Areas:
Contemporary History
Material culture
Abstract:
The importance of things, the vitality and mobility of objects, 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. The aim of this project is to link materiality to political history, taking 19th-century Italy and its transnational networks as our field of enquiry. The focus of our analysis will be the complex and changeable lives of a number of objects which 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, every-day and decorative objects, artwork, but also natural specimens played a significant role in new forms of political mobilisation 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. 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 criss-crossed 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 nationalisation 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 Bologna unit will focus on a specific aspect of political communication in the 19th century, starting with the cultural development of the natural sciences, botany in particular. Botany was not
merely a science. On the contrary, it bolstered a constant scientific passion, which accompanied the patriots during their mobilisation as well as their exile. At the same time, despite political repression, these passionate researchers came together to define “Italian nature”. Post-1860 disciplinary specialisation in Italy introduced some of these objects to botanical gardens and academic laboratories. With the passage of time, the intertwining of political motivation and scientific passion was lost, and the objects became embedded in the history of scientific discipline. It is therefore a matter of reconstructing an unexplored chapter of the “natural history of objects”. Field research will focus on the study of the objects preserved in the Herbarium of the University of Bologna, including the impressive collection by Antonio Bertoloni (1775-1868), the basis of his Flora Italica (1833-1854), and that of a patriot from Faenza, Ludovico Caldesi (1821-1884), whose correspondence is kept at the Municipal Library of Faenza, which acts as a bridge with the other strand of Italian botany of the time, the Florentine one of Filippo Parlatore (1816-1877), founder of the «Giornale botanico italiano» (1844). Another set of relevant correspondence is that of Tuscan patriot Niccolò Puccini (1799-1852), held at the National Central Library in Florence. Such correspondence allows us to reconstruct the scientific network, often parallel to the political one, and to document the “natural objects in motion”, intended to be collected or reproduced in gardens and botanical gardens. They are the evidence, following Aleida Assmann’s interpretative paradigm (2002), of a functional memory, which uses amateur botanical practice for multiple purposes (personal legitimation, relationships, scientific contribution to the “resurrection” of the homeland). The herbaria we want to study represent the established memory, archived as a function of a national scientific space (and therefore destined to be translated over time into printed matter): cultural memory in fieri.
Duration of the project:
28/09/2023 – 28/09/2025
Co-Principal Investigator:
Prof. Roberto Balzani
Principal investigator:
Prof. Carlotta Sorba Università degli studi di Padova
Partnership:
Università degli studi di Padova Università degli studi di Pavia
Budget of the University of Bologna:
57.020 EUR
ERC sectors:
SH6_9 Modern and contemporary history
SH6_13 Gender history, cultural history, history of collective identities and memories, history of religions