E-ROUTES (Time travel routes through Europe - Creative Europe Program, CREA 2021-2027, e-routes.eu) is a European project in line with the growing need to digitize, enhance and promote widespread cultural heritage. The MUSA Centre of the University of Naples Federico II, together with ICARUS Croatia ((www.icarushrvatska.hr) and the National and University Library of Slovenia (www.nuk.uni-lj.si/eng/), is a Beneficiary Partner of the project, coordinated by the Serbian Library Association (www.bds.rs).

 

The Focus

The project focuses on contemporary artistic, literary, and scientific production relating to travel experiences in Europe, from the 18th century onwards. E-ROUTES aims to provide the link between old travel diaries, maps, images, with contemporary cultural and creative experiences, within the theme of exploration in a broad sense. A journey through time allowing to know how European artists, writers, naturalists, scientists, and ordinary people have lived and perceive, this knowledge.

 

 

The objectives

The principal objective of the project is to collect significant cultural and artistic objects, in digital form or to be digitized, from different GLAM institutions (Galleries Libraries Archives Museums), related to the theme of travel. A journey here intended as element of the cultural heritage of the four European countries participating to the project (Croatia, Italy, Serbia, and Slovenia). The project will provide, at the same time, material to create new itineraries and travel stories connected to our contemporary experiences.

As part of the E-Routes project, Centro MUSA coordinates Work Package 5 (WP5 - Audience engagement and dissemination) which includes the following tasks:

• Development of web and mobile application with interactive maps and digitized travel material for an augmented reality experience in relation to new travel routes.
• Multilingual exhibition production, both print and digital, about the project's outputs and travel routes.
• Publication of the exhibition catalogue, promotional material, leaflets.
• Publication of a multilingual Open Access e-book based on the created travel stories on new European travel routes experience.

 

Furthermore, MUSA Centre will make available an articulated collection, concerning an unusual journey through pictorial images among the volcanoes of southern Italy, made in the last 40 years by Adriana Pignatelli Mangoni. The images are gouaches in which the passages of light, the color combinations, the atmospheres, represents an iconographic caption of the impressions/emotions emerging from the travelers' diaries of the European Grand Tour.

 

Associated partners of E-ROUTES provide

• Novi Sad Matica Srpska Library, www.bms.rs/
• ICARUS Italy APS, http://www.icar-us.eu/en/icarus-italia/
• Prelog library and reading room, Croatia, http://knjiznice.nsk.hr/prelog/ 

 

The Gouaches

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In 1769 P.-J. Volaire settled in Naples and the almost permanent eruptive activity of Vesuvius, for more than a decade offered him the opportunity to paint dramatic nocturnal representations of the erupting volcano, in which the presence of the moon adds a further cosmological and problematic sign.

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Jean Baptiste Claude Richard abbé de Saint-Non, draftsman and etching engraver and colors aquatint, in 1778 commissioned Vivant Denon with a scientific journey expedition to describe the most unknown part of southern Italy, the Aeolian islands and the "wild" Sicily. The "Voyage pittoresque" will be published in four volumes from 1781 to 1786. Unique, complex, imposing, very prestigious work, includes 542 etching plates and still today represents a typographical marvel.

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The Vesuvius in Swedish literature: Jacob Jonas Bjornaståhl (1731-1768). In the vast portraits gallery of eighteenth-century Napoli, a prominent place belongs to the Swedish Jacob Jonas Björnståhl, orientalist and professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, who visited the Bourbon capital and the Vesuvius in the summer of 1771, during a very long trip and singular to Europe. Björnståhl's work takes also on the dimension of an original, precious document for the knowledge of Napoli at that time.

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The study of volcanic phenomena in the precise and analytical annotations of Sir William Hamilton accompanied by the magnificent illustrations by Pietro Fabris, an appreciated landscaper and court painter. William Hamilton diplomat, naturalist and art collector, was ambassador of the King of England to the Kingdom of Napoli and stayed in the Bourbon capital for 36 years. During his stay, he became interested about the study of the Vesuvius and the seismic phenomena occurring in southern Italy. He made a series of important observations on the Vesuvius eruptions, summarized in the form of letters, sent to the Royal Society of London periodically.

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The Vesuvius in Spanish literature: Juan Andrés. Heir to the Spanish-Italian tradition encyclopedism, Andrés arrives in Napoli in 1785. His impressions, even in the very rich travel literature, are original and return an unusual image of the capital of the Kingdom of Napoli in the second half of the eighteenth century. Juan Andrés was able to document the aspects of a lively cultural landscape that only very few travelers have been able to highlight.

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