Thomas Jones, an 18th-century Welsh landscape artist in Rome and Naples

A cultural historian, Melissa Calaresu’s research has included the history of ice and ice-cream in eighteenth-century Naples and explores current paradigms of enlightenment historiography. This led to research on food-sellers in history and resulted in a chapter on the selling of 'street luxuries' in early modern Rome. Her more general research interests range from the uses and representation of urban space in the early modern period, the history of street food, eighteenth-century antiquarianism, collecting and historical writing in Italy and Spain, and travel and the Grand Tour in Europe through texts and images in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is currently writing a cultural history of the urban experience of the Welsh landscape artist Thomas Jones (1742-1803) in Rome and Naples in the 1780s.