Session Abstract

The question of how people of different cultural and religious backgrounds live together has not only dominated the historical debate of ancient and early modern Mediterranean urban history but has, more recently, been at the center of current political discussion concerning the relationship between the global and the local and the “clash of civilizations.” This panel offers a unique historical perspective on the ways that ethnicity, religion, and knowledge both challenged and constituted four Italian cities both in the north and the south and re-position Italy in the broader Mediterranean and European contexts between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Concepts of cosmopolitanism are often invoked to project the image of diverse groups of people living together as citizens of the world. But the papers in this panel do not trap concepts such as “cosmopolitanism” and “cultural contact” within preconceived discourses and instead anchor them in between broader Mediterranean and European perceptions of what constitute the culture of diversity and cosmopolitanism and the historical experience and tradition of Italian cities. In particular the four papers show how people of different cultural, social and religious backgrounds live together, reinterpreted urban traditions, and elaborated new and dynamic conceptions of cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and multiculturalism as lived experience in Venice, Livorno, Rome, and Naples. Monique O’Connell explores ethnic and religious difference within Venice’s fifteenth century empire by examining the Venetian attitude to union between the Greek and Latin churches. Using seventeenth century travel narratives and diplomatic report Stéphanie Nadalo examines the degree of access to, and interest in, Livorno’s minority topographies showing how they helped foster a growing sense of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. In his paper, Thomas Dandalet argues that the papacy’s claim to universal spiritual sovereignty, backed up by the major Catholic imperial powers, Spain and Portugal, contributed to make the city a crossroads of global cultural contact on a previously unknown level in Western Europe. Finally, focusing in particular on the eighteenth century, Barbara Naddeo’s paper documents the birth of the concept of the “metropolis” by showing the process of urbanization in Naples and by charting the development of new knowledges, or social sciences, of the polity necessitated by that same process.