Throughout the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, the world became newly “visible.” From scientific instruments that measured the world to new social practices like the Grand Tour, innovation yielded the ability to see differently. Though some features¾lands, or peoples¾ became more visible, innovation and new ideological frameworks simultaneously concealed, and erased others. This panel addresses the conceptual question posed by the 2025 Presidential Theme to interrogate the limits of the (racist, rational, scientific) notion of vision developed in and passed down from this period in the Italian and European context. Our panelists ask: what forms of belief, ways of life, localities, people, and racial or cultural “others” are obscured by new forms of vision, and how does the legacy of erasure impact later notions of identity?

This panel brings together three scholars presenting for 18 minutes each, leaving 15 minutes for unstructured discussion. The combination of their disciplinary angles offers a multifaceted response to the panel’s central question. The panelists investigate the nexus of new epistemological models with social practice and cultural beliefs, challenging established discourses in Italian studies. Ultimately, they render marginalized subjects more visible and actionable.

Presenter I, PhD candidate Beatrice Fazio, The University of Chicago, shows how scientific technology and spiritual verse collide to expand the potential of modern human vision. “Emplotting Galileo: Vision, Poetry, and the Astronomical Imagination,” examines Jesuit professor of mathematics Vincenzo Figliucci’s 1615 Stanze sopra le stelle e macchie solari scoperte col nuovo Occhiale (Stanzas on the stars and sunspots discovered with the new telescope). This poem lyricizes Galileo’s discoveries¾Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus, sunspots, and nebulae¾prompting polemics among theologians and natural philosophers. The Stanze mediate between Galileo’s discoveries as true and provable and the contrary possibility that human vision can err, imagine, or fail to demonstrate the secrets of the cosmos. Vision in the poem becomes a catalyst of the desire for knowledge as well as a menace to established religious beliefs. This presentation’s articulation of vernacular poetry’s power to imbue science with new aesthetic, semantic, and spiritual meaning sets the stage for the subsequent two presentations.

Presenter II, Nathalie Hester, Associate Professor of Italian, University of Oregon, examines how models of vision operate across disciplines and localities in early-modern travel narratives in “Europe 1606: What Bernardo Bizoni Saw.” In 1606, Bizoni accompanied art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani on a five-month tour through Europe. Scholarly references to Bizoni’s under-studied chronicle focus on his reflections on mannerist painter Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli), who joined Giustiniani and Bizoni’s journey. Yet Hester extracts new information in the tensions between the European traveler (and travel writer) and the status of Italians leaving the Italian peninsula. This reversal of the Grand Tour chronicle with Italians outside of Italy, moving through Germany, the Netherlands, England and France, adds a 17^th-century chapter to the rich field of Italians who “write back” in response to Grand Tour representations. Thus, Bizoni’s baroque taste and penchant for curiosities extends the mapping of the Italian presence abroad, introducing encounters with merchants, papal nuncios, exiles and outlaws as it hones the specificity of an Italian gaze as well as its blind spots.

Presenter III, Angelica Pesarini, Assistant Professor of Race and Cultural Studies and Italian at the University of Toronto, illuminates the discursive blind spots of the European gaze in “The Black Italian Renaissance: History and Counter-memories of Resistance.” Here, a similar conjunction between Italy’s early modern cultural practices, modes of vision, and the construction of national and racial identity become elements of narrative and counternarrative in the construction of collective memory. Though the idea of whiteness infuses our understanding of Renaissance Europe, historians have engaged in decades-long research to chart the presence of Black histories as integral parts of “European” history. Archival data brings into vision the Black presence in 1500s Florence; it highlights everyday interactions and life strategies enacted by the African people inhabiting the Florentine space. No longer a “white” country where the Black presence has been imagined and portrayed as alien and non-belonging, Renaissance Italy is seen anew. This paper exposes the means through which racialized subjects themselves excavate counter-memories of resistance through the production of documentaries, short films, and exhibitions. The telling of these stories dismantles dominant and exclusionary ideas of national identity tied to blood and race while adding new knowledge through the restoration of missing pieces to a fragmented and selective idea of “collective” memory.