The ongoing research project “Digital Cartographies of the Roman Campagna” is developing an interactive digital map to explore the relationship between artistic representation of the Roman Campagna and the history of the place itself, in the context of ecology, climate change, disease and social history from 1600 to 1900. In the following ess…[Read more]

After a lacklustre attempt to become a painter,William Kent (1685–1748) developed a career as a garden designer, working mainly for Lord Burlington and other patrons in his circle. His gardens represent some of the earliest gardens of a style that became known as the ‘English Landscape Garden’, exemplified by Stourhead in Wiltshire, Rousham in Ox…[Read more]

This paper shares the success of research-led teaching and GLAM sector collaborations developed as part of the Digital Humanities (DH) teaching program at the Australian National University. This collaborative project offered a shared solution to two distinct problems. For teaching in DH we found that students, while fascinated by the GLAM and DH…[Read more]

This paper considers the way in which the garden, the « Bosco Parrasio », in which members of Rome’s Arcadian Academy met was not only a place of pleasurable escapism, but also a place of longing and mourning. This can be seen in the design of physical spaces – each real site that hosted the « Bosco Parrasio » was required to display the lapidi…[Read more]

While the capacity of music to move the emotions has received a good deal of
attention from musicologists, philosophers, and psychologists, the history of set design
has not considered how these sets created immersive environments that induced an
affective response. Instead, the attitudes expressed by Addison continue to cast a long
shadow…[Read more]

In 2009 the protests against election result in Iran began to play out not just on the streets of the capital (check) but online. Shortly after the protests Time magazine described Twitter (at that point the platform was only three years old) as ‘ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any…[Read more]

Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in…[Read more]

The city of Lucca was never limited to the urban area within the walls. Autumn and winter would be lived in the city palazzo, with life concentrating upon commercial activities enlivened by entertainments such as music and theatre. In spring and summer life was relocated en masse to the villa. This article outlines the essentials of Lucchese…[Read more]

The garden theatre can take many forms: it can erupt forth in an explosion of water and sound as in the teatro d’acqua; it can appear carved into a hedge as a teatro di verzura; or it can calmly wait to be filled with performers as in a teatro avanti il palazzo. The garden theatre was first a feature of the Baroque garden in Italy, before f…[Read more]