Padua And Venice Transcultural Exchange In The Early Modern Age Brigit Blasssimmen Editor Stefan Weppelmann Editor by Brigit Blass-simmen (editor); Stefan Weppelmann (editor) 9783110464832, 9783110465402, 3110464837, 311046540X instant download after payment.

The artistic process is not independent of its place of origin. At the same time, aesthetic formulations help shape their surroundings. Padua and Venice are only twenty-three  kilometers apart. The lagoon separates the two cities into distinct geopolitical areas. Even today, they look very different. Venice is built into the water on many tiny islands in a lagoon in the northern Adriatic Sea (fig. 1). Padua, by contrast, is located on the mainland, in a plain, the southern Po Plain, at the edge of the Euganean Hills (fig. 2). These topographical locations conditioned distinct histories and developments. Padua was founded by the Romans. By contrast, unlike almost all other important Italian cities, Venice cannot be traced back to a founding in antiquity. On the contrary, only the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the founding of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire on the opposite side of the Mediterranean created the conditions for the topographically complicated collection of small islands to become a world power. Venice’s rise was based on sea travel and the trade routes via the Eastern Mediterranean. Trade with the East brought wealth to the city built on the lagoon. In Venice, people came together from diverse regions and cultures, so that Venice had national associations of Greeks, Turks, Dalmatians, Albanians, Armenians, and Germans as well as a large Jewish community (the origin of the word “ghetto”) to name only some. Whereas in Venice the economy and business-oriented thinking were significant, Padua, with its university founded in 1222, is one of Europe’s oldest university towns, a center for the reception of antiquity and humanist education.