Venice remembered: identity and the uses of history in Risorgimento and Liberal Italy, 1815-1922
This project, operating under the auspices of the university's Centre for Research on the Cultural Forms of Modern European Politics, has been funded to the tune of £284,147 by the AHRC, and will run from September 2007 until August 2010. Dr David Laven will work with Elsa Damien (Research Associate) using nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings on the Republic of Venice to explore and re-examine particularist and autonomous identities in Risorgimento and Liberal Italy. The project will focus on the way in which history could stimulate or reinforce loyalties which did not correspond directly with the nationalist agenda of 'making Italians'. In particular, it will ask how far historical interpretations of the middle ages, Renaissance and ancien régime privileged regional or municipal rather than national identities.
Venice remembered will also challenge simplistic models of identity, which suggest a crude dichotomy between competing national and subnational allegiances. While it will investigate the extent to which localism could obstruct the growth of Italian sentiment, it will also examine how 'Venetianness' coexisted with 'Italianness', and the ways in which municipal pride provided a building block for patriotism. It will explore lines of continuity between historical writing in the years 1815-1922, and that of earlier centuries, to ask how far the changed representations of Venetian identity were the product of the application of new historical methodologies, and how far they were shaped by altered political circumstances, most notably régime change.
The outcomes of Venice remembered will consist of a jointly authored monograph, a series of peer review journal articles and a conference to be held in Manchester in 2009.