Abstract
The Navigli Project is a collaborative, iterative, public humanities project that sits at the intersection of Italian Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Digital Humanities. Led by project director Serena Ferrando, the project team has included 18 collaborators to date, many of whom are or were students. As the authors point out, Milan is not typically known for its waterways now, but the layered approach to historical narrative in The Navigli Project encourages the reader to reconsider. Site visitors are greeted by a map of Milan marked by color-coded drops of water that indicate thematic itineraries through the city: sites of current navigli (light blue), literary connections to water through the lens of poetry by Milo de Angelis (b. 1951; dark blue), bridges (purple), the lock system designed by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519; green), historic sites of waterways (yellow), and civic initiatives related to future navigli (red). An embedded welcome video contextualizes the project and provides instructions for use and navigation. The descriptive language is written clearly in an accessible style for non-specialists. Any specific technical, analytical, or theoretical terms are used sparingly and defined when present. Italian Studies specialists will find The Navigli Project offers a way to read a city through literary expression, historical testimony, and physical interventions represented digitally.
The authors invite the site user explicitly to become a digital flâneur, following Walter Benjamin's early 20th-century rearticulation of Charles Baudelaire's mid-19th-century urban wanderer. By clicking or scrolling through the narrative episodes of this ArcGIS StoryMap, visitors learn about Milan's history as contextualized within the natural and built environment, but also through the perspective of cultural expressions of life in the city predicated upon a relationship to water. Each text-based story focuses on one of the project themes, providing historical and cultural overviews, examples that are found on the map, and links to related materials. Embedded Google Street Views allow a virtual stroll around at least one of the locations highlighted in every section. Clicking on each location on the map opens a text box with further description and embedded primary source multimedia, including images, video, and audio recordings. The Navigli Project thus functions as both a medium of presentation and a digital archive of Milan's relationship with these waterways. Overall, the project asks: what happens when a researcher brings all of these experiences and expressions together in one map? For Italian Studies, this means a technologically facilitated interpretation of Milan that connects text and image across centuries.
The process and result of developing this hypermap of Milan clearly engaged students directly with critical trends in the related scholarly fields. By connecting literary and environmental elements across time, points in the city, and perspectives, the thematic itineraries and the comprehensive map address concepts articulated by Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano in HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (Harvard University Press, 2014). Moreover, the specific content for sites in the city and the abstracted, contextualizing essays demonstrate awareness of topics and approaches seen in more recent work such as the collected volume Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (University of Virginia Press, 2018), edited by Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past.
Given the importance of such a project for connecting students to research in Italian Studies and connecting humanistic questions to a broader public, it is worth noting that the technological landscape for supporting hypermaps has changed significantly during the life of The Navigli Project. The project was first released in 2016 using Neatline, a popular open-source visualization platform for humanistic representation of primary sources, based on the metadata-driven exhibit software Omeka. For customized projects, both required technical expertise and infrastructure beyond the scope of what is available at most institutions with Italian programs. The Navigli Project has since migrated to ArcGIS StoryMaps, a commercial product available through Esri, which requires less digital or computational literacy for student collaborators and also offers centralized technical support if local institutional expertise is not available. The technological change, while time-consuming and requiring significant attention to detail to migrate the content, also addresses concerns about potential obsolescence (as evidenced by a link to the previous version of The Navigli Project that displays errors related to the deprecation of features). In addition, site visitors may see examples of link rot (when hyperlinks no longer open the intended webpage), which is a perpetual concern for digital projects that rely on such a variety of web-based sources. Until academic institutions can formalize processes to support long-term storage of representations of third-party digital assets, projects such as this will occasionally lose some of the embedded supporting evidence. Unlike research bound by the covers of the book, with the illusion that the ideas and representations within them are complete, a digital project cannot obscure its dynamism and dependencies in the media environment in which it participates.
Given the multiple disciplines engaged in the study of the history and representations of the water of Milan, The Navigli Project is a valuable tool for students, teachers, researchers, and the public. For students new to the study of Italy or Milan, the site provides several entry points for exploration and a model for formal, academic writing for a general audience. Italian Studies scholars and educators will likely see the promise of creating a similar project for other cities or other environmental features, such as green spaces, habitats, or built infrastructure. Since The Navigli Project acts as a digital repository, it can already begin to provoke and answer questions about dense and sparse attention to living waterways, the persistence in (or disappearance from) cultural memory of covered navigli, along with lexical and thematic trends in the related literary texts. The project includes a related Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/navigliproject/) and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/thenavigliproject/), both with semi-regular posts that contain examples of reflective and productive interaction in Italian with community members beyond the classroom.
My only critique is to ask a project that already offers so much to offer even more. Given the potential secondary uses of The Navigli Project, a comprehensive list of works cited and suggestions for further reading would be a supportive resource. More information about the project history would be helpful for educators who want to use this model for their research and courses. Much of this background can be found in the project director's publications, which could be listed in the bibliography as well. This might also create an opportunity for documenting the kinds of labor, funding, and technologies involved in the development of this hypermap for Milan's waterways. Nonetheless, the foundation that it has created is well-structured enough to allow for the addition of new thematic materials or examples.
Overall, The Navigli Project in 2022 is a valuable public and pedagogical resource for those new to Milan as well as those who wish to see it from a new perspective.
