People imagine Rome as a city of famous monuments. But there is a whole other, hidden Rome: one that exists to maintain its iconic counterpart. A lot of work goes into keeping touristic sites clean. This work is usually carried out by underprivileged and immigrant residents from Eastern Europe or Africa. As they do not look like the Romans that tourists expect to see (that is, white people enjoying "la dolce vita," not sweating labourers), cleaners are labelled as inappropriate users of space and made to work out of sight from visitors and wealthy residents. Hidden spaces too help sustain the tourism industry: alleys and back-rooms create a service infrastructure that profits business and property owners, but hides the people who actually keep the city running. Making this Other Rome visible is key to challenge tourist economies that capitalise on an image of purity, excluding people and spaces that contradict that image. The research will examine how the invisible city of maintenance developed and how it supports the Rome that most people know today. Archival and ethnographic methods will identify how policies and transformations of space have relegated cleaners to a condition of marginality, and how the workers in turn have countered exclusion by forging their own Rome. Special attention will be given to how the city of maintenance is not simply ancillary to, but rather a critical agent of Rome's heritage. Analyses of historical documents will form the first phase of the project. While much has been written on Rome's architecture, most studies focus on the history of celebrated buildings and the influential people who made them. Hardly any work has centred the people who cleaned those spaces. Yet efforts to keep Rome tidy have long shaped the city and its people. Since the late-nineteenth century, poor residents were hired to clean streets and monuments while being prohibited from using those spaces to eat, play, or even loiter. Written and visual sources from three archives will help detail how sanitizing measures relegated poor residents to service activities, and how residents occupied spaces for their daily routines. The second phase will focus on contemporary Rome. Since the 1990s, welfare cuts, rising housing prices, and sanitising regulations of public space have made the historic centre an exclusive playground for tourists and elites. Staging this playground as a theatre of art and power requires keeping streets in order. As administrators struggle with this task due to disinvestments and corruption, managers supplement city services by hiring people to clean churches, shops, and the streets around them. These cleaners are often immigrants who, after traveling for hours to get to the centre, find no services catering to their needs and are asked by employers to remain invisible to tourists. Spatial surveys and interviews with workers, employers, and tourists will investigate how cleaning governance disciplines labourers, and how cleaners use space to fabricate their own city within the city. The last phase of the project will make the Other Rome known to specialised and general publics. Outputs for the former will include an interdisciplinary symposium, a journal article, a book proposal, and a report with design guidelines. Two other outputs will target general audiences. Firstly, made in collaboration with the cleaners, an audio-tour will allow tourists to visit historic sites while listening to workers' memories of those spaces. Secondly, an exhibition will combine historical and present-day photographs, sounds, and digitized archival data on maintenance. Altogether, these activities will show how mainstream representations of Rome systematically erase an essential part of what-and who-the city is about. Recognizing the people who clean and their Rome as integral to the city's identity, the project will set a basis for dismantling exploitative employment and spatial discriminations.

