During the implementation of PROPEL I carefully followed the project development as presented and approved by the REA (in line with the structure of the Annex 1 to the GA). In order to fulfil the project deliverables and milestones, I have kept both my supervisors updated about the progress of my research almost weekly, and I have received helpful feedback and advice.
Through the actions outlined in the 6 WorkPackages, the project reached its main objectives. Following the DoA, the largest part of my work was devoted to the study of manuscript and printed prophetic texts circulating in Tuscany. At the Universities of Venice and Chicago I met all the ideal conditions to develop my project in the best possible way, and I found a multifaceted and stimulating environment in which I was able to disseminate the results of my research through workshops, seminars, public events and publications.
The first product of the research was published at month 12: it is the monograph I segni della fine. Storia di un predicatore nell’Italia del Rinascimento (“The Signs of the End Times. The History of a Preacher in Renaissance Italy”), published by Viella, one of the best European publishers on Medieval and Renaissance History (
https://www.viella.it/libro/9788833138145(opens in new window)). The book studies a prophetic preacher following the entire evolution of his ideas and practices, as well as the different reception of his message by different audiences (in Florence, in Assisi etc.). I segni della fine has been positively reviewed, so far, in important journals of the field as well as in newspaper addressed to a non-specialist audience. It has also been discussed during a dedicated session of the “Laboratorio Erasmo” held at La Sapienza University of Rome (July 6, 2022), and other roundtables about the book are scheduled in Genoa, Grenoble, Venice.
During the first two years of the fellowship, I wrote several articles, focusing on the understudied but central topic of the material transmission of prophecies in manuscript miscellanies, on Niccolò Machiavelli’s original approach to prophecy and politics, and on the reception of prophecies as current news, through the case study of a famous prophetic ‘newsletter’ (the so-called Toledo Letter). Moreover, I attended and organised various workshops and conferences to communicate and disseminate my research to the academic and non-specialist audience in Trento, Chicago, Montréal (due to the covid-19 pandemic the workshops were organized online).
