient city in South India known as the “Athens of the East” celebrates 'Chithirai Thiruvizha', touted as one of the world's largest celebrations, spanning an entire month. The purpose of this research is to explore the opportunities for event tourism at Madurai city, promised by the grandeur of the occasion. The manuscript investigates the meticulous planning, organization, and execution of this festive experience to understand prospects of the suitable form of event tourism through a detailed case study approach. The study evaluates the festival through four destination mix elements—physical products, programs, people, and packages—to assess its readiness as a destination product for tourism and uses the Event triangle framework- to analyse the complex relationship among the events’ stakeholders - participants, spectators and sponsors to investigate how the Chithirai Festival’s stakeholder dynamics can contribute to its evolution into a sustainable destination product. The study contributes to tourism literature by applying event management frameworks to real-world scenarios and offer actionable recommendations for communication, sustainability, partnerships, and operational improvements. Thus, the study enables a deeper understanding of event management and dynamic interaction between event characteristics, destination attributed and tourism development measures.

In the Hindu Balinese imagination, demons (buta kala) are ambiguous figures of the crossroads. Across Indonesia, the display of giant demon puppets (ogohogoh) has increasingly become part of the lunar Hindu New Year celebrations. Drawing on fieldwork among the Balinese minority on the island of Lombok, I argue that the display of demon puppets permits Hindu Balinese youth to unleash “wild” demonic forces. Building on Kaja M. McGowan’s (2008) notion of Balinese “internal aesthetics,” I propose that the puppets serve as potential sites or receptacles for the demonic. Just as each demon puppet mobilizes a display of fun and volatility, so it provokes passions and frequently becomes embroiled in conflict. Demon puppets are designed to amuse and dazzle by their outrageous appearance, yet they unsettle the porous boundaries between “religion” and “entertainment.” By examining the politics surrounding the annual ogoh-ogoh procession in Cakranegara, I show that their display acquires urgency in a multireligious context.

The procession of El Señor de los Milagros is a multitudinous religious manifestation originally from Peru that tours numerous cities around the world each year in October. In Barcelona (Spain), the procession centers the diverse dances performed in honor of the “Cristo Moreno”, especially La Marinera, which is considered the cultural heritage of the Peruvian nation and is performed mainly by dance groups formed by new generations of Peruvian migrants’ children. This article analyzes the relationship between new generations and the practice of dancing La Marinera in honor of El Señor de los Milagros in Barcelona. Our main methodological strategy was an ethnography focused on the processions held in Barcelona (Spain) in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2022. We also conducted in-depth interviews with key informants and focus groups and a review of documents and historical information. In this article, we will show that the performance of the Marinera dance in the procession can foster a connection between young dancers and the worship of the Lord of Miracles. Its performance promotes the appreciation and safeguarding of this practice as a distinctive cultural and national element of Peru, also allowing for a public staging oriented toward spectacle, framed in a transnational and globalized context.

Production and processing of milk represents a very important sector of the agricultural industry of Montenegro. Milk production is performed primarily on family farms, from which a small percentage is further placed in processing facilities. In addition to favourable conditions for cattle rearing and milk production, production results are modest. ARIMA model was applied in order to forecast the quantities of cows milk that will be collected and processed in 2019 into fermented dairy products and drinking milk. The observed and obtained data show the presence of seasonal and trend component in time series. Furthermore, the analysis highlighted the importance of milk processing on family farms, in addition to the need for investment in its improvement. The paper also analyzes investment support referring to the milk processing facilities in Montenegro.

In this article, we argue that the different ritual structures of maritime pilgrimages result from the different historical backgrounds of each site. We have focused on two maritime pilgrimage sites in the Adriatic Sea: Nin, in contemporary Croatia (Northern Dalmatia), and Perast, in contemporary Montenegro (Kotor Bay). We compared these two locations and maritime pilgrimage processions because they have similar historical backgrounds (both were under Venice’s significant influence), and comparable boat processions with similar structural elements. We concluded that multilayered customs, consisting of diverse popular traditions, were fused in these pilgrimages through ecclesiastical (para)liturgical processions. Based on material presented in this article, we concluded that the Nin and Perast elites drew on local traditions and developed maritime pilgrimage boat processions in order to draw out their political, religious, social, and economic potentials.

It is of great significance to identify all types of domestic garbage quickly and intelligently to improve people's quality of life. Based on the visual analysis of feature map changes in different neural networks, a Skip-YOLO model is proposed for real-life garbage detection, targeting the problem of recognizing garbage with similar features. First, the receptive field of the model is enlarged through the large-size convolution kernel which enhanced the shallow information of images. Second, the high-dimensional features of the garbage maps are extracted by dense convolutional blocks. The sensitivity of similar features in the same type of garbage increases by strengthening the sharing of shallow low semantics and deep high semantics information. Finally, multiscale high-dimensional feature maps are integrated and routed to the YOLO layer for predicting garbage type and location. The overall detection accuracy is increased by 22.5% and the average recall rate is increased by 18.6% comparing the experimental results with the YOLOv3 analysis. In qualitative comparison, it successfully detects domestic garbage in complex multi-scenes. In addition, this approach alleviates the overfitting problem of deep residual blocks. The application case of waste sorting production line is used to further highlight the model generalization performance of the method.

In this volume, Chungman Lee offers a concise yet thorough evaluation of the contemporary discussion on the filioque and examines the trinitarian theologies of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo.