Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University, Department of Italian) and Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University, Department of Italian) in conversation with Emanuele Giusti (Università di Firenze) on the occasion of the publication of Emanuele Giusti’s book: The Forty Columns. The Ruins of Persia in Eighteenth-Century European Culture.
Throughout their history, Europeans have fashioned a variety of “others”: Turks and Jews, heretics and “savages,” located within Europe or beyond its borders, encountered in the present or projected into the past. Le quaranta colonne examines one of Europe’s most enduring others – Persia – during the formative century and a half of Western modernity. Moving between Isfahan and Paris, Amsterdam and Göttingen, London and Calcutta, the book offers the first comprehensive study of the European reception of Iranian antiquities between 1660 and 1830. It explores European encounters with the material remains of pre-Islamic Persia, above all the ruins of Persepolis, known to early modern Iranians as Chehelmenar, the “Forty Columns.”
Illustration: Frontispicium Palatii Persepolitani. View of the ruins of Chehelmenar/Persepolis taken from the Marvdasht plain. Etching by F. W. Brandshagen ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 669.
This event is part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium organized by the Department of Italian and cosponsored by the European Institute.