Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures 9789048554638

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Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures

Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective This series is looking for interdisciplinary contributions that focus on the historical study of the imagined space, or of spaces and places as sensorial, experiential or intellectual images, from the interior to the landscape, in written, visual or material sources. From (closed) gardens and parks to cabinets, from the odd room to the train compartment, from the façade to the prison cell, from the reliquary to the desk, a variety of spaces in the shape of imageries and images unveils historical attitudes to history, to the object, to the other and the self and presents a subject that experiences, acts, imagines and knows. Spatial imageries and images in this sense constitute a prominent theme in various fields within the Humanities, from museum studies, intellectual history and literature to material culture studies, to name but a few. Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective therefore addresses a broad audience of scholars that engage in the historical study of space in this sense, from the Early Middle Ages to the Recent Past in literature, art, in material culture, in scholarly and other discourses, from either cultural and contextual or more theoretical angles. Series editor Dominique Bauer, University of Leuven, Belgium

Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures

Edited by Andrea Scapolo and Angela Porcarelli

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: City of Bologna Rooftop. Published on October 31, 2016 NIKON CORPORATION, NIKON D7100. Free to use under the Unsplash License. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 466 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 463 8 doi 10.5117/9789463724661 nur 648 © The Authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Preface 7 Introduction 9

Part I The City as a Performative Space in Early Modern Italy 1. Marketplace Encounters: Social Mixing on the Streets of Early Modern Florence

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2. “Noble Edifices”: The Urban Image of Papal Rome, 1417–1667

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April D. Weintritt

Matthew Knox Averett

3. Perspective Cities: Staging Transferable Spaces in Learned Comedy 65 Lucia Gemmani

4. The Lure of Shopping: The Mercerie in Early Modern Venice and the City as a Permanent Mall Isabella Cecchini

5. Ancient Magnificence and Modern Design

Roman Architecture and Identity in the Printed Works of Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) Abbey Hafer

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Part II The City in Times of Crisis: Urban Spaces in Modern Italy. 6. Le piazze d’Italia: De Chirico’s Prophetic Vision of Public Space in Destination Italy

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7. Colonie Architecture and Fascism’s Cult of Youth

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Julianne VanWagenen

Diana Garvin

8. Fare la vita grigia: The Industrial City of Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi Samantha Gillen

183

Part III The City as a Space of Conflict: Landscapes of Late Capitalism 9. Il mondo è meglio non vederlo che vederlo: Naples as Urban Dystopia in Un paio di occhiali 207 Brian Tholl

10. Narratives of a ‘City Under Siege’: Bodies and Discourses of the 1977 Movement in Bologna

225

11. Exploring Urban Space: Terzani’s In Asia (1965–1997)

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Danila Cannamela and Achille Castaldo

Ellen Patat

Index 265

Preface In recent years, the concept of space, its representations, and the social, cultural, and political forces that shape and inhabit it have drawn increasing attention from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives. Urban spaces in particular, have come to the fore as crucial subjects of investigation and reflection. In this sense, the history of the Italian cities offers a sort of litmus test to verify the validity and ramifications of this connection between space and cultural production, economy, and political order. Our research trajectories, specifically the study of early modern Italian comic literature and theater, naturally led us to realize the vantage point that Italian studies offer to the research in urban studies. That realization motivated us to facilitate a conversation among scholars at the cutting edge of the field. Our goal was to track the connection between the city and modernity from its origins, in the proto-capitalist Renaissance Italian city-states, to the current globalization of urban space. At the same time, we aimed at putting Italian studies in dialogue with disciplines and perspectives at the forefront of intellectual conversation in other fields of study. Finally, we wanted to propose a trajectory of analysis that questions the national dimension of Italian cultural production by delocalizing it both at the level of its regional diversity and the global scale beyond national borders. This ambitious vision lies at the core of this collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars working in North American and European institutions. Bringing this vision to fruition was not an easy task. It entailed a long process and the need to overcome numerous challenges brought about by the unprecedented circumstances of a global pandemic. The COVID pandemic has profoundly and durably changed how we inhabit and conceive of shared spaces. It also sheds light on the impact that the city space has on our life, culture, and what it means to be human. At a time when our way of life has been disrupted and dramatically limited, we looked back at the history of the representations of urban spaces in Italian culture to make sense of our present and imagine a possible future. We believe that this volume constitutes an invaluable springboard for future research endeavors that intend to approach the study of Italy and Italian culture from interdisciplinary and global perspectives. We are deeply grateful to the contributors for their generosity, grace, and commitment to this project. We are also thankful to the amazing team at the Amsterdam University Press and, in particular, Dominique Bauer for their constant support and patience. Their vision and forward-thinking mission will help the humanities remain relevant for many years to come.

