Biography

Simone Lombardo received his PhD in Medieval History from the Catholic University of Milan and the University of Heidelberg in 2022, with a thesis on the Genoese, the Venetians and the crusades of the 14th century. He has been a post-doc researcher at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome and the University of Heidelberg for the past two years. His research focuses on the Mediterranean world between the 14th and the 16th centuries, Genoa and Venice, maritime history, the Later Crusades and cultural history, with an emphasis on the study of mentalities. He has published two monographs on these topics (La Croce dei Mercanti, Brill 2023; La crociata dopo la peste, Vita&Pensiero 2023) and several journal articles.

Project Summary

This project focuses on the Isolari, encyclopedic accounts of – initially – Eastern Mediterranean islands. They flourished among the humanists of Florence and Venice during the 15th century and also spread throughout the Turkish world. Manuscripts were produced by authors such as Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti or Benedetto Bordone. The Isolari and their iconography have not yet been studied in relation to nautical maps and literary works, which allow us to investigate the explicit and implicit purposes in the description of space. The aim of this project is to read the Isolari from a perspective of political geography and to understand the function of these sources, both written and figurative, in the context of the 14th-16th century Mediterranean. The Isolari focused on the Aegean, an area of intersection between several worlds through which one can analyze the geographical consciousness of the frontier. This perspective allows one to trace the perpetuation of the fantastic in the image of otherness, the conception of the natural environment and the description of cultural crossroads.