The author approaches the concept of threshold by exploring the spatial and temporal dimensions in which it is experienced and shaped today. Rather than searching for and providing a definition, she engages the reader in actively sharing her own journey through, and ongoing dialogue with, images and writings: indoor environments, afterlife islands, lonely dark paths, embracing statues challenge and question both the author and the reader’s gaze –what do we see? what we don’t see? am I within or beyond the threshold? do I feel included or exluded? do I dare to step in and to move on or do I want to keep still and withdraw?– while writers and poets’s voices interact with the author’s caleidoscopic narratives on threshold as condition and source of both loss and encounter, security and threat, pain and hope, memories and visions. Emotionally charged and cognitively productive, spatial and temporal thresholds meet and merge in the third dimension of waiting: patience and resilience –like the queuers’ art of slow down/step aside/keep on moving– happen to be effective strategies of survival for travellers in the age of brutal speed and proliferating borders.

From the crossing between various knowledges, wisdomes and disciplines, known through the experiences whether personal or working, born a different approach to the territories of the architecture, to the concept to live and to the plan. The architectonic space is considered a resource, therefore like the air and the water, to inquire in its complexity phenomenology to the center of which it’s the body of the inhabitant. The plan makes contingent, contextual and characterizes giving them place to a not authoritarian space, where «the art to construct» converses with «the art of live and the art to inhabit» (Charlotte Perriand).

An apocryphal tale, the Acta Pauli et Theclae, tells that at the beginning of the Christian Era, a young girl, Thecla, peeping at her window hears Paul the Apostle preaching and is converted to Christianity. Has Thecla’s attitude a specific significance in the tale? And how was evaluated a woman staying at a window in the ancient world? The article searches for an answer to these questions through the analysis of episodes representing women at the window in the Old Testament and in Greek and Latin literature.

Looking out of the window or out of the door, peering beyond the property line, are considered blamed behaviours for the woman, as results in the domestic economy treaties and in the manual for the confession published between XV and XVI century. The symbiotic link between the woman and the door, background and semantic frame of the female condition, has been confirmed during the time by the paintings. In particular, the stories of Mary of Nazareth are able to define the scanning of the spaces and of the times of the Christian woman. As the illustrations of the XVI century obstetrician treaties show, the depiction of the “Nativity of Mary” is vehicle for the representation of the female life in the domestic settings in a significant moment as that concerning the birth of a baby. The pictorial and sculptural examples shown in this work, mark a double vision of the woman in the modern age in her relationship with her boundary. Doors and windows represent positive elements when are used to contain woman freedom; on the contrary, they are considered as negative ones when appear as woman means to fuel her curiosity.

Starting from the analysis of the documents produced by the Napoleonic censorship, the article examines the word of women readers end women writers and his representation in nineteenth-century France. Through the literary production of two women novelists of the time, Mme Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse and Mme Elisabeth Guénard Brossin de Méré, both in balance between pedagogy and transgression, between morality and eroticism, the article deals with the theme of literature’s influence on the habits, the intellectual formation and the emotional sphere of post-revolutionary women.

The Australian Ursulines represent an original case of contemporary female religiosity, which overcomes the boundaries of the religious and the secular, the past and the present, the female and the universal. Their model of religious life is a-institutional, inward-looking, a-hierarchical, democratic, and respectful of the members’ choices. Furthermore, in their participation to civic life, the Australian Ursulines promote innovative social and political initiatives. They have recently developed these characteristics in continuation with the spirit and thought of the sixteenth-century foundress of their order, Angela Merici.