Resilience of proto-industrial manufacturing sectors in the early modern global markets: the case of Venetian glass and silk industries (17th-18th centuries)
Resilience of proto-industrial manufacturing sectors in the early modern global markets: the case of Venetian glass and silk industries (17th-18th centuries)
Post-doctoral research (November 2024 – November 2025)Scientific supervisor: Walter Panciera
Pierre Niccolò Sofia
The project aims to study the evolution of Venetian glass and silk manufacturing sectors between the 17th and 18th centuries through the lens of trade and its impacts. In recent decades, important research work has been conducted on the world of Venetian guilds, their evolution and adaptation to international competition between the 17th and 18th centuries. In doing this, the study of internal mechanisms and power relations, production and labor organization, and technological innovation has been rightly privileged within an intense historiographical debate. The study of the commercialization of the products of these manufacturing sectors, on the other hand, remains largely unexplored, as does that of the impact that the dynamics of international trade and the circulation of manufactured goods had on the productive world. In this regard, several works in recent decades have analyzed the role of external events (such as wars, epidemics etc.) on the performance of economic activities, studying their resilience and recover capacity. Through a comparative analysis conducted on both Venetian and European quantitative and qualitative sources, the project aims to explore the resilience of the Venetian glass and silk sectors in the face of frequent disruptions in international trade or sudden changes in demand. By doing so, it will be possible to better trace the network of diffusion of the products of Venetian manufactures to international markets, understand the characteristics of these trades and their variation over time, and reconstruct the impact that global circulations had on the productive sectors of the Early modern period.


CURRICULUM MOBILITY STUDIES - new
CURRICULUM
MOBILITY STUDIES
SECOND CYCLE DEGREE PROGRAM IN HISTORICAL SCIENCES
A unique learning experience in a creative and inspiring environment,
to understand and face mobility in both the past and present!

Call for applications A.A. 2024/25
PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIPS CALLS
Goals and Objectives
The mobility studies curriculum is driven by the belief that the humanities can play a crucial role in understanding and addressing mobility in modern society. Students will be immersed in the process through which people, texts, images, artefacts, commodities and ideas are moved, translated, transformed, adapted and negotiated by different social actors – sometime in distant spatial contexts – in the past and in the present. Global and local scenarios call for new experts who are trained in historical and cultural studies but ready for political and social action today. An interdisciplinary education at an international level and enriched by inter-sectoral experiences is fundamental to facing the current difficulties that young humanists face when approaching the new job market in both the private and public sectors.
Beyond the employment possibilities in the academy, high school or cultural institutions, such as libraries, museums and archives, graduates will be offered cognitive tools and concrete training opportunities to find a job in state and local government agencies, international organisations such as NGOs, cultural tourism and the heritage, digital and communications industries.

Student/Academic Opportunities
- To meet visiting professors from relevant academic institutions from around the world
- To apply for supplementary funding for Erasmus+ outgoing mobility
- To apply for scholarships and study prizes
- To pursue an internship program with Italian and foreign partners
Job Opportunities
Beyond the employment possibilities in the academy, high school or cultural institutions, such as libraries, museums and archives, graduates will be offered cognitive tools and concrete training opportunities to find a job in state and local government agencies, international organisations such as NGOs, cultural tourism and the heritage, digital and communications industries.
- State and local government agencies
- International organisations
- NGOs
- Cultural tourism
- Heritage industries
- Digital and communications industries
- Private and public foundations
- Academic research
- High school teaching
- Galleries, museums, archives and libraries

