Venezia, la ‘festa mobile’: per un Atlante in fieri. Luoghi, figure e forme della favola antica nel primo Rinascimento

When trying to handle historical data, it can be confusing and frustrating for the reader to view and understand the information behind the documents. This is where digital technologies can be extremely useful: the article illustrates the ongoing work of a group of scholars for the creation of the atlas “FRIDA” whose objective is to represent all the events linked to Venice in the period between 1450 and 1550, using the famous bird’s eye view of Venice, printed by Jacopo de Barbari in 1500 as a geographical base for mapping events. All information related to civic-religious feasts, wedding parties, Carnival, funerals, occasional parties for passages of illustrious guests, triumphal entries, processions, banquets, liturgical ceremonies, dances, music, tournaments, jousting and theatrical performances of comedies, farces and tragedies of which spatial information was available have been linked to places on the map. The main idea is to visualize the complexity of “mobile feasts” (a description borrowed from Ernest Hemingway), exceeding the limits of the information list. In this way it was possible to begin to identify the places of events, the movements of the processions in the city space, but also the connection of the individual performances, the network of actors and artefacts — images, poems — in the Venice of Marin Sanudo. The Venetian diarist is in fact the main source of information at the base of the mapping made in the interactive atlas which, through three different levels of analysis, manages to bring together the historical, geographical and literary, visual and sound objects that we track in the pages of the Diarii.