Anachronism, according to encyclopedias, is an error. For historians, argued Manfredo Tafuri paraphrasing Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, it is something worse: a mortal sin (Bloch 1949: 176; Febvre 1947: 15; Tafuri 1984: 64). More recently, Georges Didi-Huberman and Carlo Ginzburg have argued that the conscious exercise of anachronism can become a tool of knowledge, an interpretive device that allows us to bring to light the discontinuous, composite, and non-linear character of the temporalities that weave together every story (Didi-Huberman 2000; Ginzburg 2021). Against the backdrop of the debate on the heuristic potential of anachronism, this issue invites contributions that focus on a phenomenon as widespread as it is seldom thematized: namely, the coexistence – in every site, building, construction site, if not in every building activity – of textures, practices, and values belonging to different epochs, often incongruous, at times dissonant: sometimes able to blend harmoniously, as on the façade of Santa Maria Novella; at other times incompatible, if not contradictory.
Authors are invited to submit an abstract (max 1,000 words/7,000 characters) together with a concise bibliography, 5 keywords and a short CV to direzione.srsa@gmail.com (please indicate in the subject line: Call 19 – Anachronisms). If the proposal is accepted, the author will be asked to write a text of 20,000-50,000 characters (3,000-7,500 words), including spaces and footnotes, accompanied by 10-12 images, carefully following the journal’s guidelines. The texts will be double-blind peer-reviewed and the final decision on each publication will be made by the Editor-in-Chief, who may also seek the advice of other experts.
• Deadline for abstract submission: October 10, 2025
• Notification of abstract acceptance or refusal: October 24, 2025
• Deadline for paper submission: March 15, 2026
For more information, please visit the journal’s website: https://www.aistarch.org/anacronismi-anachronisms-n-19-2025/