Explore Iranica

ITALY iii. CULTURAL RELATIONS Artistic influences. Italy and Persia have hardly ever had a direct and continuous cultural exchange. During the Middle Ages, when Italy and Persia were not clearly definable cultural entities, the translated works of significant Persian literature had a great influence on Italian and European culture. This,…

ITALY iv. TRAVEL ACCOUNTS (1) A General Survey (2) Qajar Period   (1) A General Survey Italian travel accounts represent a major source for the history of Iran, especially that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Collections of Italian travel accounts, together with biographical and bibliographical details, have been…

ITALY v. IRANIAN STUDIES, PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD The only comprehensive bibliographical repertory of studies on Iranian subjects, both pre-Islamic and Islamic, published in Italy is the Bibliografia Italiana dell’Iran by Angelo Michele Piemontese (1982). Though providing a very informative guide to the subject, it cannot be regarded as complete due to…

ITALY vi. ITALIAN EXCAVATIONS IN IRAN (1) General Survey (2) Excavations in Sistān   (1) General Survey From the early 20th century on, Italians participated in the scholarly investigation of ancient Iranian history and culture, most notably Ugo Monneret de Villard, but Italy’s direct involvement in field archeology in Iran…

ITALY vii. IRANIAN STUDIES, ISLAMIC PERIOD The earliest known references to Persia by Italian writers are gleaned from numerous notes in the oldest medieval travel accounts, dating from the 13th century onwards. Marco Polo’s Il Milione (comp. 1298), which is a great inventory of literary traditions (see Gabriel, pp. 35-39),…

ITALY viii. PERSIAN MANUSCRIPTS Italy houses 439 Persian manuscripts in two public archives and thirty public libraries located in fifteen different cities. All of them have been catalogued by Angelo Michele Piemontese (1989). Three more manuscripts are preserved at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa “I…

ITALY ix. PERSIAN ART COLLECTIONS Since the Middle Ages, Italians have been some of the greatest collectors of Islamic art in Europe. The Islamic market that Italy drew on was very large and some of the most opulent works were imported from Persia. Among the five most stunning are the…

ITALY x. LIRICA PERSICA The name of a project set up in 1989 by the School of Persian Literary Studies at Venice University. The aim of the project was to create a database for Persian lyric verse by following a computer-assisted and linguistic-statistical approach in a semiotic-structuralist perspective. The work…

ITALY xi. TRANSLATIONS OF PERSIAN WORKS INTO ITALIAN With a few rare exceptions, Persian literature has never been widely circulated or made commercially available in Italy—a fact that is more visible in this country than in other European countries with more uninterrupted political, economic, and cultural ties with Persia. The…

ITALY xii. TRANSLATIONS OF ITALIAN WORKS INTO PERSIAN Two texts by Italian authors appear to be the first known translations of European literary works into Persian carried out in the modern age. They are the Idea del giardino del mondo, a treatise on natural medicine by Tommaso Tomai (d. 1593),…

ITALY xiii. IRANIANS IN ITALY It is difficult to speak about a true Persian community in Italy. The presence of Persians in Italy has always been fragmentary and discontinuous, which never led to any extended, cohesive social groups of permanent residents. Even during the periods when the migratory flow from…

ITALY xiv. CURRENT CENTERS OF IRANIAN STUDIES IN ITALY Studies on subjects related to the Iranian cultural world can boast an ancient tradition in Italy, but not as an independent field of study at academic level. The earliest scholar to hold a chair whose main focus was Persian language and…

ITALY xv. IsMEO IsMEO is an acronym for the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (‘Italian Institute for Middle and Far East’). The IsMEO was founded in 1933 by Royal Decree no. 142 as a moral institution (Ente Morale) under the inspiration and encouragement of Giuseppe Tucci, then…

IVANOV, PAVEL PETROVICH, (b. Siberia, February 1893; d. Leningrad, 3 February 1942; FIGURE 1). In the early 1900s his family moved to Central Asia, where his father worked at railroad construction. Ivanov finished a teacher’s seminary in Tashkent in 1914 and then taught in a “Russian-Kirghiz” (i.e., mixed Russian-Kazakh) school….

IVANOW, VLADIMIR ALEKSEEVICH (b. St. Petersburg, Russia, 3 November 1886, d. Tehran, 19 June 1970; variously spelt Ivanov and Wladimir; FIGURE 1), Russian orientalist and leading pioneer in modern Ismaʿili studies. His father was a military doctor, and he spent his youth in his native city and Moscow, graduating in…