Unsure of how to entertain your parents in New York this weekend? Bwog staffer Mariela Quintana suggests Casa Italiana, where you can put your Art Hum skills to use.

Between the dank Amsterdam overpass and SIPA's bleak backside, stands the alabaster Casa Italiana, home of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. With an imperious entryway articulating the ground floor and high arching windows coursing across the second level, Casa Italiana epitomizes the architecture of the Italian Renaissance.

Under the auspices of Michael I. Sovern and Francesco Cossiga, presidents of Columbia University and the Republic of Italy respectively, the Italian Academy was established in 1991 to ostensibly promote the study of Italian culture and society. Thanks to their courageous demands, the Italian Academy intends to promote the place of Dante, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Verdi and other Italian masters in the academy. (Though it's been said that the palazzo was a gift of Mussolini, more affectionately known by scholars and party members alike as Il Duce.)

While you're in Butler cramming — or simply shitfaced at 1020 — your university is actively engaging with that frightening specter beyond the 116th Street Gates: the wide, weird world. Below, Bwog presents some of the most recent (yet unheralded!) findings and goings on from the realm of science and technology to have occurred at Columbia over the last few days.

Seismic Shi(f)t Happens

When some seisometers placed by Lamont-Doherty researchers along the sea floor of the Pacific near the Mexican coast found themselves stuck in fresh lava flows 8,000 feet below underwater, the university's bursars were surely shaking their heads in disbelief that they had surrendered any funds to a project advocated by the curious novelty of an "Earth Observatory" again. That is, until Lamont scientists Maya Tolstoy and Felix Waldhauser discovered that the seisometers were still transmitting, and became the first to closely record micro-earthquakes resulting from underwater eruptions. Good news, especially if it means Columbia research vessels won't be returning to the area to install new devices— and making enough noise to kill whales again.

Gateway Lab con Stile?

Italian artists Eva and Franco Mattes have two obsessions in life: Andy Warhol is one, the other is the virtual online community Second Life. Bwog has no doubt that if cultural critics had the time, the patience, or the lack of lives these two must in order to have endured a year in this hyper-aestheticised neighborhood of cyberspace, they would fall into paroxysms of glee before scribing fascinating tomes on this binarially-circumscribed subculture. Instead, we're left with Warholesque portraits of the artists' favorite virtual avatars. Oh, and they're going on display at Casa Italiana. We get the Italian connection, but wonder if the location has more to do with Mudd being too crowded with Halo fans?

While prettying herself up for her launch party this evening (AT MONA on Amsterdam b/t 108 & 109), the Bwog has been pondering her place in history, especially as it related to the rise and fall of Fascism, which, it turns out, Columbia is not so far removed from.

Casa Totalitarina
By Jacob Jacobsonian

One of Columbia's tour guides recently confided to a group of tourees that the Casa Italiana — the structure that today houses the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America — had been an outpost for the dissemination of fascist propaganda prior to the Second World War. At first, one might consider this to be a bit of propaganda itself, like so much of the Columbia trivia garbled over gargling at the West End. (And for the record, Wien Hall was not built to house the criminally insane). Having heard this particular rumor repeated far too often, and vowing never to let hapless tour guides upstage us, The Blue and White decided to investigate further.

Research in the archives unearthed an anonymous article in a 1934 issue of The Nation, alleging that the Casa had become "an unofficial adjunct of the Italian Consul-General's office in New York and one of the most important sources of fascist propaganda in America." The rumors, apparently, did not begin in the Admissions Department.