Forwarded message from Hugo Blake <[log in to unmask]>:

Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology & Rivista di Archeologia
Postmedievale

International Conference, 25-27 May 2006:
Italy and Britain between Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds:
Leghorn – ‘an English port’
Gran Bretagna e Italia tra Mediterraneo e Atlantico:
Livorno – ‘un porto inglese’

CALL FOR PAPERS
As part of the Society’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the UK Society for
Post-Medieval Archaeology is organising - together with the Italian
journal Archeologia Postmedievale - an international conference at the
Tuscan port of Livorno in Italy, a remarkably successful post-medieval
creation of international importance at a time when Britain dominated the
seas.

In the second half of the 16th century the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany
developed Livorno to replace the port of Pisa. The fortified village port
of 500 inhabitants was transformed into a city of 36,000 by 1764 to become
Tuscany’s second wealthiest city. Livorno’s success was due to privileges
granted, which effectively made Livorno a free port and a place where non-
Catholics were tolerated. The Medici provided a neutral safe haven, with
clean and efficient public facilities. In the early modern period it was
the Mediterranean’s most cosmopolitan and convenient transit point in the
Atlantic-Levant trade and a base for north European mariners. The English
were by the middle of the 17th century the largest group of resident
foreign merchants. A century later half the city’s trade may have passed
through British warehouses. The city ceased to be a free port on
incorporation in the Italian state in 1860, developed shipbuilding and
other industries, and is now Italy’s fourth largest port, as well as a
ferry terminal and a military base.

Although 40 per cent of Livorno was destroyed in the Second World War,
Buontalenti’s 1576 street plan, the massive water-filled ditches of the
defences, Antonio da Sangallo’s Fortezza Vecchia (1521-1530), part of
Buontalenti and others’ Fortezza Nuova (1590), the shipyards, Robert
Dudley’s Porto Mediceo (1611-20) enclosed by a pier, the lighthouses, the
Venezia Nuova quarter (1629), the Bottini dell’Olio warehouse (1698-1705,
enlarged 1729-33), the Greek and Dutch & German churches, and the extra-
mural English and Jewish cemeteries survive or have been restored.

We welcome proposals for 20-30 minute papers from any discipline with a
bearing on the material culture of these themes:
1) relations between Britain and Italy, AD1500-2000 (including papers from
historians and art historians focussing on material culture, for example
on foreign merchant culture, ethnic identity and acculturation, shipping,
port infrastructure, trade items);
2) Livorno (including 19th-century conversion from freeport to industrial
city, coping with Second World War destruction);
3) Italian post-medieval archaeology (syntheses of results - not fieldwork
summaries nor potential).
Please send an abstract in English or Italian of about 250 words together
with a brief curriculum vitae to the organisers: Hugo Blake, Royal
Holloway, University of London, ([log in to unmask]) and Marco
Milanese, Universities of Pisa and Sassari ([log in to unmask]).
Deadline for proposals: 1 September, 2005.