Ca' Foscari sends its first scholar to Soochow University with funding from a joint European Commission Erasmus+ Project

Thanks to Ca’ Foscari’s extensive institutional collaboration with Soochow University, Ca’ Foscari researcher Livio Zanini recently traveled to Suzhou to offer a series of lectures on various themes from May 25 to May 30 to local students and faculty. Prof. Zanini is the first Ca’ Foscari scholar to benefit from the funding made available by the joint Erasmus+ project approved by the European Commission, so his sojourn in Suzhou marks an important moment in the continued development of the intellectual exchange between the two institutions.

Prof. Zanini is a scholar of Chinese language and literature in the Department of Asian and North African Studies, and his work focuses principally on tea connoisseurship, especially in the Late Ming Dynasty.

The first lecture Prof. Zanini gave was for MBA students from the university’s business school, and he spoke about intercultural exchange in the context of the appreciation of wine. The lecture addressed issues of the motivations behind different kinds of consumerism and explored the various cultural roles that wine plays in Western culture. Two more lectures regarding these same themes took place on the Dushuhu campus of Soochow University in the following days, one with a group of art history students and the other with students in the social sciences. Prof. Zanini also spoke about the transnational culture of food and music, running a workshop on the theme afterward. The professor’s lecture series concluded on May 29 with a talk given in a lacquer workshop. Here in the workshop’s tearoom, he discussed his own research into the culture of Chinese tea and how this has developed in the West.

In the future, other Ca’ Foscari scholars and students will be given the opportunity to spend a period of time at Soochow University thanks to the Erasmus+ project that funded Prof. Zanini’s visit, just as members of the Soochow University community will be able to do the same at Ca’ Foscari. In the autumn, in fact, Sooch

ow University's Prof. Mao Qiujin will travel to Venice to teach courses on various aspects of Chinese culture, including Chinese calligraphy, Chinese painting, the gardens of Suzhou and the history of the Silk Road.