Marino Niola, a journalist and anthropologist of the contemporary, was born in Naples in 1953. He has taught at the Università degli Studi di Napoli as well as universities in Padua and Trieste, where, in 1999, he was one of the founders of the first Italian degree in Intercultural Sciences and Technologies. At the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli, where he is professor Anthropology of Symbols, Cultural Anthropology and Nutritional Anthropology, he direct with the anthropologist Elisabetta Moro the Museo Virtuale della Dieta Mediterranea and the MedEatResearch. He dedicates part of his research to the relationship between tradition and change in contemporary society, the processes of globalisation and localism that inspire the symbols, mythologies and imaginaries of the 'glocal' village. A popular science commentator for television and radio, he is a columnist for Repubblica and in the magazine il Venerdì di Repubblica he has the Miti d'oggi column.

(photo: © Giliola Chistè)