Introduction The cultural production of the urban landscape is a complex and contradictory phenomenon as the city provides channels of interaction that affect socio-economic, political and cultural structures of society. The complex and multilayered ecology that defines the city space invites an interdisciplinary approach to its analysis. The field of urban studies has embraced this interdisciplinary perspective by bridging the social sciences with contributions from fields such as literature, history, philosophy and the like. Humanities-based investigations bolster a deep understanding of the ways urban life shapes notions of community and identity. On the one hand, the city has always been a special object of representation in literature and the arts; on the other, these representations are key to understanding the significance of urban architecture beyond its materiality. Encoded in it are ideas, ideologies, as well as political and economic worldviews. Yet these are not presented in abstract form, but as concrete buildings and monuments, streets and squares that are themselves forms of representations. The city has a symbolic and material nature, each based on and affected by the other; its complexity cannot be captured within one single discipline. In his seminal work, The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre talks about “the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.’1” Joe Moran, applying Lefebvre’s view of the urban space, affirms that: Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it.2 1 Lefebvre, Henri, and David Harvey, The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 11–12. 2 Moran, Joe, Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge, 2010), 166.

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In this volume we approach the city as a textual representation, or better yet as a plurality of textual representations. We aim to capture the multifaceted identity of the city, physical and symbolic, so as to acknowledge its cultural and anthropological nature. Our volume uses methodologies drawn from diverse disciplines to explore the life of major Italian cities, among which Florence, Rome, Venice and Naples, at specific junctures in time, when fundamental transformations in the structuring of collective identity occurred. The objective is not to offer a survey of representations of Italian cities across time, but rather to spotlight chronotopes that we have identified as particularly significant. The city is a living palimpsest; it carries in its materiality the signs of time. The volume, by consequence, emphasizes the importance of the historical context as crucial to the study of urban space. The book opens with essays dedicated to the proto-capitalist space of the Renaissance city states. It follows its development through the modernity of the Italian nation, building into the crisis of late capitalism and the contradictions brought about by current processes of globalization. We divided this volume into three thematically organized parts. The essays making up the first unit, “The City as a Performative Space in Early Modern Italy,” each from its own original perspective, illustrate how the configuration or reconfiguration of the city affects the socio-political and economic structure of collective life. At the beginning of “Marketplace Encounters: Social Mixing on the Streets of Early Modern Florence,” April Weintritt argues for the legitimacy and importance of using popular literary sources for historical interpretations. Comedy in particular, given its inclination to realism, reveals the social aspects of the architectural space by emphasizing customary or atypical public and private behaviors. In order to explore the life in Florence’s mercato vecchio, today’s Piazza della Repubblica, Weintritt concentrates on Antonio Pucci’s fourteenth-century poem Proprietà del mercato vecchio, and three sixteenth-century comedies: two by Giovan Battista Gelli, La sporta and Lo errore, and one by Maria Cecchi, L’Ammalata. Referencing these texts, the author documents the plurality of the crowd attending the market square as well as the vitality and social mixing with which it was characterized. What emerges from her exploration is a special type of beauty; not one coming from the mathematical proportions and symmetries of the buildings, but one developing from the chaos of the human labyrinth that inhabits the market. The author focuses in particular on the zanaiuoli (“deliverymen”); these figures were at the center of social interactions and as such, they are key to understanding the complex dynamics of the marketplace.

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The second chapter, by Matthew Knox Averett, reconstructs the urban history of Papal Rome from 1427 to 1667, displaying the connection between urbanism and politics and illustrating the ways in which architectural projects were used as tools to gain, retain, and exercise power. The author begins by describing the state of decadence and neglect that took over the architectural glory of ancient Rome in the Medieval period; he draws parallels with the growing political instability of the Papal States and their decline in power. To restore the glory of the papacy it was necessary to bring back the architectural splendor of Rome; to transform the city into a place apt to represent, visually and symbolically, its role as a major European capital. The death of Pope Alexander VII in 1667 signaled the end of one of the most successful building campaigns of early modern Rome. In “Perspective Cities: Staging Transferable Spaces in the Learned Comedy,” Lucia Gemmani discusses the use of perspective in the stage settings of comedia erudita (“learned comedy”). Scenographies, commissioned to actual painters such as Pellegrino Prisciani and Girolamo Genca, were initially rather rudimentary, but by the sixteenth century the sceanae frons had given way to perspectival representations. The scenes of the plays were used to promote the political ideology of the court’s elite, their idea of city space and its internal socio-political organization. This was achieved mainly by presenting the city on stage both symbolically and realistically. The cities in the sceneries had familiar features; the audience could recognize in them their own urban spaces. As a consequence, the spectators would relate the events of the play to their own personal experience. In “The Lure of Shopping. The Mercerie in Early Modern Venice and the City as a Permanent Mall,” Isabella Cecchini describes how the urban route of the Mercerie (“streets of mercers”) marked the identity of the city and established it as a powerful political and commercial center. The concentration of shops around Rialto and along the road from Rialto to St. Mark constituted, according to Ennio Concina’s argument, the “umbilicus” of the city where, as Cecchini writes, its two hearts would meet: the commercial one of Rialto and the political one of St. Mark’s. In her case study of the Venice Mercerie, by using as evidence contemporary guides, archival documents and the existing literature on the subject, the author demonstrates how an urban route became the essence of an early modern economy and society. In the first part of her contribution, “Ancient Magnificence and Modern Design: Roman Architecture and Identity in the Printed Works of Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778),” Abbey Hafer illustrates how Specchi, through his representation of early modern architectural masterpieces, exerts his influence as a pedagogue

