| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper is part of a wider project carried out by Università Ca Foscari, Venezia, which aims to support the knowledge of the tradition of travels from Venice to Constantinople and back. At this stage I want to focus on the concept of travel from a different perspective: the power of flavours to move from one side to the other of the Mediterranean, affecting and changing the experience of taste.
From the description of the banquet offered to Liutprando from Cremona by Emperor Niceforos Focas in 968, to the Kitab al-tabikh written by Muhammad al-Baghdadi or from Giambonino from Cremona's Liber de ferculis et condimentis to the descriptions of the feasts at the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, I will try to reconstruct step by step the routes of flavours in order to understand and to promote the roots of Venetian cultural heritage.
Paper -b:
Frequently it is maintained that the travel of craftworks and craftsmen was a determining factor of artistic innovation. This paper doesn't seek to explore which could be the effects of the travel of finished works and consummated masters, but the incidence of the journey of apprentices and professionals that were able to arrange a workshop, to create new cells of training and production that last beyond the founder's stay, or even the founder's life. The features of a crucial way of transmitting artistic knowledge would become sharper. The issue has traditionally aroused interest among medieval art historiography. Sometimes, we have reflected on the matter from standpoints that have condemned it to the dead end where it is piled up 'what we can't know': the object of the economic transaction in an apprenticeship contract (what is taught and what is learned) is never written down. The archives keep an obstinate and frustrating silence: there's no evidence of which were the skills that were taught and how they were learned. This silence has been often confused with secrecy. What is not written down in apprenticeship contracts, the tacit knowledge, the skills that will make the apprentice able to earn his living, the novelties that will make him different from others, can only be learned by working beside the master. The medieval technical treatises, appraised sometimes as a helpful and usual way of transmitting craft knowledge, are scarce and often overdue. In fact, they used to codify consolidated methods rather than new practices.
This way, the main traces of the transmission of artistic knowledge by means of travel are, first of all, the apprenticeship or collaboration contracts that bounded craftsmen from different origins, the prospecting journeys sponsored by the promoter in order to see works of art which were worthy of being imitated (the journeys that were undertaken by artists motu proprio are more difficult to identify), and the drawing-books which show a figurative repertoire composed by elements of diverse sources. All these factors were a direct investment on the professional fortune of the workers that decided to move to improve their craft. In the Crown of Aragon there are interesting and abundant examples of all mentioned above.
Paper -c:
On the bases of the troubadours' texts and information (mainly dates or historical facts), we will try to outline an historical-geographical reconstruction of the possible roads used by the troubadours to reach the Italian courts of Este, Malaspina, Montferrat, and Da Romano in the 13th century. Starting from a general analysis of roads, alpine passes, rivers, canals utilised during the Roman empire, we will create a set of tools needed to draw a map of the most used roads linking Provence to Northern Italy which troubadours may have used generating, in less than one century, a flow of ideas and people similar to a holy pilgrimage.
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