Le città di fondazione


Book Description




The End of Tradition?


Book Description

Rooted in real world observations, this book questions the concept of tradition - whether contemporary globalization will prove its demise or whether there is a process of simultaneous ending and renewing. In his introduction, Nezar Alsayyad discusses the meaning of the word 'tradition' and the current debates about the 'end of tradition'. Thereafter the book is divided into three parts. The three chapters in part I explore the inextricable link between 'tradition' and 'modern', revealing the geopolitical implications of this link. Part II looks at tradition as a process of invention and here the three chapters are all concerned with the making of landscapes and landscape myths, showing how the spectacle of history can be aestheticized and naturalized. Finally, Part III shows how traditionis a regime, programmed and policed and how it has been deployed, resisted, and reworked through hegemonic struggles that seek to create both built environments and citizen-subjects.




The Fight for Greek Sicily


Book Description

The island of Sicily was a highly contested area throughout much of its history. Among the first to exert strong influence on its political, cultural, infrastructural, and demographic developments were the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium BCE: the Phoenicians and the Greeks. While trade and cultural exchange preceded their permanent presence, it was the colonizing movement that brought territorial competition and political power struggles on the island to a new level. The history of six centuries of colonization is replete with accounts of conflict and warfare that include cross-cultural confrontations, as well as interstate hostilities, domestic conflicts, and government violence. This book is not concerned with realities from the battlefield or questions of military strategy and tactics, but rather offers a broad collection of archaeological case studies and historical essays that analyze how political competition, strategic considerations, and violent encounters substantially affected rural and urban environments, the island’s heterogeneous communities, and their social practices. These contributions, originating from a workshop in 2018, combine expertise from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and philology. The focus on a specific time period and the limited geographic area of Greek Sicily allows for the thorough investigation and discussion of various forms of organized societal violence and their consequences on the developments in society and landscape.




Le città di Dante


Book Description

Il volume raccoglie una serie di contributi riferiti sia alle città in cui Dante Alighieri ha vissuto o che ha visitato nel corso della sua vita, sia ai luoghi menzionati nella Divina Commedia, al fine di delineare – con un approccio interdisciplinare – le trasformazioni urbane e territoriali, in particolar modo in Italia, tra la seconda metà del XIII e la prima metà del XIV secolo. Le celebrazioni per i settecento anni della morte del poeta sono state un momento importante per una riflessione su questa fase cruciale della storia urbana, a cui hanno contribuito studiosi afferenti a diversi settori disciplinari, specialisti per gli ambiti territoriali presi in esame.




The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture


Book Description

Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini’s government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town. The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism’s afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place. This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.




Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy


Book Description

The social problem of infant abandonment captured the public?s imagination in Italy during the fifteenth century, a critical period of innovation and development in charitable discourses. As charity toward foundlings became a political priority, the patrons and supporters of foundling hospitals turned to visual culture to help them make their charitable work understandable to a wide audience. Focusing on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy examines the discursive processes through which foundling care was identified, conceptualized, and promoted. The first book to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this study looks beyond the textual evidence to demonstrate that the institutional identities of foundling hospitals were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries. The author draws on fields as diverse as art history, childhood studies, the history of charity, Renaissance studies, gender studies, sociology, and the history of religion to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.




Time and Space


Book Description

The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities (PHI) Time and Space were compiled to establish a multidisciplinary platform for presenting, interacting, and disseminating research. It also aims to foster awareness and discussion on Time and Space, focusing on different visions relevant to Architecture, Arts and Humanities, Design and Social Sciences, and its importance and benefits for the sense of identity, both individual and communal. The idea of Time and Space has been a powerful motor for development since the Western Early Modern Age. Its theoretical and practical foundations have become the working tools of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who seek strategies and policies to accelerate the development process in different contexts.




Handbook of International Futurism


Book Description

The Handbook of International Futurism is the first reference work ever to presents in a comparative fashion all media and countries in which the movement, initiated by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, exercised a particularly noteworthy influence. The handbook offers a synthesis of the state of scholarship regarding the international radiation of Futurism and its influence in some fifteen artistic disciplines and thirty-eight countries. While acknowledging the great achievements of the movement in the visual and literary arts of Italy and Russia, it treats Futurism as an international, multidisciplinary phenomenon that left a lasting mark on the manifold artistic manifestations of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Hundreds of artists, who in some phase in their career absorbed Futurist ideas and stylistic devices, are presented in the context of their national traditions, their international connections and the media in which they were predominantly active. The handbook acts as a kind of multi-disciplinary, geographical encyclopaedia of Futurism and gives scholars with varying levels of experience a detailed overview of all countries and disciplines in which the movement had a major impact.




The Representation and Perception of Roman Imperial Power


Book Description

From the days of the emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14) the emperor and his court had a quintessential position within the Roman Empire. It is therefore clear that when the Impact of the Roman Empire is analysed, the impact of the emperor and those surrounding him is a central issue. The study of the representation and perception of Roman imperial power is a multifaceted area of research, which greatly helps our understanding of Roman society. In its successive parts this volume focuses on 1. The representation and perception of Roman imperial power through particular media: literary texts, inscriptions, coins, monuments, ornaments, and insignia, but also nicknames and death-bed scenes. 2. The representation and perception of Roman imperial power in the city of Rome and the various provinces. 3. The representation of power by individual emperors.




Moderns Abroad


Book Description

This volume studies the architecture and urbanism of modern-era Italian colonialism (1869-1943) as it sought to build colonies in North and East Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Mia Fuller follows, not only the design of the physical architecture, but also the development of colonial design theory, based on the assumptions made about the colonized, and also the application of modernist theory to both Italian architecture and that of its colonies. Moderns Abroad is the first book to present an overview of Italian colonial architecture and city planning. In chronicling Italian architects' attempts to define a distinctly Italian colonial architecture that would set Italy apart from Britain and France, it provides a uniquely comparative study of Italian colonialism and architecture that will be of interest to specialists in modern architecture, colonial studies, and Italian studies alike.