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German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

Looks at the first 100 years of Italian cinema examining its role in Italy’s recent history. Provides a bibliography of major film directors, Italian cinema sources, reference works, histories, themes, theory and criticism and articles in journals.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured methodology for performing build‐in reliability (BIR) investigation during a new product development cycle.

The methodology in this paper represents an extension of the Quality Functional Deployment/House of Quality (QFD/HoQ) concepts to reliability studies. It is able to translate the reliability requisites of customers into functional requirements for the product in a structured manner based on a Failure Mode And Effect Analysis (FMEA). Besides, it then allows it to build a completely new operative tool, named House of Reliability (HoR), that enhances standard analyses, introducing the most significant correlations among failure modes. Using the results from HoR, a cost‐worth analysis can be easily performed, making it possible to analyse and to evaluate the economical consequences of a failure.

The paper finds that the application of the proposed approach allows users to identify and control the design requisites affecting reliability. The methodology enhances the reliability analysis introducing and managing the correlations among failure modes, splitting the severity into a detailed series of basic severity aspects, performing also cost/worth assessments.

It is shown that the methodology enables users to finely analyse failure modes by splitting severity according to the product typology and the importance of each Severity criterion according to laws or international standards. Moreover the methodology is able to consider the “domino effects” and so to estimate the impact of the correlation between the causes of failure. Finally a cost/worth analysis evaluates the economical consequences of a failure with respect to the incurred costs to improve the final reliability level of the product.

The paper proposes a completely new approach, robust, structured and useful in practice, for reliability analysis. The methodology, within an integrated approach, overcomes some of the largely known limits of standard FMECA: it takes into account multiple criteria, differently weighted, it analyses the product considering not only the direct consequence of a failure, but also the reaction chain originated by a starting failure.