Between the 7 and 11 February 2022, Dr Emanuel Buttigieg (Department of History, Faculty of Arts) and Dr Valeria Vanesio (Department of Library, ¸£ÀûÔÚÏßÃâ·Ñ & Archive Sciences, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences) were engaged on a research trip to Florence.
Dr Buttigieg was a guest speaker at the Islamic Mediterranean Seminar of the European University Institute (EUI), co-ordinated by Professor Giancarlo Casale. Dr Buttigieg’s paper was entitled ‘The smell of slavery: Aspects of slavery in early modern Malta’. Whilst at the EUI, Dr Buttigieg also met Mr Matthias Ebejer, an alumnus of the University of Malta (Department of History) who is currently in the third year of his PhD programme at EUI.
Dr Buttigieg and Dr Vanesio also held meetings with Dr Sabrina Magrini, Director of the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Dr Francesca Fiori and Dr Simone Sartini, professional archivists at the same archive. For Dr Vanesio, the trip involved opportunities to review materials for her ongoing research into Order of Malta and its archives in Italy. Dr Vanesio and Dr Buttigieg also discussed their collaboration with the Archivio di Stato di Firenze and HMML’s Malta Study Center for the upcoming digitization of the records of the Order of Malta to be initiated by the Malta Study Center later in 2022.
