THE SUBJECT OF MIGRANTS AT A CONFERENCE IN THE MARCIANA LIBRARY

The subject of ‘migrants’ is a very topical one, which is often treated superficially and approximately. The Marciana Library is holding a conference entitled ‘Venezia città aperta. Immigrati, mendicanti, visitatori e granturisti’ directed by Andrea Zannini on Thursday 6 October at 5 pm in the Sansovini Library at Piazzetta San Marco 13/a. The meeting analyses a subject that is as important now as in the past, relating to migrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The meeting on Thursday opens the second part of the cycle ‘Stranieri, barbari, migranti: il racconto della Storia per comprendere il presente’ highlighting seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cosmopolitan Venice, which was open to dialogue despite the political crisis involving it. More and more travellers and foreigners began coming to Venice with the crisis of the republic, writes Il Gazzettino today in an article on the Marciana event, possibly being the first western case of ‘mass tourism’ as the French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out in his time.