Avvisi

In 1605, a report sent to Europe from the Caucasus a few months earlier and written by Robert Sherley, an English gentleman in the service of the Shāh of Persia, was printed in Bologna. In the text the English adventurer described the outbreak of war between the Ottomans and Persians and the great victories gained by Shāh ‛Abbās I the Great. The document was published by the official papal printer of Bologna. This short publication was probably part of a wider propaganda programme devised by the Pope and some Catholic states, particularly those which were involved in the war against the Ottoman Empire and interested in an alliance with Persia. The aim of the present article is to recover this ‘forgotten’ document, to publish its transcription, and to place it in the political and cultural context of the Catholic world in the early 17th century.

The present paper highlights the process of circulation of information in the early modern Mediterranean (1683-1721), reconstructing the mentality of the time with respect to what news were considered to be important and how they were presented. Our original archival sources are the manuscript avvisi sent weekly from Malta to the Vatican Secretary of State, now in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. The analysis on the production and dispatching of news from Malta is based on three parameters, i.e. the identification of the agent (the inquisitor of Malta), the island's key role as a news’ gathering point, and the nature of the transmitted information. The enquire allow us to point out how the choice of what was considered to be a meaningful information changed over time, together with Malta’s role in the Mediterranean balance of power. Furthermore, the change of the documentation’s literary register over time allows us to assume that, despite their confidential nature, the Maltese avvisi began to be meant for a wider audience.

The link between communication and politics is deeply rooted in history. In the recent years, the rise of noteworthy events---such as the Arab Spring and its "Twitter revolution", the “Wikileaks affair" and the vicissitudes surrounding the NSA whistle-blower, Edward Snowden---have harnessed the attention of both the wider public and scholarly community on the issues regarding new and old media. However, new technologies not only trigger new questions on the way we should be thinking about our cultural and political legacy in today's global (and protean) world, but they also provide new tools of analysis on the study of the history of news and its impact on our present. In this respect, a number of Digital Humanities projects applied to archival collections continue to shed new light on a primary sources, which are fundamental for the study of political communication and information in the early modern period. My paper will examine these very issues with specific relation to handwritten newsletters, known in Italian as Avvisi, which circulated rampantly in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Almost every single European archive and library houses a collection of Avvisi. In the past, historians made full use of them in their works, although they have failed to recognize the intrinsic value of these sources. The reasons were partly due to their sheer quantity and their often erratic organization in archives, which have frustrated comprehensive analyses of this historical phenomenon. Through the research program “The Birth of News”, set up by the Medici Archive Project and directed by Professor Brendan Dooley, this challenge is beginning to be tackled. The aim of the program is to examine one of most complete collections of Avvisi in Europe, which are incorporated in the epistolary collection of the Medici Grand Dukes (Mediceo del Principato), preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Florence. This corpus of newsletters consists over 100 volumes from 1543 to 1743, comprising more than 200,000 folios. Utilizing the data-organization tools furnished by one of the most innovative digital humanities platforms now in public use: the Medici Archive Project's BIA, “The Birth of News” program will systematically address the cultural world of Avvisi, map out their trajectories, analyze their content, and configure, with historical grounding, the shape of public information in early modern Europe.

Villani Stefano, “Raccolte di aforismi. Gli Avvertimenti di Alessandro Amidei come plagio e riscrittura di alcune massime di Francesco Guicciardini, Giovan Francesco Lottini e Francesco Sansovino,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore – Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, serie 5, 9/1 (2017), pp. 127-149

On January 3, 1661 a certain Amidei Alessandro offered to the king of England Charles II a manuscript collection of political aphorisms, that is currently preserved at the Library of Clarke, University of California at Los Angeles. He presented himself as the author of the maxims, which in reality were copied from a printed collection of aphorisms by Guicciardini, Lottini and Sansovino edited by the latter under the title Propositioni, overo Considerationi in materia di cose di Stato in 1583 and republished multiple times in the following decades. A singular figure with a shifting and elusive identity, Amidei was an Italian Jew who moved to England in 1656. As an audacious plagiarist, Amidei took full advantage of the flexibility of the manuscript form, recomposing the maxims to serve his own aims. This case study helps us to understand this creative reuse of aphoristic matter as a common practice of the Baroque age.

