Atelier, The Sociability of Imperial Gateway-Cities, 16th-19th c., 20 mars 2020, Sciences Po Paris

Le deuxième atelier du Projet Formation-Recherche CIERA « Trieste : ville d’empire(s) » se tiendra à Sciences Po le 20 mars prochain de 14h à 18h au 199 bd Saint-Germain, salle de l’école doctorale (3ème étage).

La séance portera sur « The sociability of Imperial Gateway-Cities, 16th-19th c. »

Organisation : David Da Poço ; Christine Lebeau ; Markus Koeller

Programme :

Massimo Rospocher, Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico
Trento: Mobility and Sociability in an Early Modern Transit City

In 1673, when travelling into Italy and crossing the Alps, the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin noted a very important detail: “Here (in Trento), it was your last chance for a Beer”. Those travellers descending from the Alps, thanks to the presence of German innkeepers and taverns, could still enjoy a good tankard of beer. He noted that here you could find an important cultural shift, the change of drinking habits: the passage from beer country to wine country. This like many other travellers’ accounts epitomizes the complex nature of the city of Trento in the Early Modern period, a border city between different cultures, languages, urban layouts, political regimes. This border and gateway-city was an important node of a network of trans-regional and long-distance mobility linking the Habsburg Empire and the northern Italian states. Due to its nature of transit city, Trento was characterized by significant migratory flows and wide availability of infrastructures of hospitality within the city and along the commercial channel of the Adige river and the transport axis of the Brenner Pass. By looking at the urban history of the city through the lens of the infrastructure of mobility and practices of sociability, the aim of this paper is to offer a few insights and a new (and less static) interpretation of the social and cultural history of the City of Council.

Giulia Delogu & Antonio Trampus, Ca’ Foscari
Places of negotiation in port cities: the cases of Trieste, Fiume and Pola (18th-19th centuries)

This paper presents some preliminary findings of a research project on port cities. In particular, the first part will illustrate the beta version of The Atlas of Port Cities, an open access space which aims at offering both interpretive and visualization tool. At this stage of the project, the Atlas collected and mapped data concerning the Adriatic area and especially Trieste, Fiume (Rijeka) and Pola (Pula). It focused mainly on highlighting two aspects: the networks of commerce and information which fostered global connections between the above-mentioned port cities, and the places of negotiation. Regarding this latter aspect, it analyzed the development of the urban spaces of port cities, to verify the degree of interpenetration and integration between port and city both overlapping the historical topography to the current one, and locating the places destined to the government of the city and to the negotiation and composition of the various social instances. The second part of the paper will reflect upon the place of negotiation “from the inside”, by analyzing the processes and the agents involved through a series of unedited archival sources: the consular correspondence by Giovanni Rossetti who acted as consul for the Duke of Modena in Trieste between 1778 and 1793. The letters written by Rossetti, in fact, will help completing the maps which will be showed in the first part, by illuminating the everyday practices and mechanisms of negotiation which took place in the public spaces of Trieste and the other port cities.

Raluca Muresan, Inalco – Université Paris-Sorbonne
Theatre and ridotto all-in-one: a new architectural typology in Central Europe (ca. 1750-ca.1815)?

The inner distribution of Trieste’s Teatro Verdi  (1795-1801) has been judged as irregular by historians of architecture, namely because of its separated ball-hall, which occupies almost the half of the entire construction. The present inquiry does not consider the ball-hall as a source of irregularity. Instead, the very fact of assembling a theatre hall together with a separated hall for balls needs to be reconsidered, in respect to the common social practices and the balls’ regulation in the Habsburg Monarchy from 1700 onwards. On a second level, I propose to compare these practices to examples recorded in neighbouring Italian territories, such as Venice. On a third level, the comparison will be broadened to several lands of the Holy Roman Empire. The aim of this study is to seize the dissemination of such an architectural ensemble on these territories during the 18th century, in order to discuss its eventual codification into a coherent architectural typology. If the case of the Venetian La Fenice (1789-1792) is without any doubt one of the most famous constructions displaying a theatre and a ridotto, attention should also be drawn on the large success of such architectural ensembles in the Habsburg territories from the 1770s onwards, such as in Graz, Milan, Kaschau, Lemberg, Fiume and Pest. Far from being peculiar constructions, buildings regrouping theatres and ball-halls were actually common to provincial cities of the Habsburg lands during the last third of the 18th century and even throughout the whole 19th century.

contact: david.dopaco@sciencespo.fr