Markets, squares, streets: urban space, a tool for cultural exchange

The book focuses on how merchants and traders, the Jewish communities and the Greek diaspora, specialized artisans and itinerant labourers, rulers and monarchs, as well as artists and students were accommodated and received in Europe's political and commercial capital cities. In these capitals the migrant men and families were "cultural foreigners": for professional, ethnic or religious reasons they belonged to one or several minorities in a city demographically dominated and in many cases legally and politically dominated by "The Other". The book's contributions aim at providing a deeper understanding of how the residential, spatial, and architectural features of early modern cities could facilitate and stimulate or conversely restrict, impede or stifle the urban presence of "cultural foreigners" and their involvement in cultural exchanges. This chapter discusses city landscapes as both products and producers of meaning to the social groups performing on their stage. Rather than attempting an overall view it examines some of the developments and possibilities the use of urban space offered, primarily in Europe's two oldest and most important urban landscapes: northern and central Italy and the southern Low Countries.