Lectures on the Silk Road

Alexandra Wetzel

Who was Kublai Khan, "the lord of lords" whom Marco Polo so admired?  How can a foreign people have achieved the conquest of the whole of China, and with what strategies did the invaders succeed in hanging onto power for almost one hundred years?  Were they really as tolerant and as cosmopolitan as the Venetian writer suggests?  In this lecture we'll b [...]

Luca Molà

Italian Merchants and the Treasures of the East: An Early Example of Economic Globalisation
Thanks to the unification of a large part of the Asian continent under the Mongol Empire, Genoese and Venetian merchants were able to travel the silk roads fairly freely between 1250 and 1350. This was a century of intense trade and exchange between East and West, [...]

Mario Biondi

We Europeans are a basically sedentary race yet we've always been possessed by a kind of inbred travel bug.  In some hidden corner of our soul we still hark to the call of our nomadic ancestors.  Mario Biondi, the author of a series of fantastic travelogues, has been nurturing this ancestral call to travel the globe for the whole of his life, and his infec [...]

Maria Ludovica Rosati

The legend of the East goes back a long way. In the eyes of medieval Europe, mysterious Asia was the lair of monsters but it was also a treasure chest with endless riches, silk being the rarest of them all. Through the words of travellers and eye-witnesses of the time, we'll be learning how the fantastic equation East = Silk came into being, and e [...]

Claudio Zanier

When a serious silkworm epidemic jeopardised the production of silk in Italy, then the world's second largest producer of this luxury commodity, hundreds of businessmen travelled throughout Asia for over thirty years, at great personal risk and cost, in search of healthy worms, so that they could bring their eggs back to Italy and set the industry back o [...]

Paolo Gasparini e Enrico Balli

What's the relationship between genetics and taste? Can we use eating habits to reconstruct a people's history?  A scientific expedition travelled the ancient Silk Road to explore the relationship between genetics, food preferences and culinary and enological traditions, covering over 20,000 kilometres in ten different countries and worki [...]

Marco Guglielminotti Trivel

Jingjiao, Religion of Light - Archaeological Traces of Syrian Oriental Christianity in China
Syrian Oriental Christianity, commonly known as Nestorianism, was introduced into China at the time of the Tang dynasty and it spread widely under the Mongol domination of the Yuan. Dipping into his personal experience as an archaeologist in Chi [...]

Michela Fontana

A distant and virtually unknown world in which slant-eyed men spoke incomprehensible gibberish, painters was ignorant of perspective and religion didn't countenance a God who governed the universe. That's what China looked like to the late 16th century Jesuit who travelled alone to the far reaches of the Ming Empire. Michela Fontana will be bringing to [...]

Marta Caroscio

As "chocolate shops" multiplied alongside coffee shops in 18th century Europe, Chinese porcelain began to flood the European market. Much prized, much imitated and avidly collected, it was certainly used also to drink hot chocolate.  Is it appropriate to label it the globalisation of taste, or was it simply a fashion for the wealthy few?

Silvia Cappellozza

Silvia Cappellozza from the Agricultural Research and Experimentation Council (CRA), Italy's largest agricultural research institute, will be taking her audience on a journey of discovery through experiences and adventures of the past centred around the silkworm. Past and present will intermingle in a thrilling tale combining scientific scholarship w [...]

We inform visitors that today's lecture "Silk and poison" has been cancelled for unexpected professional commitments of the speaker, the journalist Duilio Giammaria.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

Fiorenzo Omenetto

It's produced in a sustainable manner, it strengthens other fabrics and it's used in medicine for a whole range of purposes.  One of the most elegant materials nature offers us, silk is used by scientists today to produce optic and optoelectronic nanostructured components.  Fiorenzo Omenetto will be explaining how we start with the yarn the silkworm p [...]