info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Elisa Andretta, « Il filo dell’acqua : fiumi e saperi nel mondo di Giovanni Botero », HAL-SHS : histoire, philosophie et sociologie des sciences et des techniques, ID : 10670/1.e2kwab
Natural objects, geographical elements, sources of life, political borders, commercial routes, rivers are a fundamental presence in the world traced by Giovanni Botero in his famous works the Relazioni universali. For Botero, giving "full information" about the world also meant describing in detail the watercourses that flow through it, in their different physical qualities and interactions with the people who live along their banks. In the Relazioni universali, rivers constitute a kind of subset of the world that reflects all its variety. For historians, they can prove to be an object that allows us to go through the work transversally and to question the different operations that its author uses to observe in its entirety and complexity a world whose contours gradually extend and whose internal spaces become more precise. The analysis of their presence also makes it possible to reflect on the way in which knowledge from different fields, genres and origins are broken down and recomposed under Botero's pen, within epistemological and narrative strategies.The knowledge about rivers that the Relazioni universali produces and disseminates is examined here by crossing different analytical perspectives and attempting to construct a dialogue between the work, other pieces of Botero's production and some contemporary reflections on these rivers and their features.