Italian travellers

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

This data base is developed as a by-product of the author's river-research titled The Evolution of the Ottoman House . 4 parts of this independent work, which is evolving into a book , have been published as conference proceedings and articles. The study started with a research presented at the Conservation and Implementation of Wooden Structures Symposium of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, KUDEB (Conservation, Implementation, Supervision Bureau) and was published in Turkish and English in the proceedings book.  Although this presentation has a distinctive structure in itself, it was understood that some sections should be examined and detailed. These were the problems of how the transition from the Byzantine house to the Ottoman house was  and why the " çardak", an Iranian masonry building style, was started to be used for wooden structures by the Ottomans  . The findings and propositions of this research were published as two separate articles. During all these studies, it was seen that the limited research and publications of architectural historians could only provide healthy clues for the recent times, since the house was always overshadowed by monumental structures. On the other hand, we were experiencing that the Ottoman houses that we restored had evolved through testing/error processes that stretch back far back . Evolutionary processes, on the other hand, could only be read on a very limited number of 18th and 19th buildings that survived and were not damaged by restorations. Another important source for a full understanding of the process was the results of archaeological research. We saw that the architectural whole, which we call the Ottoman house, dates back to the Neolithic in the Eastern Balkans and Anatolia. On the other hand, it was seen that the Turks (Seljuks and Turkmens) had never used such a wooden structure system before Anatolia, that the Ottoman house (Anatolia) was local and spread to Anatolia and the Balkans, especially after its development in Constantinople . These processes would also need to be carefully studied. The research had to cover not only Ottoman lands but also pre-Eastern Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk civil architectures. Still, archeology, history, architecture and art history, and the buildings themselves were insufficient to fully read the process. For example, there were important gaps that could not be filled, such as the period when Byzantium was interrupted by the Latin Empire. The reason why the Ottomans continued the wooden building system in Constantinople despite the great fires was another paradox that we had difficulty in understanding. As you move away from the capital, there is very little documentation about the Ottoman house. We should have also investigated the emergence and spread of the Ottoman house as a concept. At this point, it was understood that travelogues and engravings could provide clues to complete the missing links. Based on this need, we started to examine the previously studied travel books. For this purpose, it turned out that travelogues should be read as much as possible and their traces should be sought in any secondary source. In some travel books, the traveler's references to previous travelers not only enabled the author to reach another first source that had not been noticed before, but also gave important clues about the changes in the structure in question over time. The process of using travelogues and engravings to write the history of the Ottoman house was presented as a paper in Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina). While it is thought that  the development of the Ottoman house ended due to the transition from wood to masonry due to fires, especially in Constantinople , 18.-19. We have come to the conclusion that the notables, who emerged as a necessity in the centuries and became stronger, extended their lives with the ayan palaces they erected or gathered using the architectonics of the Ottoman house. The presentation will be included as a chapter in the proceedings book of the symposium. The fifth and final river-studies will cover the development of the house in the Balkans and Anatolia from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, based on archaeological research.
It has been shaped as a by-product of the database we share in this process. The database we have prepared with Excel is constantly updated, corrected and developed. In the last column, accessible primary sources are given in APA format (as far as possible). Secondary sources are given collectively in another bibliography at the end of this report. We are currently publishing the bibliographies as PDF ( Portable Document File ) while avoiding our copyrights to some extent . We archive the PDFs of the accessible first and second references as big data and index them using Adobe Acrobat program. In this way , we can easily access the information we are looking for by doing data mining .

This study aims to provide a fresh look at some of Nicolae Iorga’s travel accounts written on the occasion of his multiple journeys in Venice. I herein argue that the Romanian historian did not have a fixed and homogenous representation of the city from one travelogue to another, as is so often assumed, since every time he returned in an obviously shifting context. Therefore, his writings offer valuable impressions about the life, the people and the socio-political changes in Venice starting from 1890 to 1938, a period of great and rapid changes both for Italy and Romania. An analysis of these notes shows how a traveller’s perceptions about a place change with age, experience, social status, and, ultimately, history. Venice symbolized many things to Iorga throughout this nearly half a century: at first, it was the synonym of its Medieval past, afterwards it evolved into a political entity to be observed and finally it became his first foreign destination, his „second homeland‟. The dynamic path that I propose for the new reading of these journeys follows four understandings of Venice: 1. the Romantic intellectual vision of the city as the ignoble heir of the ancient Serenissima Republic, 2. visions of otherness through Iorga´s perceptions of the Germans, the Jews, the Armenians and the Communists of the city, before and after the Fascist seizure of power 3. the propaganda vision by which Iorga proved to have internalized some of the core Fascist myths 4. a final re-vision of the city as everything pointed to an increasing rapprochement with Nazi Germany.

On the occasion of the first centenary of the greatest Italian expedition to Central Asia, the paper wish to focus public attention on the Piedmontese doctor, accomplished mountaineer, explorer and geographer Filippo De Filippi. De Filippi is known in the field of the History of Exploration but is unfamiliar to the general public; of his 1913-14 extraordinary undertaking much has been written: not only the ponderous volumes reporting the scientific findings, but also De Filippi’s numerous official reports, presentations and notes. However the great bulk of unpublished papers preserved by the heirs allows to examine much more closely the figure of the explorer, specifically from the human point of view.

The essay focuses on Italian travelers in the Ottoman Empire between the late seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Through analysis of four works and the detection of three different ways of translating the ‘real act’ of traveling into literature, we introduce ‘experience’ as an epistemological tool. Impersonal narration, treatment of the act of knowing as a personal achievement and narration as a way of sharing a conscious encounter with the ‘other’ convey a knowledge based on first-hand experience. Leaving behind the old principle of authority typical of the Ancient Regime, a new dignity was given to authority that came from the physical act of the concrete experience of the author himself. The ability of authors to overcome prejudices in their narratives of their encounters with Turkish culture and society should not be taken for granted, but what can be detected is greater articulation and sensitivity in the definition of diversity that through the dissemination and editorial success of this kind of writing also had an impact on the mentality of these author’s readers in the Italian peninsula.