RISULTATI RICERCA

Dei Comuni della Sicilia preunitaria, sulle loro complessità, parzialità geopolitiche, tra valli e circoscrizioni ecclesiali di età siculo – Normanne, Ramacca ne costituiscono un caso interessante. Essa, tra antiche e nuove diocesi, prerogative legaziali e rinnovate esigenze politiche concordatarie, è coinvolta nei nuovi assetti ecclesiastici duo siciliani. L’ articolo nel presentare qualche inedito dato su Ramacca, indi-ca altri processi di ricerca di una Sicilia “aperta”.

Il percorso di integrazione nazionale successivo all’unificazione politica procedette con grande difficoltà, inoltre, le notevoli differenze interne e le condizioni di estremo disagio di alcuni territori destarono una crescente preoccupazione, alimentando un ampio dibattito non di rado condizionato da un evidente pregiudizio antimeridionale. Ciò favorì la diffusione una vasta letteratura pseudoscientifica influenzata dalle teorie della Scuola positiva di diritto criminale, che riconduceva le straordinarie condizioni del Mezzogiorno a una differenza etnica oppure a un regresso antropologico, sottovalutando le cause socio-economiche. In questo contesto, anche le principali inchieste ufficiali sulla Sicilia accolsero alcune suggestioni che facevano riferimento a una presunta alterità antropologica.

Il contributo analizza le descrizioni di opere d’arte di età moderna rintracciabili nel volume dedicato alla Sicilia del Voyage pittoresque, ou description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile di Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non, pubblicato tra 1781 e 1786, e in quella che è stata ormai riconosciuta come la sua fonte: la relazione del viaggio in Sicilia del 1778 di Dominique Vivant-Denon, data alle stampe, con denuncia del plagio di Saint-Non, con il titolo Voyage en Sicile nel 1788. L’indagine sui passi relativi a opere e artisti siciliani nei due testi lascia emergere predilezioni, giudizi, presenze ma anche assenze e soprattutto il diverso atteggiamento rispetto all’arte siciliana dei due autori francesi, la profonda comprensione dei fatti artistici da parte di Vivant-Denon e la sua capacità di apprezzare anche tendenze artistiche diverse dall’imperante classicismo, nell’ammirazione del naturalismo radicale di Caravaggio o dello stile composito del siciliano Pietro Novelli.

Il saggio intende fornire un quadro aggiornato degli studi sul poeta e filosofo Tommaso Campailla da Modica, indica le direttrici di ricerca, le fonti da esplorare e i problemi ancora aperti. L’autore ripercorre l’origine della famiglia, i primi studi, la sua rivoluzione cartesiana, l’impegno a rinnovare l’accademia degli Affumicati, l’invenzione della stufa per la cura della sifilide, fino alle vicende editoriali dopo la sua morte, soffermandosi sull’analisi delle opere scientifiche meno conosciute.

This article describes the walking tours realized for the app Hidden Trento within the project Public Renaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present (PURE, 2019-2022). The app, free of charge and available at www.hiddencities.eu, offers four different urban walks through the lesser-known places of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Trento. One of these is set in December 1563 during the final days of the Council of Trent and is narrated by Angelo Massarelli, bishop and secretary of the assembly. The storyboard and thematic insights are based on what Massarelli wrote in his Diari during his almost 20-year stay in Trento. In addition to personal comments on the political situation and the work of the Council, this source offers much information on the city’s social and cultural life. Through the app tour, Angelo provides the main elements of the Council’s institutional and doctrinal history while drawing the user’s attention to aspects of everyday urban life, such as street fighting and public order, hospitality and supplies, public factions, festivals, the production and selling of press prints and the repression of unorthodox religious ideals. The paper discusses the realization of this digital itinerary, presenting its methods of dissemination, highlighting its educational and didactic applications, and describing its uses in a museum context.

How do we make sense of urban life in the past? What do we do when we study urban history, and to what extent do our methods fully capture the complexities of historical city living? These are crucial questions for any scholar interested in the historical dimensions of urban experience. Notwithstanding the interest of most urban historians in the relationship between the physical form of urban space and its experience by inhabitants and visitors, very few scholars have written histories that systematically integrate these two areas of inquiry. In this article the authors argue that such research requires a method and an accompanying digital tool that can analyze historical urban life in a more integrated, holistic way. The authors propose a way forward by introducing the Time Machine platform as a scalable data visualization and analysis tool for researching everyday urban experience across space and time. To illustrate the potential, the authors focus on a case study: the area of the Bloemstraat in early modern Amsterdam. Unpacking a section of the Bloemstraat, house by house and room by room, this case shows how the Time Machine forms an instrument to connect spatial layouts to the arrangement of objects and to the practical and social use of the space by the inhabitants and visitors. The authors also sketch how this tool illuminates more dynamic spatial and temporal practices such as how people, goods and activities are connected to locations in the wider city and beyond.

