The fifth student workshop dedicated to Dalmatia in travel narratives was also the first student workshop organised within the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) project “Where East meets West”: Travel narratives and the fashioning of a Dalmatian artistic heritage in modern Europe (c. 1675–c. 1941) – Travelogues Dalmatia. This project builds on the results of the earlier HRZZ project Dalmatia – a Destination of the European Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th Century – Grand Tour Dalmatia.

For the purposes of the Grand Tour Dalmatia project, we established a chrono-geographical database bringing together travel narratives about Dalmatia across different media produced during the 18th and 19th centuries. Within the new project, this chronological scope has been expanded. In order to initiate more intensive collection of travel materials within the broader timeframe defined by Travelogues Dalmatia, we organised a student workshop in Dubrovnik. The workshop was designed to support a deeper understanding of later travel narratives, with particular emphasis on visual travel accounts. For this reason, the workshop was hosted at the University of Dubrovnik.

Participants included undergraduate students from the programmes Conservation and Restoration and History of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. As part of the activities on 25 April 2025, students visited collections of travel literature illustrated with Dalmatian motifs and the collection of Dalmatian drawings by Anton Perko at the Scientific Library in Dubrovnik. They also examined 19th- and 20th-century prints and paintings depicting Dalmatian themes from the collections of the Dubrovnik Museums, as well as paintings by foreign artists inspired by Dalmatian landscapes from the holdings of the Art Gallery.

Following the visits, participants took part in a guided discussion at the University of Dubrovnik campus, reflecting on the visual materials reviewed. The discussion served two key aims: first, to develop students’ ability to identify relevant sources and contribute to the enrichment of our database; and second, to further raise awareness among conservation and restoration students of the importance of preserving such works for their documentary value, even when they are not considered high-quality artworks.

The workshop was led and organised by Prof. Sanja Žaja Vrbica, PhD, a member of the Travelogues Dalmatia research team. The mentoring team included Rozana Vojvoda, PhD (museum advisor), Lucija Vuković (senior curator), Paula Raguž (Head of the Scientific Library in Dubrovnik), and Ana Šverko, PhD, PI of the Travelogues Dalmatia project. During the project’s third year, the database will be expanded with an additional approximately 100 entries, primarily travel narratives from the first half of the 20th century.