The Venetian Population. A city and its activities in mid-eighteenth century

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice has recently assigned a grant of € 26,500 for a research project in collaboration with the University of Warwick, led by Professors Luciano Pezzolo (Ca’ Foscari, Department of History) and Luca Molà (Warwick, Department of History and Director of the Warwick Venice Centre).

The project will start in December 2024 and has a duration of two years. It aims at the creation of a digital database with all the information contained in a census of tenants for the whole city of Venice, parish by parish and street by street, ordered by the Venetian government in 1750. These unique historical records offer an amazing picture of the social and economic reality of mid eighteenth-century Venice, at the time still a thriving cultural, artistic and productive centre with 130,000 inhabitants. It describes the composition of families, their occupations and professional activities, the provenance of immigrants, the location of all shops and working places, giving the possibility of analyzing the topographical structure of the city in relation to its people.

The collection and processing of this information will bring to the creation of a database that will be uploaded on a dedicated website and made available to scholars and the general public. It is the first step of a long-term project on the population of early modern Venice, in which the 1750 census will be subsequently cross-referenced with a complete set of tax declarations sumbitted to the state in the same period by real estate property owners, and enriched by other statistical sources of the previous two centuries. It is also a project of public history that involves the dissemination of the information and new knowledge produced through conferences, lectures and an exhibition, in collaboration with some of the most prestigious cultural institutions of Venice.