The Gagliana Grossa Virtual Museum showcases multidisciplinary research on a shipwreck site (the Gagliana Grossa sank in 1583 near the Gnalić islet off the coast of Croatia). It ambitiously targets a wide audience, from highly specialized scholars, to children of nursery and primary school age. This virtual and widely-targeted approach develops new ways of telling history, engages different kinds of audiences, including those caught up in the current migration crisis, and encourages dialogues between all these community stakeholders, making historical events accessible through contemporary events and vice versa.
The Gagliana Grossa Virtual Museum is based upon work from COST Action ‘People in motion (PIMo): Entangled histories of displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)’, CA18140, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks (www.cost.eu). COST Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and beyond and enable researchers and innovators to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts research, innovation and careers.
The COST Action PIMo (CA18140) is a large humanities research network involving 40 countries across Europe and globally. It seeks to investigate multiple historical case studies of the movement of people, objects, ideas and paper through drivers such as war, religious persecution, environmental and social catastrophe, imperialism and slavery, trade, exploration, scientific and cultural curiosity. One of the project’s major goals is to provide a critical historical context and increased understanding for the current migration crisis in Europe, specifically in terms of the intensity of emotional responses of displaced peoples and the communities they orbit and join.
We gratefully acknowledge the scientific advice and support by the PIMo Action’s Chair Professor Giovanni Tarantino (University of Florence) and PIMo researchers Professor Irena Radić Rossi (University of Zagreb), Professor Rosita D’Amora (University of Salento), Professor Luca Molà (University of Warwick) and Professor Tülay Artan (Sabancı University).
The archaeological and historical research of the Gnalić shipwreck site is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Croatian Science Foundation (AdriaS Project – IP-2014-09-8211 and NEREAS Project – IP-2020-02-3420), the German Association for the Promotion of Underwater Archaeology (FUWA), the University of Zadar and the Institute for Maritime Heritage ARS NAUTICA.