Biography

Ludovica Galeazzo is an Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Padua. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project Venice’s Nissology. Reframing the Lagoon City as an Archipelago (VeNiss) on the digital reconstruction of the history and urban transformations of the Venetian lagoon islands. Her research focuses on Italian architecture in the early modern period with a special interest in new technologies to demonstrate the process of city’s change over time. She received her PhD from the Graduate School Ca’ Foscari-Iuav in Venice and was later a Research Fellow at the Iuav University (2013-16), a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University (2016-17), and a Kress Fellow in Digital Humanities at I Tatti (2019). She holds the position of Digital Humanities Research Associate since 2019. Ludovica is a member of the international projects Visualizing Cities and Metapolis and serves on the editorial board of the Architectural Histories journal (EAHN). She is the author of the monograph Venezia e i margini urbani. L’insula dei Gesuiti in età moderna (IVSLA 2018).

Project Summary

In the early modern period, the network of islands encircling the Venetian lagoon served as capillary structures for the political, socio-economic, and cultural interests of the Serenissima. Scattered throughout the entire ‘gulf’ of Venice, these settlements were indispensable to the larger Venetian community as loci dedicated to the city’s food supply, spiritual places for religious communities, and centers for defense structures or public hospitals. The socio-political events that followed the fall of the Republic (1797) profoundly changed this understanding and totally altered the reading of the city as an organic entity that encompasses the watery ecosystem. In some cases, interventions significantly transformed the islands’ geographic configuration and functions. The Venice’s Nissology project (VeNiss) aims to investigate the long-term history and change of this cluster of islets starting from the sixteenth century, through a geo-spatial semantic infrastructure that, as a sort of historical Google maps, enables a journey across time and space. This combines digital 2D and 3D reconstructions, interwoven with pertinent archival and iconographic sources, actors, and events, thus helping uncover the significance of Venice’s archipelago and retrieve its history as a physical site but, above all, as an integrated system of calculated interactions.