The human need for news and communication about news has been fulfilled in various ways in different eras and cultures by diverse technical means. Beginning with local dissemination by means of word-of-mouth information from person to person about events near and far, the news made its way via random lines of communication and sporadically organized messenger routes or permanently institutionalized postal networks. These had varying degrees of exclusiveness as well as increasingly shorter intervals and delivered the news in ever greater intermittency to reading publics of differing size. The news ranged from covert intelligence for the king to printed newspapers for the nation. The increasing regularity and frequency of news reporting, as well as its growing public nature, are especially notable features of its development.

This book explores perceptions of toleration and self-identity through an analysis of otherness’ real experience of Italian travellers, Catholic missionaries and Maltese proto-journalists within Mediterranean border-spaces. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, which integrates the analysis of original and unpublished archival documentation with early modern European travel literature, the book shows how fluid subjects and border groups adapted to new environments, often generating information that made the Ottomans and their system of values real and dignified to an Italian audience. The interdisciplinary combining of historical methodology with the tools of comparative literature, anthropology and folklore studies provides a fresh perspective on concepts of tolerance as experienced in the early modern Mediterranean.

Tecnologie come i big data promettono di darci meravigliose possibilità e
una vasta consapevolezza dei fenomeni che ci circondano, ma se non riusciremo a bilanciare il loro crescente utilizzo con la privacy, la trasparenza, la confidenzialità e la libera scelta, rischiamo di subordinare tali valori a queste nuove capacità.
L’attuale legge sulla privacy si fonda sul principio di “notice and choice” (FTC, 1998), intendendo con notice (avviso) “l’impegno da parte di un entità di informare la fonte dei dati che sarà messa in atto la raccolta e la condivisione di essi”, e con choice (scelta) l’idea che le persone dovrebbero poter essere libere di dissociarsi (opt-out) dagli usi dei loro dati che non desiderano. Compatibilmente con queste definizioni, nella presente tesi si definiscono avvisi online sulla privacy quegli atti linguistici dell’interazione in rete con cui solitamente i proprietari di siti o app richiedono agli utenti il consenso al trattamento dei dati personali e della privacy. Solove (2013) descrive questo approccio “notice and choice” come una “auto-gestione della privacy” (privacy self-management). Idealmente, l’obiettivo è quello di informare l’utente sulla raccolta, l’uso e la condivisione dei suoi dati, e sulla base di questi avvisi l’individuo può soppesare i costi e i benefici di questi accordi ed avere il controllo dei propri dati personali. La pratica però è ben diversa. Di fatto in pochi, se non nessuno, ha le capacità, lo zelo ed il tempo di leggere tutte le cookie policy, privacy policy, accordi di licenza (EULA) e termini di servizio vari presenti in ogni sito.
McDonald e Cranor (2008) hanno stimato che in termini di tempo leggere tutte le privacy policy impiegherebbe annualmente ad ogni utente circa 201 ore, mentre nel loro studio empirico i partecipanti spesero in media 14 secondi (privacy paradox). Osservazioni come questa mostrano empiricamente quello che a livello aneddotico sappiamo già: gli avvisi sui dati personali non funzionano perché gli utenti non li leggono. Questo è dovuto al fatto che il principio di “notice and choice” e l’approccio di self-management della privacy sono semplicemente basati su un ideale della razionalità umana inesatto. Appare evidente quindi come in questo tipo di comunicazione sia inevitabile ripensare a diverse strategie e nuove pratiche, partendo dal comportamento reale degli individui. L'obiettivo di questa tesi è appunto quello di investigare in modo qualitativo come gli avvisi si inseriscono nel corso d'azione all'interno della navigazione e in che modo gli utenti vi si interfacciano.

The research focuses on the Neapolitan revolution and, particularly, on the spreading of news in the Medicean
court of Florence. Thanks to the Medici Granducal Archival Collection (Mediceo del Principato) hold at the State Archive in Florence, I would like to study the flow of official and unofficial
information regarding that event. This would allow us to consider under a new light the relationship between the Medici Grand Dukes and the vice-kingdom of Naples.

