First volume of the VeLoCi project results currently in publication

The PRIN 2022 VeLoCi Project takes a new step in disseminating its scientific results with the forthcoming publication of the volume Invisible Cities between Memory and Representation (16th–19th Century), edited by Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi and Francesca Mattei.

The book results from the research activities carried out within the project and offers a comparative and multidisciplinary reflection on how, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians, artists, scientists, and travellers observed, described, and sometimes reinvented lost cities and landscapes.

Through case studies ranging from the Vesuvian area to the Middle East and the New World, the essays show how views, maps, images, and travel accounts contributed not only to documenting places but also to shaping new ways of interpreting and narrating them. The volume thus combines historical and scientific reconstruction with an analysis of the forms of representation and the circulation of knowledge.

The book includes contributions by Arianna Campiani, Stefania Castellana, Lorenzo Gatta, Diletta Haberl, Domenico Laurenza, Milena Viceconte, and Lorenzo Vigotti.

Among the key themes addressed are the role of memory in the perception of places, the circulation of information between Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, and the dialogue between empirical observation and learned tradition in the construction of the imaginary of lost cities.