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The master ship builders of seventeenth-century Venice formed part of what was arguably the greatest manufacturing complex in early modern Europe. As many as three thousand masters, apprentices, and laborers regularly worked in the city's enormous shipyards. This is the social history of the men and women who helped maintain not only the city's dominion over the sea but also its stability and peace. Drawing on a variety of documents that include nearly a thousand petitions from the shipbuilders to the Venetian governments as well as on parish records, inventories, and wills, Robert C. Davis offers a vivid and compelling account of these early modern workers. He explores their mentality and d...
This book reviews four decades of debate about restoring an industrial heritage site of inestimable value – the Venice Arsenal. Focusing on the challenges of economic, financial and institutional feasibility, it reveals how failing to address these aspects has undermined potential solutions from both technicians and heritage professionals. With a deep connection to the city over centuries, the Arsenal was the very basis of La Serenissima’s sea power, enabling its economic expansion. Later, it maintained a vital military function through shipbuilding until World War II. But the slow process of abandonment of the traditional site’s uses and spaces continues to pose questions regarding it...
A group of senior citizens decide to move in together in All Together, a French-language comedy from director Stephanie Robelin. When Claude (Claude Rich) suffers an injury while trying to climb steps in order to meet a woman for a liaison, he and his friends, who are all suffering from some age-related malady, decide to move in together and hire a graduate student to look out for them. Among the new co-tenants are the senile Albert (Pierre Richard) and his wife, the outgoing Jeanne (Jane Fonda) who herself is fighting cancer. Also living with them is Jean (Guy Bedos) a onetime social crusader who enjoys the wealth he's acquired with his wife Annie (Geraldine Chaplin), who wants nothing more than to visit with her children and grandchildren. As they adjust to their new living arrangements, old jealousies and hurts resurface, forcing everyone to reconsider how they want to spend their golden years. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions contains about 160 papers that were presented at the IV International Seminar on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions that was held from 10 to 13 November, 2004 in Padova Italy. Following publications of previous seminars that were organized in Barcelona, Spain (1995 and 1998) and Guimarães, Portugal (2001), state-of-the-art information is presented in these two volumes on the preservation, protection, and restoration of historical constructions, both comprising monumental structures and complete city centers. These two proceedings volumes are devoted to the possibilities of numerical and experimental techniques in the maintenance o...
This book brings to life the story of the construction of some of the most outstanding early Renaissance buildings in Venice. Through a series of individual case studies, Richard J. Goy explores how and why great buildings came to be built. He addresses the practical issues of constructing such buildings as the Torre dell’Orologio in Piazza San Marco, the Arsenale Gate, and the churches of Santa Maria della Carita and San Zaccaria, focusing particular attention on the process of patronage. The book is the first to trace the complete process of creating important buildings, from the earliest conception in the minds of the patrons--the Venetian state or other institutional patrons--through the choice of architect, the employment of craftsmen, and the selection of materials. In an interesting analysis of the participants’ roles, Goy highlights the emerging importance of the superintending master, the protomaestro.
In this elegant book Richard Bosworth explores Venice—not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. Bosworth looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernization, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the fascist regime, through to the “Disneylandification” of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. He draws out major themes—the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernization, consumerism versus culture. Bosworth interrogates not just Venice’s history but its meanings, and how the city’s past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, he shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface.
Margaret Plant presents a wide-ranging cultural history of the city from the fall of the Republic in 1797, until 1997, showing how it has changed and adapted and how perceptions of it have shaped its reality.
This study seeks to correct the underrepresentation of Mediterranean maritime history in academic publications, in attempt to understand the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment in which maritime activity takes place, by compiling ten essays from maritime historians concerning Spain, France, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Greece, Turkey, and Israel. The aim of the collection is to provide an insight into Mediterranean maritime history to those who could not previously access such information due to language barriers or difficulty securing non-English publications; some of the essays have translated into English specifically for this publication. The majority of the essays concern the Early Modern period, and the remainder concern the contemporary.
The essays in Nationalizing Empires challenge the dichotomy between empire and nation state that for decades has dominated historiography. The authors center their attention on nation-building in the imperial core and maintain that the nineteenth century, rather than the age of nation-states, was the age of empires and nationalism. They identify a number of instances where nation building projects in the imperial metropolis aimed at the preservation and extension of empires rather than at their dissolution or the transformation of entire empires into nation states. Such observations have until recently largely escaped theoretical reflection.