Italian Studies Research Seminar Series

Pandora’s Legacy: Venice in its 1,600th  year

Catherine Kovesi (University of Melbourne)

Abstract

Perhaps no city has so captured the world’s collective imagination as that of Venice. Legendarily founded on the Feast of the Annunciation in the year 421, this year the city celebrates 1,600 years of an improbable, shimmeringly beautiful existence. However, the trading supremacy which gave Venice its wealth also made it complicit in the creation of modern-day consumer society, a creation which today threatens the city’s very existence. This seminar examines Venice as Pandora: glitteringly beautiful, endowed with unique gifts by all the gods, but with the fatal allure of temptation and a jar whose contents could not be contained.  

About the speaker

An historian at the University of Melbourne, Catherine Kovesi researches discourses surrounding luxury consumption in early modern Italy; Florentine and Venetian family history; and the history of Australian women religious. She is the author of Sumptuary Legislation in Italy, 1200-1500 (2001), editor of Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy (2018), of a special issue of the journal Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption (2021), and co-General Editor of Bloomsbury’s forthcoming A Cultural History of Luxury.  She is Chair of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies and curates cultural events for the Australian Council for the Arts at the Venice Biennale Arte. 

Join online via Zoom.

For more information, contact: Associate Professor Francesco Borghesi – francesco.borghesi@sydney.edu.au

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