The Amsterdam City Archives have launched a vast plan for the digitization of notarial deeds and other historical documents with the aim of making their collection available and fully searchable online. This and other initiatives provide a large amount of previously unknown data about the city of Amsterdam and its inhabitants over the centuries. The challenge ahead is to organize these thousands of digitized documents in a way that facilitates access and consultation by a larger public. The spatial information that can be extracted with varying degrees of accuracy from these documents allows them to be mapped to reconstruct urban historiographies and geographies. This contribution takes the house as a starting point for this spatialization and discusses the approach of the Virtual Interiors project which aims to create virtual reconstructions of XVII century domestic interiors that act as interfaces to access the archival documents used as primary sources for their creation. The case study that will be presented in detail is Herengracht 573 in the Amsterdam historical centre. As will be demonstrated with the reconstruction of the XVII century entrance hall, a prototype web viewer developed as part of the project integrates the 3D models and contextual information, thus giving direct access to digitized archive documents. This approach would offer a way to organize the sources about this and other houses and to make the stories hidden behind the façades known to a larger public even when these historical buildings are closed.

This article presents recent initiatives in the fields of Digital Heritage and digital mapping by researchers attached the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR) in Tours, France. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth century the city of Tours, situated in the heart of France in the valley of the river Loire, was one of the main residences of the French kings and this had important consequences for the nature of artistic production and for social aspects of urban life. Making use of the latest developments in Digital and Spatial Humanities, researchers attached to the CESR have created an interactive digital map of historical Tours; several crosslinked databases of artworks and archival sources from Tours; an enriched 3D model of an artistic masterpiece, the funeral monument of deceased royal children; an interactive historical graphic novel; and a GPS-led app with an historical guided tour of the city. These digital projects all have in common that they bring together the outcomes of scientific historical and art historical research with digital applications, as a starting point for further research, and for public outreach activities.

The digital project which forms the focus of this article is the website www.parisiansoundscapes.org. Both the theory and practice of attempting to recreate the sound worlds and particularly the song culture of early modern Paris are discussed in this article, starting with the research-based background to the project, with the publication of two monographs, and moving to the musical collaboration with the period instrument group Badinage. The importance of the Pont Neuf both as an auditory space and as the location where street songs were most often performed is analysed, followed by consideration of the various challenges that we have encountered in attempting to recreate the sound worlds of the 1600s and 1700s. The three major features of the website - transcription of handwritten manuscripts, song recordings, and song tunes - are highlighted, as are the future plans for the development of the project.

In the historical tradition, Venice is a city without walls and gates, and hence lacking suburbs. The project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) reverses this trope by examining the urban, political, and cultural patterns connecting the capital with its lagoon archipelago through a web interactive 3D map, intended for researchers and the wider public alike. This is a geo-­spatial semantic infrastructure that, as a sort of historical Google maps, enables a journey through time and space to discover and visualise the layered histories of Venice’s over sixty ‘domestic’ islands. VeNiss tells a story of half a millennium, starting from the sixteenth century, the very moment in which the city began consciously to structure its lagoon territory. Allowing users to navigate across the digital historical lagoon, the research platform brings the once densely-­populated islands to life in their physical appearance as well as in their social arrangement. Through bi-­ and three-­ dimensional digital models interwoven with pertinent historical information, the online infrastructure helps investigate, interpret, and represent the long-­lasting dynamics of Venice’s centre-­periphery relations, blending the physical and functional dimensions together and displaying them as an on-­going flow. By reframing the lagoon as a large-­scale ‘urban fringe’, this project re-­evaluates the Venetian archipelago as the fundamental connective tissue of the city’s political, socio-­economic, and cultural practices.

3D models of historical sites tend to be presented to researchers and the wider public as isolated “objects” that can be freely manipulated through online platforms, with little consideration of their original settings or their physical qualities. The Florence 4D project proposes new ways of presenting 3D models of buildings and the artworks they contained within the early modern city of Florence through an interactive website that allows users to navigate the built environment using historic maps, a variety of historical geodatasets, and embedded 3D models linked into an underpinning database. Such an approach makes it possible to digitally reinstate connections between buildings that have often been radically transformed and their spatial context. In turn by redeploying these same 3D models onto an agile location-aware app (Hidden Florence 3D), the models can be experienceed as Augmented Reality enhancements on location in the city, as well as in connection with artworks that may have been relocated to museum collections, delivering innovative digital art history research to wider audiences.