Marco

Andrea Frizzera

At the beginning of a century in which Rome is almost fully aware of its mediterranean dimension, we can observe the exploitation of the possibilities of movement that the Mare nostrum’s new political configuration can offer. This concerns the commerce, the cultural exchanges, the migrations, but also political refugees. This project wants to conduct an investigation on this last category. So, starting from the existent prosopographic studies, it will be necessary to revisit the ancient sources (literary, epigraphic, numismatic) and the modern studies on sullan proscripts, in order to travel beside them the ways that bring them to find rescue in different places in the Mediterranean sea. This will lead us not only to draw a map (thanks also to digital tools and methods) of proscripts’ movements, but also to understand which choices (political, moral, economic choices), feature their lives in the new contexts in which they finally settle. So, we will be able to appreciate how the proscripts’ mobility resulted very conditioned and it had peculiar features compared to the other displacement typologies. We also hope that such a kind of research could contribute, in a different perspective, to enrich the debate on the political significance of the sullan proscriptions and on the consequences they caused in the Roman world. Finally, we do not exclude the possibility that, by adopting such a kind of approach, the research focus could expand to 43 BC proscriptions.

Teresa Bernardi

The research project explores the role played by social ties within processes of migrant identification during the early modern period. The historical and geographical background of this study are the cosmopolitan city of Venice and its domains during the seventeenth century. The research is primarily based on a specific archival source: the so called processetti matrimoniali. This documentation consists in pre-matrimonial enquiries aimed at attesting the marital status, or widowhood, of foreigners and other ‘mobile people’ who wanted to get married in Venice. The project’s hypothesis is that relying on gender as a lens of analysis, along with focusing deeply on women’s mobility, may challenge some historiographical assumptions about the very phenomena of mobility and identification: respectively, the presumed clear-cut between short and long-distance mobility; and the assumed replacement of orality – in terms of reputation and social networks –  by written documents.

This research is part of a bigger international programme funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and supervised by Prof. Jean-François Chauvard. The research group’s overall objective is to explore the relation between marriage and human mobility both from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. It does so by comparing the city of Venice, the Greek World under the Venetian dominion and other cities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, this programme will pursue the digitalization of a vast portion of the processetti in the context of the virtual research environment Geovistory (http://geovistory.com/). In addition to the digital humanities, this project’s research interests thus span various fields of social, legal, and cultural history.