João Gabriel Covolan Silva

João Gabriel Covolan Silva is a PhD candidate in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He holds an MA in History from the University of Turin and a BA from the University of São Paulo. During his doctoral studies, he was a Visiting PhD student at King’s College London and a Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. His research focuses on the commercial networks between the Portuguese Atlantic and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the role of Portuguese New Christians in Italy and the influence of Tuscan merchant-bankers and their agents in Portugal and its Atlantic territories. As a Beatrice Solomon Fellow, João will work with documentation from the Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona and Antinori collections to examine the association between this Portuguese family of Jewish origin and the Tuscan nobility, as well as with account books of Florentine apothecaries to investigate the retail distribution of colonial goods such as sugar and spices.