How a bespoke software plugin hints at a connection from an Italian Scientist to an Italian City!
Preface
This is also my first post in a chained post. The idea behind these posts being that they are within themselves an interconnected web of ideas. They are always expanding, and quite often referencing to other posts in a similar domain. Of course this being the first post in this domain, does not have any links, however the idea is that subsequent ones will.
However in the spirit of incompleteness, I will also most likely make more changes to this. Perhaps expanding on the reasoning here and there, or adding more media. This is an experiment after all.
Circumstance
I attented a session today about digital gardens. One of the presentation items stuck to me was Torricelli, which was a bespoke tool demonstrated which helped curate the digital garden. Unfortunately following some reasoning, I managed to connect it to the Most Serene Republic of Venice, I found the chain of thought pretty amusing and organic, which does made it somewhat in theme with the idea of a digital garden. Thus, I will document it out here in case someone wants to follow along to the chain.
Torricelli
The mention of Torricelli the name, brings immediately to mind, the scientist Evangelista Torricelli, avid listeners of science teachers across the worlds might recognise his name as familiar, since the unit of pressure torr is named after him. 1 Torr is equivalent to the pressure exerted at the bottom of a container of mercury (liquid in it's natural state at room temperature) which contains 1mm of mercury. The unit, is rather intimately tied to the material mercury, and it's awkward defintion, is indeed a homage to the scientist so instrumental in shaping our understanding of fluids.
The Connections
The first name of Torricelli is Evangelista, the Evangelist. An epitheth shared by an early Christian saint, from Egypt nonetheless. Celebrated in Alexandria, and the patron saint of a small Italian island city and once a most serene republic. Saint Mark is a celebrated saint of Christendom today and also somehow surprisingly the link between a scientist and ...
La Serenissima
PAX TIBI MARCE EVANGELISTA MEUS
Peace be to you Mark, my Evangelist
The emblem is none other than the extravagant emblem of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, perhaps one of the most elegant flags one has had the honour to know. A sample and some modern smatterings and variations are presented on a reddit post on r/vexillology which I show underneath.
What's your opinion of the flag(s) of Venice?
byu/esdedics invexillology
A look at the post above reveals another of St. Mark's emblems, a winged lion, one more which is shared with the city of Venice. Venice itself has an immense history, from being an island of emigres frustrated of the raids which became more commonplace as the might of Rome waned, to an appendage of a briefly resurgent Greek speaking half of the Rome's immense presence , to an Empire of Enterprise of it's own built on trade and commerce, and wood and coin, the lust for spices in Europe, and the monopoly of it's supply from the Orient. The humble ducat would find it's way across Europe and the Mediterranean, until the dawn of the modern world, with Pound Sterlings, and bastardised Thalers from across the Atlantic displacing this once mighty gold coin.