2023-2024 Events & Programs

Ghetto in Florence: Reconstructing a Lost Jewish Space

webGhetto Firenze.jpg

Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Time: 04:30pm - 

Academic Building, B1170, 15 Seminary Place

A digital reconstruction of the Jewish Ghetto of Florence, which originated in the middle of the 16th century is presented by the Medici Archive Project. By sifting through hundreds of documents, they have mapped the ghetto (destroyed at the end of the 19th century) and have started a detailed reconstruction of it, which includes layout of apartments, furniture, wells, shops, etc.

Cosponsored with the Department of Italian, Department of History, Department of Jewish Studies, Department of Art History, Center for European Studies and the Digital Humanities Initiative.

Limited space: First come first served (Parking available behind Student Center)

SPEAKERS:

Alessio Assonitis, Director of the Medici Archive Project since 2009, was born and schooled in Rome and received his doctoral degree in Renaissance art history from Columbia University in 2003. He has published extensively on the Italian Renaissance, including a monograph on the fifteenth-century painter Bastiano Mainardi (IMA, 2011) and a collection of essays on the history of the Medici archive (Brepols 2017). He has received fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Allen Whitehall Clowes Foundation,a nd Florence Gould Foundation. He served as Principal Investigator for digital projects supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, including BIA (2010-2012; 2013-2014) and MIA (2015-2017; 2017-2019). His edited volume on the life and career of Grand Duke Cosimo I is due out in the fall, published by Brill.

Piergabriele Mancuso (PhD, University College London) is the Director of the Eugene Grant Research Program on Jewish History and Culture in Early Modern Europe at the Medici Archive Project. Board member of Beit Venezia – Venice Centre for International Jewish Studies and member of several scholarly associations. His research interests include early medieval southern  Italian   Judaism,   Jewish astronomical and astrological tradition, Hebrew and Latin paleography, Jewish music and ethnomusicology, seventeenth- to nineteenth-century   Italian   Jewry as   well   as   Venetian   history   and European fraternalism.

Lorenzo Vigotti has a M.Arch. from the University of Florence on the Palazzo Datini in Prato and a M.Phil. from Columbia University, where he is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation project on the origin of the Renaissance palace (1380-1440) under the supervision of Prof. Benelli and Prof. Cole. He is currently associate professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Utah; he also taught seminars on Italian architecture, the architecture of New York and Florence, introductory courses on Western Art, and on the relationship between architecture and propaganda. As a trained architect, he worked in Florence in an architectural firm, focusing on structural problems and preservation issues in medieval and Renaissance architecture. His interests include cultural exchanges between Europe and Islam during the Renaissance. Since 2016, Lorenzo received a Kress Fellowship and joined Prof. Mancuso’s Program on Jewish History and Culture in Early Modern Europe at the Medici Archive Project, where he is in charge of the study and architectural reconstruction of the now lost Florentine Ghetto during the Medici rule.