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to contemporary architects; he teaches them to use the heritage of ancient Rome’s architectural achievements as a basis for developing modern architecture. She then illustrates how Piranesi, similarly to Specchi, sees the history of ancient Rome as essential in shaping theories and practices of modern architecture. The second section of the book “The City in Times of Crisis: Urban Spaces in Modern Italy,” investigates the ways in which historical processes as well as the socio economic and cultural transformations of modernity both shape the physical appearance of the urban landscape and are, at the same time, shaped by it. “Le piazze d’Italia: de Chirico’s Prophetic Vision of Public Space in Destination Italy” by Julianne VanWagenen offers a compelling interpretation of De Chirico’s Piazza d’Italia. The author reads the empty space characterizing the paintings in relation to the phenomenon of the mass-tourist gaze of the fin de siècle in Italy. When looking at the urban landscape, tourists remove the human presence to see only the monuments, as happens, as Barthes noted, in tour-guide books where the city appears as an uninhabited space. The author demonstrates how mass tourism affected the architectural design of the city by causing its commodification. This phenomenon is reflected in De Chirico’s piazzas where the artist on one hand has erased the negative presence of the tourists, and on the other he has projected in the landscape their alienating gaze. Diana Garvin’s chapter focuses on the colonie—fascist summer camps— some of which still mark the Italian landscape today. In her analysis, Garvin connects the architectural features of the buildings and their functions with the political ideology of the Fascist regime. The cult of racial health and physical fitness led the regime to create holiday hostels where children from low social classes could take advantage of the benefits of the outdoors and practice physical activity. This mass organization of the children’s play time allowed Fascism to exercise its power at the microscopic level of the personal individual life. By the end of the chapter Garvin has successfully demonstrated the ways in which the colonie constituted a powerful means to mold and control the new generation, as well as an extremely effective tool for propaganda. In “Fare la vita grigia: The Industrial City of Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi,” Samantha Gillen focuses on the greyness that covered the industrialized cities during the time of the economic boom of post war Italy. Gillen illustrates how Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi attached to the color grey a symbolic value and turned it into a feeling that effectively translates the malaise of modernity. Although in different and original ways,

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both Calvino’s La nuvola di smog / Smog (1958) and Bianciardi’s La vita agra / It’s a Hard Life (1962) render in their narratives the process of transformation that turned Italy into a consumerist society; the grey, il grigiore of the industrial landscape becomes the visible trait of the moral degradation that leads to the conformity and submission to the new neo-capitalistic ideology. The third and final section, “The City as a Space of Conflict: Landscapes of Late Capitalism,” deals with the many and contradictory directions the evolution of the city space and its representations have taken under late capitalism: from the dystopian disarticulation of social spaces to their precarious rearticulation in the cultural production of political movements to their projection onto a new globalized urban space. In “Il mondo è meglio non vederlo che vederlo: Naples as Urban Dystopia in Un paio di occhiali,” Brian Tholl focuses on Naples in the aftermath of World War II through analysis of the short story by Anna Maria Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” and its film adaptation by Carlo Damasco. In both works the dystopian representation of the city develops from the very nature of the utopia that precedes it. In the process of this transformation the qualities of the physical space marking the divisions existing among social classes become more and more evident, as does the impossibility of crossing them. When the protagonist Eugenia wears her glasses and sees the reality of her environment, she is overcome by nausea. This is the moment when she leaves childhood behind and enters the disillusionment of adulthood. As in the etymology of the word utopia, based on the Greek words ou “not” + topos “place,” the city she imagined is a “no place;” its counterpart is the more concrete dystopia of the bassi where the protagonist and her social class are confined. “Narratives of a ‘City Under Siege’: Bodies and Discourses of the 1977 Movement in Bologna,” by Danila Cannamela and Achille Castaldo, takes the reader into the urban landscape of Bologna in the late seventies, when the city became the stage for political activism organized around new forms of social aggregation. During this time, some areas in the city become laboratories for creative ideas, as in the case of the Traumfabrik (the “factory of dreams”), an apartment in Via Clavature occupied by the musician Gianpiero Huber together with Filippo Scozzari and Dadi Mariotti. By telling the story of the political and artistic activities that took place in squares, streets, university buildings or private spaces, the authors illustrate the complex dynamics of communal existence within this political movement of the seventies. They reveal the vital creativity of this movement as well as the self-destructive impulses which developed in response to the trauma of the violent repression it experienced.

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The last chapter of the book, “Terzani’s cityscapes of Asia: In Asia (1965– 1997),” by Ellen Patat, takes the reader outside Italy. The author analyzes Tiziano Terzani’s narrative of his travels across Asia. Patat illustrates how the author, looking at the landscape from a space of otherness, inevitably over-imposes on it his knowledge, sensibility and expectations. Terzani combines the information on twentieth-century East Asia he accumulated over the years as a war correspondent, to the sensibility and subjective view of a traveler who narrates his f irst-hand experience. As a result, the cities described undergo a transformation when transposed on the page. Terzani’s narrative is not a chronicle nor a personal diary. His prose deconstructs the cities into fragments, and only after the author projects his personal experience into them, are they reconstructed in a literary elaborated portrayal of the complex and rich reality of the Asian continent; the emotional involvement of the writer affects the reader and succeeds in raising cultural sensitivity and awareness that would not emerge from a merely informative account. Furthermore, from Terzani’s pages emerges the image of an Orient where opposite forces face one another: the effect of the globalization process and the consequent disappearance of local culture, and the efforts to resist and oppose such a process. With its last essay the volume finally approaches the present time, inviting further investigation of the global dynamics of current society. After this journey through the history of the representations of Italian urban space, the reader will be better equipped to appreciate the complexities, contradictions and possibilities that mark the city today. This volume presents a collection of distinct snapshots of Italian city spaces taken at different times in history and through the lens of multidisciplinary perspectives. Each picture gains depth from its dialogue with the others. The reader, like a post-modern flâneur, is invited to gaze at some of the most memorable scorci of the Italian urban landscape. Through this process, an image of the city takes shape, not as a unified whole, but as a mosaic of voices and narratives inscribed into its materiality and social fabric across space and time.

About the Authors Angela Porcarelli is Associate Teaching Professor of Italian at Emory University. Her research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance literature, theories and literary expressions of comedy, Modern Italian literature and Italian cinema.

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Andrea Scapolo is an Associate Professor of Italian at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on drama-based pedagogy, the theater of Dario Fo and Franca Rame and the reception of Gramsci in post-war Italy.

Part I The City as a Performative Space in Early Modern Italy

1.

Marketplace Encounters: Social Mixing on the Streets of Early Modern Florence April D. Weintritt

Abstract Florence’s once-standing mercato vecchio, today’s Piazza della Repubblica, existed as a meeting place of multiple strata of urban society. Populated with its vendors and customers as well as its in-between figures, such as zanaiuoli and battifancelli, the market space physically allowed for the encounter of diverse members of society, yet the tales and images of its oxymoronic existence—marvelous and messy, loud and intimate—communicate much more. In my contribution, I explore literary and theatrical representations of this public square and its peoples, analyzing cultural encounters, social mixing, and practices of inclusivity/exclusivity in the urban landscape. Furthermore, I draw on historical sources, including census data, tax records, and now digital humanities projects such as Decime, to track trends of identity, status, and movement in Florence. Keywords: Florence, early modern Italy, zanaiuoli, comedy and urban spaces

Florence’s mercato vecchio was the living center of the city as both physical space and sociopolitical realm of values, status, and images. Once the site of the Roman forum, through premodern periods of economic growth, it flourished as the beating heart of commerce and urban street culture. Early modern everyday practices of production and consumption and social life are communicated to us through the market square’s diverse population: its vendors and its customers meet in-between figures: mendicants, brawlers and ruffians, upper-class strollers, and marginal professions such

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch01

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as street singers and zanaiuoli (“deliverymen”). Even in its squalor in the nineteenth century, the market features in walking tourist itineraries of the city, indicating its importance to anyone who wants to truly understand the urban environment of Florence. 1 When Florence was the capital shortly after Unification, the physicalturned-symbolic space would be demolished. There was a sense of loss among architects and city planners; some promoted an open, public forum to debate new proposals for the people’s market.2 Over 100 years later, the arch of Piazza della Repubblica looms larger, its inscription promising new life: “L’ANTICO CENTRO DELLA CITTÀ DA SECOLARE SQUALLORE A VITA NUOVA RESTITUITO” (“the ancient city center returned to new life after centuries of squalor”)3. Given the space’s beloved and central status in centuries of Florentine urban life, it is fruitful and timely to uncover the lively and heterogeneous textual images, different from that of unsanitary, problematic urban slums. Thus, this chapter seeks to shed light on the mercato vecchio as it once was: the vibrant social and cultural meeting place for multiple strata of society. Early modern poets and playwrights offer descriptions and dialogues that communicate its oxymoronic and dynamic existence: magnificent and messy, loud and intimate, filled with violence and laughter. Literary and theatrical representations, integrated with interdisciplinary studies in popular culture, marginal professions, and historical archives, provide examples of how the market hosted innumerable physical and social encounters of the most diverse peoples. The texts explored in this chapter give us an elusive glimpse into everyday social and economic life, and they afford us the opportunity to create a legacy for this extraordinary space of social mixing in the urban landscape. To achieve this, I turn first to Antonio Pucci’s illuminating poem Proprietà di mercato vecchio. From ambient noises to vendors’ shouts rebounding off the makeshift walls, Pucci’s poem resonates with details that enliven public spaces of negotiation. Nearly two centuries later, the market is still a place of 1 At least one example of a late nineteenth-century walking tour of the mercato vecchio and the ghetto is described in detail by two sisters Susan and Joanna Horner in Chapter Ten, Volume 1 of their book series Walks in Florence, published in 1873. While the Chapter does not contain any unusual information about the market, it denotes a tourist’s interest in pursuing a glimpse into everyday life in a heavily frequented area of the city. 2 Paolo Nanni, “I georgofili nella Firenze Capitale d’Italia: spazi verdi urbani e periurbani,” in Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere “La Colombaria”. Atti e memorie. vol. LXXXI (Firenze: Olschki Editore, 2016), 211–214. Here Nanni details Giuseppe Poggi’s calls for public opinion in the new configuration of a mercato or mercati for the city. 3 Translations unless otherwise indicated are mine.

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boisterous laughter, negotiation, and advertisement in the sixteenth century. Insights into the lives ambulant street singers provide evidence of multiple professions on the margins of society and lead to close readings of deliverymen’s scenes in three comedies: La sporta and Lo errore by Giovan Battista Gelli, and Giovanni Maria Cecchi’s L’Ammalata. Brought to life through dialogue, these zanaiuoli depict urban social life through their employment and culinary expertise. In conclusion, I offer a perspective on social mixing in early modern urban space that informs social practices of diversity, inclusivity, and the prosperity of market workers. These insights into the early modern period offer us the opportunity to think about early forms of “the gig economy” and fluctuating status and power in semi-controlled social spaces, and they can help us interrogate to what extent we perform inclusivity for all the workers of today’s piazzas and market squares. First, however, I will offer an introduction to how literary and theatrical portrayals of early modern spaces illustrate urban life.

The Role of Literature and Comedy in Documenting Premodern Urban Space Understanding early modern urbanity and its peoples require interdisciplinary methods, particularly when we understand “peoples” to have inhabited spaces outside the courts and homes of upper nobility. In recent years, a number of scholars have theorized the expansion of sources employed in understanding all-encompassing social and cultural phenomena of Medieval and Renaissance Italy. I subscribe to these methods and I build upon the work of these scholars in this chapter. “Popular” literary sources—verses intended for piazza audiences, the novella, and comedy—communicate daily social life and navigate the urban landscape in a way that official histories or courtly and papal circles do not. Taking advantage of these sources, we begin to recognize the infinitely rich lives and the multiplicity of experiences in early modern society. For example, Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of premodern Florence through documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural history in The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life. Atkinson explores the soundscape as a foundation for the upkeep of the urban community, just as much as the architecture. His analysis of Antonio Pucci’s Proprietà di mercato vecchio provides a natural precursor to understanding the market social practices as recorded by sixteenth-century

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playwrights. In Chapter One, Atkinson explains the lens through which Pucci’s poetry can contribute to understanding street life without having to be an archival document: Such a reading of the poem in historical terms, taking seriously but not literally what it tells us about its times, is a productive way of gaining perspective on street life in the early modern city, where the absence of sustained popular media resources obscures the vitality of daily life. Although a literary construction, narratives like this one performed critical task of staging how—in grotesque or comic terms—urban society came to terms with its relationship to and the part it played in constructing the urban environment. Their importance, therefore, for historical investigation cannot be overstated. They do not give rise to a history of facts so much as generate a representation of historical experience, where attitudes and assumptions become the subject of ridicule, mock praise, biting critique. Urban stories, ones like this one that were likely told and retold, enable us to understand the city as a socio-spatial construction in ways that may not correspond to the traditional domains of architecture or urban history but were integral components of construction and functioning of built environment. 4

As Atkinson employs sound where texts and images are more common, I look to deepen our focus on theater dialogue as a type of text with oral dimensions more apt for bringing market space alive. Rediscovering the messy and dissonant dynamics of the city through Pucci’s focus on everyday encounters finds its natural companion in comedy, constructed as it is upon the problems of ordinary citizen’s experiences and communicated through everyday language. Giovanni Ciappelli expresses a similar idea in Quaresima e Carnevale: comportamenti sociali e cultura a Firenze nel Rinascimento. When justifying his appeal to Pucci’s Proprietà di mercato vecchio, he states that “il quadro così delineato è completato da fonti di tipo letterario—come la novellistica—che, pur se di diversa affidabilità rispetto alle fonti documentarie, confermano alcuni di questi elementi in un modo che è loro proprio, la cui caratteristica utile ai nostri fini è la capacità di cogliere ciò che è tipico della situazione che fa da sfondo alla vicenda che viene descritta” (“this representation is completed by literary sources—such as those from the short story tradition—which, 4 Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (University Park: Penn State Press, 2016), 30. Italics mine.

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although of a different type of reliability compared to documentary sources, confirm some of these features in their own way; they possess the ability, useful for the purposes of this study, to capture that which is typical of the situation constituting the background of the events described”).5 Cogliere ciò che è tipico (“Seize the essence of what is typical”) is reminiscent of the Ciceronian imperative that governs comedy: Comoedia est imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis. We gather as much from Renaissance playwrights themselves as they theorized and revised poetics and justified their contributions to the genre. In this way, Gelli writes in the prologue of La sporta, a comedy analyzed in this Chapter, that the work can be taken seriously: “La comedia, per non essere elleno altro ch’uno specchio di costumi della vita privata e civile sotto una immagine di verità, non tratta di altro che di cose che tutto ‘l giorno accaggiono al viver nostro” (“comedy, being nothing but a mirror of the customs of private and public life in a truthful way, simply deals with the everyday experiences of our lives”).6 The playwright demonstrates a profound commitment and hyper focus on Florentine reality, which Chiara Cassiani calls his “municipal consciousness,” an attribute evolving in the Florentine tradition and guided by the hand of Machiavelli.7 If we can—as Atkinson suggests—rely on the portrayals offered by urban storytelling, we can attend to their intriguing contributions to the socio-anthropological and spatial dimensions of a living city with new scholarly vigor.

Antonio Pucci’s Fourteenth-century Proprietà del mercato vecchio A native Florentine, Antonio Pucci (c.1310–1388) is among the best-known representatives of popular literature developing in the premodern city. It is difficult to overstate how profoundly his profession influenced the intimacy of his contact with urban culture. As bell founder and town crier, Pucci 5 Giovanni, Ciappelli, Quaresima e Carnevale: comportamenti sociali e cultura a Firenze nel Rinascimento (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1997), 74. Italics mine. 6 Giovan Battista Gelli, La sporta (Torino: UTET, 1968), Prologo. 7 Chiara Cassiani, “Le commedie di Giovan Battista Gelli nella tradizione fiorentina,” in La commedia italiana. Tradizione e storia, eds. Maria Cristina Figorilli and Daniele Vianello (Bari: Edizione di pagina, 2018), 136. Cassiani includes a direct quote from Machiavelli in his Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua: “il fine d’una commedia sia proporre uno specchio d’una vita privata, nondimeno il suo modo del farlo è con certa urbanità e termini che muovino riso, acciò che gl’huomini, correndo a quella delettazione, gustino poi l’esemplo utile che vi è sotto”. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, ed. P. Cosentino (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2012), 459–460.

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traveled the streets, specifically to 32 designated positions from which he would announce proclamations. Later in life, he served as Guardiano degli Atti della Mercanzia (1371–1382), another appointment that exposed him to the social diversity of the vibrant Florentine society of the Trecento that he described in his verse. In the arts, Pucci was “un popolano autodidatta.” This evaluation as popolano suggests his ordinary, low to middle class status in Florentine society. It also makes his verse and rhyme exchanges with the hailed “realist” Franco Sacchetti and with Boccaccio—whose importance needs no introduction—all the more remarkable. Indeed, his mediation of both erudite and popular cultures and his favorable representation of people from diverse social backgrounds make Pucci and his work compelling. It is clear that these social circles granted him a key role in representing urban environments, a point of juncture between responsibility and creativity for many Medieval and Renaissance artisan/popolani-letterati. Among Pucci’s works, the Proprietà di mercato vecchio delivers an unrivaled account of fourteenth-century Florentine street life and culture. Pucci extols the beauty of the mercato vecchio; yet contrary to more contemporary formal aesthetics, the Proprietà reflects the plurality of a crowded and chaotic market square. In over 200 lines of terzine the market’s unabashed fan heralds it as nobil giardino and he emphasizes an extensive cast of characters coloring the space. The consequence is an early modern urban landscape that is diverse and disruptive with a fundamental openness to social mixings. The author begins by praising his native Florence’s mercato vecchio above all others, characterizing Perugia’s market as acceptable and Siena’s Campo as horrendous. Firenze, on the other hand, does not disappoint: appetto a quella che mi dà vaghezza di dirne in rima, perché in quella terra nacqui dov’ella a tutti dà allegrezza, cioè Firenze; e se ’l parer non erra, Mercato Vecchio nel mondo è alimento, sì che d’ogni altra piazza il pregio serra. Ond’io fermai il mio intendimento di raccontarvi con parole preste le proprietà che nel Mercato sento.8 8 Antonio Pucci, “Proprietà di mercato vecchio,” ed. Natalino Sapegno (Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952), v. 16–24: “[C]ompared to the market that inspires me / to write these

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Food for the world, the market’s properties are sentite (“felt” and “heard”) by the author who attempts to put them to words in a series of overlapping social encounters. In fact, the presentation of the market’s essential properties is not a physical map of well-organized vendors’ stalls. Once the poet situates the market geographically by mention of the four churches at its corners and the departing vie, he never again describes it visually. Instead, terzinas later, he collapses the semantic space between market, piazza, and noble garden: Non fu giammai così nobil giardino come a quel tempo gli è Mercato Vecchio, che l’occhio e ’l gusto pasce al fiorentino.9

At once piazza, mercato, and nobil giardino, Pucci describes a highly adaptive socio-anthropological space, one that can nourish the sight and taste of any Fiorentino.10 Niall Atkinson remarks that, “[t]o Pucci, this piazza was more valuable, more dignified, more esteemed, and more precious than any other piazza. The beauty of the square came not from its geometric or visual harmony but from its discordant functional virtue.”11 “It’s discordant functional virtue”—more than the physical dimensions—speaks to the people and practices of daily life in the space. As for the market’s characters, there is constant traffic of all genders, all ages and social classes: artisans and vendors of all kinds, lenders, gamblers, clever swindlers, beggars, street singers, ruffians, prostitutes, bons vivants, peasants, and gentleman, women, and young girls. In the diverse mix of visitors, drifters, and labourers, the zanaiuoli’s appearance provides continuity with comedies from two centuries later: verses. For in the city / where I was born, it gives pleasure to all: / Florence, that is. And I report is true, / the Mercato Vecchio feeds the whole world / and takes the prize from all other markets. / So I have strengthened my intention / to describe to you quickly in words / the qualities I see in our market”. Translation by Trevor Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000). New York: Distributed exclusively in the U.S. by St. Martin’s Press. 9 Pucci, “Proprietà,” v. 73–75. (“There never was so noble a garden / as the Mercato Vecchio at that time, / which feeds the Florentines’ sight and tastes”). Translation by Trevor Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages. 10 It is worth nothing that mercato and piazza are used interchangeably throughout the poem. While we read of a unique space, prized above all others, the interchangeable use of market and piazza also allows us to imagine more market piazzas just as intricate to the fabric of their societies as the Mercato vecchio of Florence. 11 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 30.

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Ogni mattina n’è piena la strada di some, e di carrate nel mercato è la gran pressa, e molti stanno a bada. Gentili uomini e donne v’ha da lato, che spesso veggion venire alle mani le trecche e’ barattier ch’hanno giucato. E meretrici vi sono e ruffiani, battifancelli, zanaiuoli e gaioffi e i tignosi e scabbiosi cattani.12

As Pucci informs us early on, these scenes are just a portion of those witnessed in the market, creating images of abundance in our imagination. Atkinson summarizes others in which “well-stocked food vendors jostled against vibrant commerce of fraud, shrieks exchanged between garrulous female vendors, vilest insults all day long, sounds of mocking banter of young girls, lively and vulgar exchanges in piazza.”13 It is clear that urban heterogeneity is on full display in this competitive market space. These descriptions lead us to theorize the value proposition of the forced proximity of diverse peoples in the market. Atkinson explains that: “[in the market people had] to recognize differences through economic exchange, and to make space for both friends and foes. […] Everyone belonged there, and everyone had a stake in the functioning of the market. Even the female peasants bringing milk and fowl from their wretched dwellings among clumps of mud became ‘neighbors’ (vicini) to Florentine citizens when they arrived in the square.”14 Pucci shifts focus and moves to describe how the market participates in holiday preparations, rituals, and foods for Lent, Carnival, and New Year’s celebrations. He ends with reminders of the rise and fall of social 12 Pucci, “Proprietà,” v. 82–90. (“Every morning the street is filled / with cartloads of goods, and so great is the / throng that many stand waiting to pass. / Noble men and ladies stand to one side / and often see the costerwomen and / gambling hustlers come to blows. / And prostitutes there are, and their pimps, / and folls, and bagmen and good-for-nothings, / and stingy, scabrous gentry-folk”). Translation by Trevor Dean, The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages. 13 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 28. Zanaiuoli are very rarely studied and even more rarely is their profession translated to English. Atkinson translates the profession from Italian as delivery boys. I have chosen deliverymen because I cannot find reason to think that such individuals were young when they practiced the profession. In one instance to the contrary, the 1562 census of Florence counts a widow of a zanaiuolo living in Santo Spirito. See Descrizione delle bocche della città et stato di Firenze fatta l’anno 1562, Archivio di Stato Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea, busta 224. 14 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 31.

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and economic fortune in an intimate and sincere disclosure of how money and good luck never last: Quando nel pane asciutto dà di morso e beve l’acqua, si reca a memoria che ber soleva il vino a sorso a sorso. Oh quanti della rota hanno vittoria per questo modo, che similemente iscendon dal trionfo a grande storia. Foll’è chi vuole oprar, signor, per boria.15

These individuals fantasize of past evenings spent sipping wine, now quenching their thirst with only water. A few verses prior, they lament having dined on a professional cook’s meal one evening and having no one to light the flame the next. The everyday struggle of economic and alimentary comforts defines how a person interacts in urban space. This, together with Pucci’s appeal to the senses in this poem, allows for an embodied experience of the premodern market and civic spaces: the abundance or scarcity of goods and workers, smells and sounds, and riotous competition and/or festivities.16 Because of the attention to the people and their lives, we get a glimpse into what it was like to be alive in the early modern market. As we explore early modern urbanism and street culture, more detailed examples of the professions and practices of the Mercato are found in scenes of Florentine Renaissance comedy. The innovative and exhilarating aspect of this theater is “hearing” the voices of marginal professions in street encounters, furthering the embodied experience presented to our imaginations.