Courses
General Modules
The course will offer to the students a theoretical framework about the social, cultural and political (gendered) value of transport and mobility, giving them innovative and tools to define movements of people, object and ideas. The critical approach to the traditional historiography, as well as to the current policies in transport, will give them skill to better frame transport´s culture(s) and mobilities in a long-term view.
The goal of this course is to understand ideas and cultures on the move, showing how they have been transmitted and are the result of continuous contacts across global spaces, particularly during the Renaissance. Instead of de-constructing the Renaissance and showing many Renaissances in other civilisations, such as those of China, India and Arabia, the course aims to re-construct another Renaissance, when Italy – and Florence in particular – was deeply connected to the rest of the world through economic, artistic and cultural exchange.
When moving across time and places, actors and the media shape networks and spaces of communication that systematically challenge the paradigms proposed by political and institutional history. In the past five centuries in particular, the dissemination of handwritten news, the spread of the printed book and the invention of the telegraph, television and, finally, the internet have all designed new geographies of communication and knowledge. This class is an introduction to media history and a methodological discussion on the mobility of knowledge and the study of its technical means.
The class will explore the effects of digital technologies on historical research and communication; it will explain the spatial and chronological contextualization of historical sources; it will give students an overlook of some of the most important digital tools available to historians and humanists; it will critically review some of the most famous digital history projects and digital archives; it will discuss the legislation on intellectual property; it will foster learning by doing with frequent exercises on tools and software.
HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
This course introduces students to the study of economies and historical systems, combining the heuristic tool of the commodity-chain approach (CCA) with the methods of the historical sciences. Conceiving commodities as the outcome of labour- and production-process networks, we will focus on the social relations and economic organisations that characterise production, distribution, marketing and consumption. Monopoly, ownership, labour control and cyclical economic changes will allow us to understand economic convergences and divergences across the world over the last millennium.
The course aims to analyse tourism through a historical lens charting its processes and evolution into a global phenomenon. A key component of contemporary tourism is the vector of mobility that determines its social impact. The annual movement of approximately 1.4 billion people traversing international frontiers conveys with it a range of cultural, environmental and economic consequences that need to be understood, managed and planned for if tourism is to be a component of a sustainable future. In 1950 there were 25 million international travellers and the 1.4 billion of today will continue to increase on the praxis of the continuing integration of tourism into global lifestyles in response to economic advancement. But without looking back to understand the complexity of tourism’s evolution it is impossible to plan for its future.
The aim of the course is to make students familiar with the interpretation of migration dynamics in a demographic perspective. Through the discussion of the different interpretative theories and the analysis of different case studies, we will try to understand the complex mechanisms that determine different migratory phenomena in the past and present. In particular, students will get some basic skills on economic, cultural, social and environmental phenomena and how they interact with different forms of migration, what is their impact on the departing and hosting communities. The ability to critically analyze sources and data useful for understanding and interpreting past and present migratory phenomena in a global and interdisciplinary perspective will also be developed.
he contemporary world is marked by religious conflicts. To understand how to resolve them, it is necessary to understand how they arose and developed. This course seeks to explain that.
This course explores mobility as an empirical reality and an analytic paradigm from a human-geographic perspective. Key terms – such as place, the local, the global and territoriality – are challenged in the light of the so-called mobility turn. Reasons for movement, sensory aspects and mobility performances will also be questioned, as they blend with the diverse politics of space. Students will be asked to share their mobility experiences and take part in ongoing problem-based assignments.
This course explores mobility as a defining characteristic in the life and history of objects. We follow different things through their uses, itineraries, trajectories and circulations in space and time. Key terms from museum studies and material culture – such as origin, provenance, collection and heritage – are addressed in the light of the so-called mobility turn. Students will be asked to be active learners through a variety of object-based activities and visits to museums throughout the course.
FACILITIES
- MOBILAB, a digital laboratory for mobility research, will help students to develop their creativity and undertake independent research on mobility and the humanities.
- MOHU, a centre for advanced study in mobility and humanities, organises workshops and conferences to promote the study of mobility from the humanities perspective.
LOCATION
The Mobility Studies curriculum is based at the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World, in the heart of the historical city centre of Padua.
WHY PADUA
We are based at a world-leading university that has been driving global change since its foundation in 1222. Discover ten reasons to study in Padua here:

Admission Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in historical and geographical studies or a related subject, such as philology, literature, sociology, anthropology, global studies, or social or political sciences
- Minimum GPA equivalent to Italian 95/110
- English language: B2 level (CEFR) or equivalent
Material Culture and Risorgimento: Activism, Emotions, Mobility PRIN 2022 Project
Material Culture and Risorgimento: Activism, Emotions, MobilityPRIN 2022 Project (2024-)
Research Unit based at the University of Padua
The importance of things, the vitality and mobility of objects, and their ability to offer different viewpoints on life in the past are all themes that have emerged from the many recent historical studies on material culture. This project aims to link materiality to political history, taking 19th-century Italy and its transnational networks as our field of inquiry. The focus of our analysis will be the complex and changeable lives of several objects that took on political significance in various ways and on diverse occasions, thereby contributing to the construction of political and national identities. In 19th-century Europe not only personal accessories, everyday, decorative objects and artworks, but also natural specimens played a significant role in new forms of political mobilization and dissent and in the articulation of political discourse in new repertoires and narrative forms. Whereas studies on the social life of objects and their contribution to the construction of social and gender identities have already found numerous and articulated developments, much less has been done on the materiality of the political experience and its specificities. Our research project intends to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between politics and the world of objects in the belief that this will shed light on new aspects of individual and collective political experience, at a time, in the 19th century, when the modern political sphere was being built.
The project will reconstruct and give meaning to the political lives of many objects, focusing on two different perspectives (and their ongoing relationships):
– Objects in action, variously linked to activism, political dissent, and mobility during the Risorgimento.
– Objects and the politicization of nature, particularly botanical objects created and collected by intellectuals and /or patriots.
Far from adopting a static point of view, our research will highlight mobility, re-use, cultural translations, and the transnational circulation of political objects in their different dimensions. These things embodied new practices and crisscrossed private and public spaces, political upheavals, and commercial trade routes.
Thus, this project will, on the one hand, bring out novel aspects in Italian 19th-century political practices and nationalization channels, and, on the other, make new and innovative educational and dissemination tools available to a wider public. Bringing together the work of scholars who in three Italian universities have been working on political objects for some time, the project intends to build an innovative collective workshop on the material history of politics, reflect on the methodological aspects of approaching politics through objects and finally develop an intense dissemination and public history project.
The project features two other units, one coordinated by Arianna Arisi Rota at the University of Pavia, and one coordinated by Roberto Balzani at the University of Bologna.
The objective of the Padua unit is to analyze how the staging of the nation, especially during the revolutionary episodes of the Risorgimento, also took the form of the use of a significant armoury of objects which frequently belonged to the dimension of everyday life but were re-semanticized in political and patriotic terms.
Principal investigator:
Carlotta Sorba

