On the move: food, merchants and the early modern European city

A lecture given by Dr. Sarah Milne, hosted by Nuncio Alloca, will introduce a collaborative project which seeks to historically contextualise some of the issues associated to globalisation and the city through the medium of food and philosophies of health and status.

The collaboration seeks to deepen understandings of the ways in which merchants and their associates were at the heart of cultural and ideological exchanges in the 16-18th centuries, bringing European cities into closer communion with one another through intensified trade, as well as facilitating the new spaces of exchange on an expanded scale.

In particular, merchants adopted foods and were at the forefront of changing tastes, with first access to ‘new’ items.

Influential individuals enjoyed the benefits of global flows of goods, ideas and people, in turn affecting a broader cultural and philosophical shifts, but publically expressed their concern when people from ‘beyond’ sought to share the same physical space.

In partnership with Sapienza - University of Rome