On 21st September, Sara Zanotta will hold a seminar at Teatro San Domenico in Crema as part of the seminar series “Il rovescio della poltrona. Il fascino delle cose imprevedibili”. She will explore how the Italian word divano, now commonly associated with a piece of domestic furniture, carries with it a long history of contacts between Asia and Europe. This presentation takes us back to the origins of this word, in the Persian world, where the diwan could be associated with both poetry collections and the bureaucracy of the Safavid and Qajar empires. In a story that intertwines languages, empires, bureaucracy, poetry, and furniture, we will discuss the centrality of the diwan in the Persian world and how this word evokes stories of intercultural contacts and mobility between the Iranian plateau and the Arab, Ottoman, and European worlds.
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