Join us as we celebrate the publication of Jane Stevens Crawshaw's Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environmental Ideals and Urban Practice in Genoa and Venice with friends, colleagues and well-wishers.

Health, cleanliness, waste and reuse were closely managed in the port cities of Genoa and Venice through the regulation of urban daily life as well as communal responses to natural disasters. The close connections between the nature of people and the places they inhabited endowed these activities with both physical and symbolic purposes and meant that measures to improve health, whether through street cleaning, waste disposal or the dredging of canals, were often justified in societal and religious as well as natural terms. Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy takes us onto the streets, bridges and waterways of these significant cities to reveal the ambitious schemes undertaken to promote the wellbeing of these communities. Along the way, we encounter a broad cross-section of Renaissance society — from courtesans to street food sellers and architects to canal diggers — and, using new archival sources, uncover both the ideals and lived experiences of health and environmental management.

Tricia Allertson (National Galleries of Scotland)

Claire Judde de Lariviere (Université de Toulouse)

Lavinia Maddaluno (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes University)

Book Launch: Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy