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***Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize 2022*** After World War II, a wave of Italian films emerged that depicted the life and hardships of characters left helpless after the conflict, bringing to the screen the struggles of a time of existential angst and uncertainty. This form of filmmaking was associated with a broader artistic phenomenon known as ‘neorealism’ and is now considered a pivotal point in the history of Italian cinema. But neorealism was not limited to film any more than it was to literature. It spread to other areas of artistic production, including architecture. What was, then, neorealist architecture? This book explores the links between arc...
Few other cities can compare with Rome's history of continuous habitation, nor with the survival of so many different epochs in its present. This volume explores how the city's past has shaped the way in which Rome has been built, rebuilt, represented and imagined throughout its history. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of architectural history, urban studies, art history, archaeology and film studies, this book comprises a series of studies on the evolution of the city of Rome and the ways in which it has represented and reconfigured itself from the medieval period to the present day. Moving from material appropriations such as spolia in the medieval period, through the carto...
This collection of twenty-one essays, written by colleagues and former students of the architectural historian Spiro Kostof (1936-1991), presents case studies on Kostof's model of urban forms and fabrics. The essays are remarkably diverse: the range includes pre-Columbian Inca settlements, fourteenth-century Cairo, nineteenth-century New Orleans, and twentieth-century Tokyo ... The theme of the volume is that the street presents itself as the basic structuring device of a city's form and also as the locus of its civilization. Each essay is a detailed investigation of a single urban street with unique historical conditions. The authors' shared concern regarding anthropological, political, and technical aspects of street making coalesce into a critical discourse on urban space.
Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlik...
Revealing a history of mysterious deaths, shady characters, and moral and political tensions, exposes the inner workings of the Catholic Church to trace how the Vatican evolved from an institution of faith into an extremely wealthy corporate power. --Publisher's description.
Scritti di Cesare Brandi relativi alla Sardegna, inquadrati nel più ampio panorama delle opere letterarie del Maestro, ma anche considerazioni sui restauri che nell'Isola si andavano compiendo, negli anni dei viaggi "sardi" del critico d'arte senese e, in generale, sulla tutela di un territorio ricco di valenze archeologiche, architettoniche e paesaggistiche, verificando quanto delle idee dello stesso Brandi sia stato recepito in quella straordinaria area geografica: tali sono gli spunti suggestivi che emergono dalla lettura di questo volume, che raccoglie gli Atti di una apposita giornata di studio tenutasi a Castelsardo nel settembre del 2007. Il volume è a cura di Bruno Billeci e Stefano Gizzi.
Spazio di vita e di riproduzione sociale, la casa è anche, sempre di più, una merce. La promozione della proprietà di massa è stata il fulcro della rivoluzione conservatrice che ha schiacciato le lotte sociali e cancellato le politiche urbanistiche e abitative del Secondo dopoguerra; è stata uno strumento di creazione di consenso e di un’egemonia culturale che ha reso possibile presentare come ‘naturali’ gli interessi di una minuscola parte di popolazione: quella più ricca. Il repertorio di argomenti usati per legittimare questa operazione – fatto di ‘valorizzazione’, ‘miglioramento’, ’efficienza’ e ‘modernizzazione’ – viene da molto lontano. Ricostruendo i percorsi familiari e i fatti storici, passando attraverso nazioni e città diverse, l’autrice di questo saggio mette assieme i tasselli che hanno composto il quadro della situazione abitativa all’inizio del nuovo millennio, dipingendo uno scenario contemporaneo in cui, contrariamente a quanto ci viene raccontato, il problema della casa non riguarda solo ‘gli ultimi’: riguarda una visione di società.
Fascism and the Second World War left Italy indelibly changed, and cinema was arguably the art that most rigorously confronted the devastated nation. In this examination of four Italian filmmakers, Noa Steimatsky brilliantly maps their forceful negotiation of Italy’s identity and posits that the cinematic forms they employ constitute an imaginary reinhabiting of Italy-one that is inextricably linked with the political, physical, and symbolic predicament of reconstruction. A dynamic intersection of pictorial and photographic, architectural and literary discourses inform Steimatsky’s revisionist interrogation of exemplary works from the 1940s to the mid–1960s. From the earliest documenta...