Members:
Enrico Francia

Michele Magri

Plant Humanities & Botanical Collections | Conference with RHUL Centre for the GeoHumanities
Plant Humanities & Botanical Collections | Conference with RHUL Centre for the GeoHumanities
The Plant Humanities & Botanical Collections international conference aims to explore the potential of interdisciplinary research concerning the world of plants and their relationship with humankind, using historical collections housed in museums and botanical gardens as a starting point.
A dialogue between the ongoing research of the History of Science group at the Padua Botanical Museum and the Plant Humanities research at the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities, featuring contributions from international renowned experts.
The event is organised in collaboration with the University of Padua Botanical Garden, the MoHu Centre, the University Museum Centre and the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities.
Participation is free, registration is required.
Forum del Paesaggio: Progetti in movimento - 14 March 2024
Forum del Paesaggio: Progetti in movimento - 14 March 2024
Forum del Paesaggio. Progetti in movimento was organised by MoHu, DiSSGeA and the Museum of Geography, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Culture of Italy and the support of the City of Padua, with the aim of encouraging reflection and idea exchange among institutions, the university research and all the stakeholders operating, in various capacities, within landscape.
The event stemmed from the Department’s experience, on behalf of the Ministry of Culture, as Technical Secretariat in the latest edition (2022-23) of the Landscape Prize under the supervision of Benedetta Castiglioni, who is also Coordinator of the Master’s degree programme in Landscape Studies at the University of Padua.
On the occasion of National Landscape Day, the representatives of the 73 projects nominated for the latest edition of the Prize, along with those from past editions, and other professionals operating ‘in/with/for’ the landscape across the Italian territory, in addition to a large group of students, gathered in Padua for a unique occasion to meet and discuss relevant topics and strategies related to education, social well-being, the protection of natural and cultural heritage, and the regeneration and enhancement of territories.
The morning session, hosted by Padua Botanical Garden, started with greetings from Monica Salvadori, Vice Rector in charge of Artistic, Historical, and Cultural Heritage, Andrea Caracausi, Head of the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA), Isabella Fera from the Directorate of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape (MiC) on behalf of the Director General Luigi La Rocca, Francesca Benciolini, Delegate for housing policies and residential construction at the Municipality of Padua, Salvina Sist, Director of the Territorial Planning Directorate of the Veneto Region, and Stefan Marchioro from the Tourism Directorate of the Veneto Region.
Benedetta Castiglioni introduced the speeches given by Sabrina Meneghello (University of Padua), Mauro Pascolini (University of Udine), Fulvio Adobati and Riccardo Rao (University of Bergamo), followed by the roundtable chaired by Margherita Cisani (University of Padua). The roundtable discussion involved Stefano Olivari and Matteo Baldo (Orti Generali srl Impresa sociale, winning project of the Landscape prize 2022-23 edition), Maria Grazia Bellisario (Associazione Economia della Cultura), Marco Bussone (Uncem), Paolo Castelnovi (Fondazione Landscapefor), Mario Andrea Francavilla (AIGAE), Costanza Pratesi (FAI).
The working groups, held in the afternoon at the Museum of Geography, allowed for further reflection on institutional recognitions as tools to support project development, the meeting/clash between formal aspects and practical needs, and the impact of various activities on the landscape in both material and immaterial terms, broadening the perspective towards the future.
The students of the MA in Landscape Studies were involved as facilitators of the working groups, thus experiencing in first person what public engagement means.
It was also a great opportunity to collaborate with a number of stakeholders of our Master’s degree programme.
The event was supported by the City of Padua; Veneto – The land of Venice, the Regional Landscape Observatory, and the Alumni Unipd association also joined the initiative.







