SILC – SinoItalian Links and Crossroads – Research group
SILC aims to investigate, identify and highlight cultural contacts and cross-pollination between Italy and China in the modern era.
Cultural relations between the Italians and the Chinese represent an interesting field of research on different levels and for different reasons: for example, the observation of cultural relations between Italy and China represent a case study in dynamics of encounter, clash and interaction between cultures which, over time, have played substantial roles in global geopolitics and have respectively been the subject of an important amount of studies.At the same time, the relations between Italy and China constitute an important case study also because, despite considerable areas of contact, in the current public discourse these cultures are often imagined as distant, mutually orientalized and essentialized. Marco Polo's Million represents the oldest literary testimony of the relationship between Europeans and Chinese, and even if in Chinese sources there are no similar cultural productions that arise from the contact between the two peoples, if not in much more recent times, the contribution of Matteo Ricci and many missionaries from the Italian peninsula throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have nevertheless left an important mark on Chinese cultural heritage.This privileged interaction between Italy and China has also caused ideas and notions of the Celestial Empire to circulate more and more widely in Europe, overturning certain beliefs and stimulating fruitful debates in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, religion, science and policy. On the one hand, in conjunction with Italy's loss of influence in the global geopolitical landscape and on the other the inauguration of a phase of closure to the outside world and protectionism that characterized some phases of the late Chinese imperial era, the interaction between the two cultures became apparently rarefied, however continuing to exist and consolidate above all through some ecclesiastical realities such as the College of Chinese in Naples (1724), the first institution in which the Chinese language was taught and spoken in Europe. In mid-nineteenth century, not only has the cultural exchange between the two peoples resumed, but specific ties have also been created and rooted that highlight a relationship whose aesthetic, symbolic and value characteristics and presuppositions are yet to be fully studied.The activities of SILC, while focusing on cultural issues and producing results comparable to those of humanistic research, are inter and transdisciplinary and also make use of methodologies borrowed from disciplines outside traditional humanistic studies. For this reason, SILC is an interdepartmental research unit and it is also open to collaborations with other universities and research centers. The research promoted by SILC, in fact, is characterized not only by the interdisciplinary component, but also by the international dimension of the network of contacts it involves. Indeed, one of the goals of this research group is to collaborate to build new knowledge about cultural contacts between Italy and China in the modern era, activating exchanges and building transnational project networks, which allow a broad and free research and facilitate the production and circulation of innovative and original results.
Coordinator:
Valentina Pedone (University of Florence, Italy)
Members:
Miriam Castorina (University of Florence, Italy)
Mark Chu (University College Cork, Ireland)
Giulio Giovannoni (University of Florence, Italy)
Chiara Giuliani (University College Cork, Ireland)
Rolando Minuti (University of Florence, Italy)
Alessandro Panunzi (University of Florence, Italy)
Andrea Scibetta (University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy)
Sun Tianyang (University of Florence, Italy)
Zhang Gaoheng (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Others involved:
Last update
26.01.2024