Material Culture and Risorgimento: Activism, Emotions, Mobility PRIN 2022 Project

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.