The Shipwreck of Gnalić: A Mirror to the Renaissance World

Unlike official history, which takes long and impersonal strides through the past, The Shipwreck of Gnalic describes individual human destinies that convey the story of the late Renaissance period throughout Europe and the Mediterranean as uncovered at the site of the shipwreck. Transiting the permanent route between Venice and Constantinople, the ship Gagliana grossa, formerly known as Lezza, Moceniga e Basadonna, symbolically connected two apparently opposing, yet tightly interwoven worlds. The stunning objects that spent four centuries at the bottom of the sea briefly made the Gnalic shipwreck famous in the 1960s and 1970s, but only in recent years has the scholarly community finally started collecting all the available information hidden in museum collections, at the shipwreck site, and in the archives. After many years of effort by the authors of this publication, the University of Zadar restarted the research in 2012 thanks to the support of many domestic and foreign institutions and organisations that, through their participation, continue to contribute to the successful realisation of project activities. The reconstruction of ancient events was successfully started by Astone Gasparetto in the 1970s. After a long pause, the painstaking work was undertaken by Mauro Bondioli, who, through dedicated archival work at the State Archives in Venice, discovered hundreds of documents and pieced them together into a multi-layered historical story, which is summarised in the second part of the book.