(De)colonial Resonances in the Mediterranean Basin: Botanical Collections, Tourism, and Territories on the Move

The intertwining of narratives generated since the 19th century by the intense mobility of objects, people, as well as theories and worldviews across the Mediterranean basin now takes shape in the form of collections, architecture, landscapes, tourist itineraries, and various forms of territorial development and enhancement.

Museums incorporate these “resonances”—particularly of a colonial nature—into their gestures and conservation practices. Today, they are increasingly rethinking the processes through which objects and people have circulated. As drivers of social change, museums continue to shape the relationship between colonialism, sustainable development of local communities, and responsible tourism.

With the aim of strengthening existing research lines within MoHu, MobiLab, and the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua, and initiating new ones, the project investigates the relationship between the mobility of museum collections—particularly botanical ones—and the various forms of Italian colonialism in Africa (specifically in Libya, Ethiopia, and Eritrea) between the 19th and 20th centuries. It brings together disciplines with diverse methodological approaches, ranging from the material history of science to cultural anthropology, from mobility studies to the critical geography of tourism.

Principal Investigator: Luca Tonetti

Members: Elena Canadelli, Maria Teresa Milicia, Chiara Rabbiosi, Tiziana N. Beltrame, Marco Orlandi, Claudia Addabbo, Paola Bernadette Di Lieto, Valentina Boscariol.

External Collaborators:

• Yota Batsaki, Plant Humanities Initiative, Dumbarton Oaks;
• Felix Driver, Department of Geography, The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities;
• Andreas Weber, Knowledge, Transformations & Society (KiTeS) Research group, University of Twente.

Contact & More Information:

For further details, please contact Luca Tonetti at luca.tonetti@unipd.it

The project will develop along four main lines:

1. Botanical explorations in the Mediterranean through the herbaria of the Botanical Museum: the network of Achille Forti and Alessandro Trotter;
2. Journeys of women botanists in Italian colonial Africa: the Libyan specimens of Silvia Zenari;
3. The construction of the colonial popular imagination around “exotic flora”;
4. The colonial roots of contemporary tourism.

This project is carried out in dialogue with other ongoing projects, including:

• Museum objects in movement, coordinated by Elena Canadelli;
• Herbaria on the move between history and botany: Exploring scientific, political, and cultural narratives through Achille Forti’s botanical collections (1878-1937), postdoctoral research by Claudia Addabbo, supervised by Elena Canadelli;
• the international project Materials and Spaces for Biodiversity: Digital Histories of Natural History Collections, funded by the Italo-German Centre Villa Vigoni (with the collaboration of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden). The initiative focuses on the role of the humanities and social sciences in the study of natural history collections.