Seminar: Shared and Multilayered Cities Around the Mediterranean - an Integrated Methodology for Historical Research
Event Details:
- Date: Wednesday, 6 March 2024
- Time: Starts: 15:00
- Venue: John Ioannides Auditorium, Fresnel Building, The Cyprus Institute.
This is a hybrid event, so you are also welcome to join us online on The Cyprus Institute YouTube channel and our Facebook event page. - Speaker: Prof. Renata Salvarani, Full professor of History of Christianity, Director of CeSHeT (Research Centre for Heritage and Territory), European University of Rome
Abstract
If we consider a city as a symbolical system created and transformed in relation with identities, rites and forms of the society, the urban space appears as a living palimpsest receiving signs impressed by human communities.
Cities shared by different cultural, religious, linguistical groups appear as multiple symbolical spatial systems. They can be also seen as multilayered systems, result of dynamic processes of semantization and re-semantization of places, architectures, natural elements.
From a historical perspective, the documental recontruction of liturgies, processions and devotional gestures is a key to interprete the relation itself between groups and built environment.
Three case studies, in particular, can highlight such dynamics.
In the settlement context of Rome between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, during the passage from Paganism to Christianization, the itinerary connecting the memories of saint Lawrence martyr demonstrates how devotions and liturgies can create new meanings and, finally, a new different symbolical city.
In Jerusalem, shared and multilayered city per excellence, the controversy between Ethiopians and Copts for the monastery of Deir es Sultan in the area of the Holy Sepulchre underline how till today religious identities shape and re-shape spaces according to liturgies, with relevant diplomatic and political implications.
Written sources about Nicosia in 15th and 16th century testify the presence of different groups in the urban space, opening the perspective of further analysis of a stratified urban space.
The use of ICT and low cost technologies for the detection of spatial and archaeological contexts in these cases and, more in general, in an integrated historical methodology focused on symbolical processes, is essential.
About the Speaker
Prof. Renata Salvarani, Full professor of History of Christianity, Director of CeSHeT, Study Centre for Heritage and Territory European University of Rome
Renata Salvarani is a historian of religious and cultural relations between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Scholar of Medieval History, she focuses her researches on: Monothesistic Traditions in the Euro Mediterranean area; Religion and Space (urban spaces, liturgies, semantization processes, symbolic codes); Institutions and Space (territorialisation processes); History of Jerusalem.
She is Full Professor of History of Christianity at European University of Rome, where she is also director of CeSHeT (Research Centre for Heritage and Territory), and Delegate for the relationships with Catholic Universities and Private Universities.
Her international projects focus on Identity and Heritage, with specific reference to historical origins of different cultural groups living in contemporary Euro Mediterranean cities. She is author of more than 130 scientific works. “The body, the liturgy and the city”, Venice (Ca’ Foscari University Press) 2019 is a synthesis on the topic of shared and multilayered urban spaces.
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Additional Info
- Date: Wednesday, 6 March 2024
- Time: Starts: 15:00
- Speaker: Prof. Renata Salvarani, Full professor of History of Christianity, Director of CeSHeT, European University of Rome
