Migrazioni mediterranee. Migranti, minoranze e matrimoni a Venezia nel basso medioevo

On one hand the volume aims to analyse, with regards to Venice, the various forms of integrating foreigners and their strategies of adaptation to the city, and on the other the plurality of interactions, exchanges and mutual influences between the host society and it’s minorities. Venice, it must be remembered, had substantial foreign communities in the Middle Ages that where often administered legally. In particular these included Germans, Albanians, Dalmatians and Slavs, Greeks, Armenian’s, Jews, Muslim Turks, as well as a considerable number of slaves. We want, in essence, to study how individuals and minorities interacted with each other, how they communicated with the majority group, how they perceived themselves and the host society and how they acted in the context of close proximity and regular interaction. We are particularly interested in bringing to the surface what was happening in the basic social structures – the family, kinship networks, neighbourhoods, parishes, national schools, places of worship – or in the areas of interconnection: where cultural boundaries and identity became more rarefied and permeable. In these spaces the possibilities for compromise, mediation and reciprocal influences were higher. In this regard, the first part of the volume will address the phenomenon of migration itself and the processes of settlement, acceptance and integration of migrant populations in Venetian society. In having identified marriage and the family as one of the major factors of integration for newcomers in the host society, and ascertained the lack of attention devoted so far by immigration studies on these subjects, the central part of the volume has been reserved to a timely and in-depth analysis of unions formed in the city between and with foreigners, in order to verify their functionality in terms of integrating and rooting minorities. Finally, the third part of the volume will be devoted to the dynamics of interaction in the longer term, i.e. the socialization processes of minorities and the mechanisms of coexistence between majority and minority groups.