This research analyses the processes of dissemination of news in the context of the mid-Seventeenth Century revolutionary crisis, by highlighting the role played by political information in the spread of political and cultural ideas. This research concerns a revolutionary event (i.e the Neapolitan revolution of 1647-48, which for nine long months had its impact on the Early Modern ‘Mezzogiorno’) and its spatial and temporal diffusion from the viewpoint of media representation. This study scrutinizes the European media landscape within which the revolutionary event was embedded, as well as the new media environment which it eventually generated. It focuses on a wide range of archival and unpublished sources, largely underplayed by traditional historiography, and consisting of manuscript and printed newssheets, diplomatic letters, pamphlets, and other informational material, produced and widely circulated during the Neapolitan revolution. Using this new approach, it is possible not only to trace the fragmentary remnants of that event, but also the historical climate of which they were part. On this basis, our purpose is to analyse the dissemination of revolutionary news about, and to evaluate the long-lasting repercussions for, European political culture. Such a scholarly endeavour allows us to single out, through the lens of particular events, the emergence and function of an Early Modern information society, characterized by the criss-crossing of different regimes of communication (oral, written and printed). The aim is to understand the making of the news, itself often the result of a heterogeneous combination of handwritten news, printed gazettes, and diplomatic correspondence, as well as to explore the interaction between the secret, private, and public spheres of information. By focusing on the communicative practices inherent to and constitutive of the revolutionary process, the research draws attention to the formation of a new political identity forged in the midst of conflict, whose dissemination through information networks is fundamental to an understanding of the impact that the revolutionary event had on contemporaneous political upheavals. It also illustrates the movement of both medium and message of the Neapolitan revolution within the European public space, and follows the path undertaken by the revolutionary news and its subsequent reception in other linguistic and cultural contexts. Ultimately, the message of the Neapolitan revolution would acquire a ubiquitous significance and a whole range of polysemic meanings, before once again being reabsorbed within the reassuring boundaries of traditional discourse. This research attempts to problematize important, fundamental questions arising from the ‘paradigm of modernization’, by focusing on historical phenomena generally considered as minor and peripheral from the point of view of the central thrust of Western political and cultural development.

Despite of the title, this article focuses on the marginalization of any religious and scientific element in the printed reports (avvisi) from 16th century, especially the ones about natural disasters or similar. Actually, the central matter of news texts was the pure fact: as a consequence, any interpretation (religious or scientific) is irrelevant or purely ornamental.

During the Mid-Seventeenth Century, Europe experienced a revolutionary wave whose impact transcended the borders of single countries. The years 1647-48 represent the apex of a long period of challenges to political powers. The outcomes (i.e. the British Revolution, the Neapolitan Rebellion and the French Fronde, just to mention the most relevant ones) would changed profoundly the political, social and cultural framework of the Old Continent. My paper tries to suggest that the dissemination of political information created the conditions through which new political ideas and practices were publicly developed, exchanged and debated throughout Early Modern Europe.

It analyses information which passed through diplomatic channels, for instance, manuscript and printed gazettes between Florence and the British Isles sent by the Tuscany envoy in London, Amerigo Salvetti; or the news flow between the Roman Curia and the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. These examples will prove not only how the diplomatic entourage reported on similar events, but also how it reacted to exceptional conjunctures.

Moreover, my paper will try to figure out the movement of news not only through the geographical space but also within a variegated media landscape. Through the analysis of the contents and materiality of information, on the one hand, we will see how news went from a manuscript from to a printed one; on the other, their renegotiation in other cultural contexts following their translation in different languages and the appearance in different early modern political arena.

This approach could help us link again not only important events which were artificially separated by the narrative of national historiographies, but also to balance the dichotomy of some historical categories, such as printing/writing and public/private.

This paper analyses how the Republic of Genoa gathered, conveyed and processed data from the Mediterranean after the Genoese officially returned to the Levant (1665-1670). It begins by discussing a report by a maritime committee known as the Giunta di Marina presenting the major directions, challenges and doctrines of Genoese intelligence to decision-makers and suggesting reforms in order to adapt the Republic’s information system to the new order. The second part of the paper analyses the procedures and networks that enabled the government to stay informed, and it examines news provided by agents in Livorno, Smyrna and Istanbul. The objective is to focus on the institutionalization of maritime news and the so-called consular nature of Mediterranean information as it was structured and used by the Genoese government.