2.5 Arrivals and departures. A little map of migration, exodus, and desire

“Arrivals and departures. A little map of migration, exodus, and desire” is the title of the fifth episode of this season of “Nowtilus”, which plunges into the dynamics of the social, historical and contemporary migration in Venice, debunking some myths about the times, means, and causes of depopulation in the city.

In the company of Federico Barbierato, professor of Modern History at the University of Verona, we’ll find out about the flow of people that crossed through and enriched the Serenissima in the modern era, while discovering a very different understanding of what it means to be a foreigner. Together with the anthropologist Clara Zanardi we’ll discover the dynamics of mass migration and tourism in the second half of the twentieth century, revealing the systems of “human reclamation” encouraged by the ruling classes, and whose analysis offers unprecedented points of view on the age-old question about the depopulation of city. Venice is a city that embodies a contradiction between the continuous arrivals, even if only temporary, and the ever diminishing resident population, but it is also a place that in the past achieved “serenity” in terms of economic, social, and cultural stability thanks to a welcoming, cosmopolitan, and diverse demographic. These conversations with Barbierato and Zanardi represent a refreshing reflection on a type of sustainability that aside from being ecological, must also be both human and social.

The episode is available only in Italian on Ocean-Archive.org and on TBA21–Academy Radio on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

“Nowtilus. Stories from an urban lagoon in the 21st century” is a podcast produced by Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy Radio. Music by Enrico Coniglio.

Each episode of the second season of Nowtilus. Stories from an urban lagoon in the 21st century! is accompanied by Nowtilus Plus, a document with a bibliography, related images, and an in-depth analysis of the content discussed by the guests aboard.

Check out the material from the fifth episode:

Federico Barbierato is professor of Modern History at the University of Verona. He held a scholarship at the Luigi Einaudi Foundation of Turin in 1997/98, and subsequently obtained a research doctorate at the Catholic University of Milan in 2001 with a thesis entitled “Religious non-conformism, sects and the circulation of ideas in Venice between the 16th and 18th centuries”. He deals with social history and culture between the 16th and 18th centuries. He has been particularly interested in the circulation of prohibited books, censorship, religious dissent and Freemasonry mainly in the Veneto area. He is a member of the editorial committee for the www.stmoderna.it portal, and the coordinator of the Research Group in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (EMoDiR, www.emodir.net).

Clara Zanardi was born in Belluno in 1988 and is an urban anthropologist and activist for degrowth in tourism. She graduated in Philosophical Sciences, and in 2020 she obtained a PhD in History of Societies and Institutions at the University of Trieste. She lives and works in Venice, where she deals with tourism, inequality, and processes of urban transformation. She is the author of “Human reclamation. Venice from exodus to tourism” (Unicopli 2020) and “On the edge of presence. Ernesto De Martino between philosophy and anthropology” (Unicopli 2011).