With Jürgen Renn, Matthias Schemmel, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Francesco Luzzini, and Thomas Turnbull

The Max Planck Partner Group The Water City brings the city and the environments of Venice into focus as the basis for historical and comparative studies on global geo-anthropological processes. It takes into account the multi-faceted reality of a “hydropolis,” which has always constituted a crossroad of environmental, cultural, political, economic, and migratory phenomena.

Roberta D’Argenio introduces this inaugural event, which sets in motion a five-year collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Jürgen Renn (Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) then introduces the Partner group and its aims, and Matthias Schemmel and Pietro Daniel Omodeo speak about the group’s research, which includes a digital publication on the lagoon management in the seventeenth century and an iconographic database on the Water City project (including cartographic maps, veduta, and symbolic representations).

The session concludes with the following short presentations:

Francesco Luzzini, “The Floating Price of Beauty: Water (and Land) Management in Venice throughout the Centuries”

Thomas Turnbull, “The Water-Energy-Food-Climate Nexus: an historical perspective”