The network examines the key question of academic responsibility and action in times of crises, focusing its enquiry particularly on the scholarly use of image-led practices to comment and shape political reality. Central to this enquiry is a unique engagement with the little-explored material archive of British Art and the Mediterranean (BAM), a photographic exhibition curated by Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower in England in 1941, which asserted Britain's cultural connections with Europe. The network brings together artists, historians, media theorists, curators, journalists, photographers and activists to reactivate this unique archival resource and to make it accessible following the methodology of the digital humanities. BAM was organised by the Warburg Institute and leveraged a European history of art through new media, namely photographic reproductions of historical artworks. It expressed ideas of cultural continuities between Britain and Europe at a critical time of conflict. Consisting of 500 photographs, the exhibition was representative of the new art-historical approach imported from Germany via the Warburg Institute, namely an image-driven enquiry about cultural transmission. The exhibition was shown in London and in 20 other cities around Britain, taking its educatory ideas to as wide an audience as possible. Thus, foreign academic expertise converted into a highly successful enterprise with no compromise in its standards, due to the support of British institutions (CEMA) and key public figures, including the art historian, museum director and broadcaster, Kenneth Clark. Re-evaluation of BAM as a paradigm of scholarly engagement is critical in today's European political climate. The curators took action on the basis of their research in a time of crisis, widespread nationalism and populism. That BAM's curators were refugee scholars in Britain is all the more relevant today, opening an exploration of the migration of knowledge which will be investigated in two ways: as an object of historical study and as a barometer of how politics have impacted on the movement of scholars, particularly in the 20th century. What examination of this rich archive offers the network is the opportunity for concrete analysis of an historical example of scholars engaging with the crisis of their time, which opens up space to discuss and challenge narratives of national histories and questions of academic action and responsibility. Using the untapped BAM archive (photographs, glass slides, floor guides, correspondence) the network has four key objectives: 1. To address themes of academic responsibility and action, migration of knowledge and intellectual history, technologies of reproduction and dissemination, image-led practices and academic impact, and archives of conflict. 2. To reactivate and document a historical source using digital interfaces: website, social media, video-streams 3. To enable critical engagement with the future of academic action and responsibility in a conference, focusing on interactions between scholars and a general public, and so facilitate a two-way knowledge exchange that engages with the archive material. 4. To present three public-facing events in London (WI), Munich (ZI) and Rome (BSR) in the form of partial displays (exhibitions), workshop, study day and a conference. The network will capitalise on the combined expertise and experience of PI, Co-I and Project Partner networks, which target different disciplines, interests and audiences. To address its objectives, it will network significant academics and professionals from the Arts and Humanities as well as a wider public through its public-facing activities and meetings. The mutual work enabled by the network and its activities during its lifetime will feed into a long-term objective: scoping funding towards a touring exhibition in the UK and Europe, and wider media engagement, involving further research applications.

Over the past century, leading UK researchers working under the auspices of the British School at Athens (BSA), British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) and British School at Rome (BSR) - members of the British International Research Institutes (BIRI) - have generated heritage science collections - archaeological ceramic, lithic and botanical samples and geological reference collections - of international significance for addressing big-picture questions concerning the human past in the Mediterranean. These collections have substantial research value from ancient technologies and economies to innovation and societal change, with unparalleled value for investigating mobility of objects, raw materials and humans. Newcastle University works closely with the BIRI and has an international reputation for research in heritage science especially in artefacts and archaeological archives as well as substantial expertise in collections management. Of particular interest to Newcastle, 50-years of scientific study of Mediterranean ceramics at the BSA has created a collection of unrealised potential. These fundamental collections, however, remain inaccessible to most researchers. The BIRI Collections represent an ideal model for building a versatile and powerful heritage science collections management system. Underpinning and contextualising these data are significant related excavation and ethnography archives. Our collaborative programme will address the need for a heritage science collection management system and related digital infrastructure by focusing on a meaningful subset of BIRI collections laying the groundwork for future expansion. Using new technologies (set to international standards), we will build infrastructure to transform the potential of these unparalleled heritage science resources for international researchers and the public serving two key purposes: 1. To make primary data freely accessible. Providing access to this infrastructure will enable researchers to explore inherent, meaningful spatio-temporal networks of information in diverse collections, so that they can explore and analyse relationships between objects, people and places. 2. To enable the combination of collections and the creation of thematic stories through custom web themes, available for public and educational programs from school children to post-doctoral researchers. The data and the technology have been selected to ensure a meaningful research resource and a proof of concept for compatible expansion. Requirements for infrastructure include: Standards-based, findable and accessible to humans and machines, enabling research potential for humanities and social sciences including the use of machine learning to characterise digital images (e.g. of material thin sections). Cultural heritage aggregators will be able to consume linked open data published by the infrastructure. Remote access will include browsable catalogues of downloadable data as well as custom web themes that bring public education value through engaging storytelling. Tools that enable collaborating organisations to add data to websites sustainably without requiring ongoing IT development; facilitating collaborative research.