Itinerant Professions: Comedy’s Representations of Social Mixing Before turning to close readings of deliverymen’s scenes, we can look at the early modern dynamism of public market squares put on display in the study of street singers. This eclectic group of professionals, reciting a variety of news, satire, and commentary on current events but also selling small consumer products such as soap and spices, highlights the complex 15 Pucci, “Proprietà,” v. 220–226. (“When he bites the dry bread / and drinks water, he remembers how / he used to drink wine sip by sip / How many share the same destiny! / they go from high to low / Crazy is the one who lets himself be guided by arrogance”). 16 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 28.

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individuals who traveled the streets and mediated the transmission of information. Contextualizing street singers in their milieu provides insights into the urban landscape of markets, streets, and the debate over control of the public sphere. As Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher state, the very presence of such characters in the splendid piazza reflects the way in which the space of Renaissance cities and Renaissance culture could never be shaped entirely by the efforts and preoccupations of elites and ruling powers. Impelled by the need to make a living, and by the public’s desire to be informed and entertained, these ordinary individuals continued to sprout up in the urban landscape, even if they had little capacity to leave a permanent and lasting mark on the spaces of history.17 Street singers’ ambulant routine of song and dance add to the beautiful chaos that reigned over early modern urban market squares. They are in many ways analogous to deliverymen: generally emerging from humble conditions, rarely native to the cities in which they are found working, and their professional capacities include multiple skills. In the late sixteenth century, ceretani, cantimbanchi, a spectrum of performing professions, are considered by Tommaso Garzoni to be a mal’erba (“noxious weed”) threatening to take over the piazza and an (unfortunate) “unavoidable element of urban culture.”18 Their ambiguous and fluctuating social status—variable only within the lower classes—tells the story of their operations in the contact zone of cultural mediation. As Salzberg and Rospocher put it, “these performers worked on the dynamic frontiers of high and low culture, or orality and writing; their mobile and liminal nature has contributed to their disappearance from much of the historiography.”19 I am convinced that zanaiuoli and street singers are constituents of the same poor, socially marginal, and mobile group. More often than not, a perpetual outsider status and liminality of a profession do not lend a great deal of trust to their words or work. It appears that at least one street singer, Ippolito Ferrarese strains to salvage his profession’s reputation and emphasize his virtue as he lay on his deathbed.20 Renaissance comedy’s stories also 17 Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher, “Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication”, Cultural and Social History 9, no.1 (2102): 21. Increased attention to street singers also conf irm the heterogeneity of piazza audiences, as Pucci’s Proprietà di mercato vecchio had suggested: “humanists, patricians and court poets might jostle for space alongside artisans and wage-labourers, as well as peasants who had come into the town to attend fairs and markets.” Salzberg and Rospocher, “Street Singers,” 13. 18 Salzberg and Rospocher, “Street Singers,” note 74. 19 Salzberg, and Rospocher, “Street Singers,” 10. 20 Salzberg, and Rospocher, “Street Singers,” 16.

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feature zanaiuoli often needing to defend themselves and their honor from gossip and stereotypes. Now, looking closely at deliverymen requires paying attention to how much value comediographers placed on sourcing their contemporary urban material. Much like Pucci, these artigiani/popolani-letterati are otherwise employed in the city. As artisans and merchants, they walked the streets of the center of Florence. Giovan Battista Gelli is the best example of this new type of artigiano-letterato, maintaining his profession of shoemaker despite the growing number of public offices and official titles bestowed upon him, not least among them that of public lector of the Commedia. At times, Gelli had to defend his works from contemporary criticisms. Notably, the defense mounted cites the “truth” of his facts and his direct experience of vita e popolo.21 From this experience, Gelli and fellow playwrights source a particularly lively image of Florence’s streets in his comedies: the short-term employment gigs of zanaiuoli. In sixteenth-century Florence a zanaiuolo’s primary means of employment is as a food purveyor, carrying purchased goods home from the market. This figure is also found serving as a day cook for special events in the homes of rising merchants or lower nobility. Sometimes—like street singers who sell soap or spices—zanaiuoli can be found delivering letters, and like Pucci’s Proprietà di mercato vecchio suggests they generally appear in an outsider crowd. However brief and comic their encounters be on the stage, these zanaiuoli are at the core of many forms of movement and exchange in the urban environment. Their deliveries, one-night catering gigs, advertisement for their services communicate conversation and mixing among social classes. In Gelli’s La sporta (1543) a deliveryman Polo appears adjacent to Berto in the home of Ghirigoro in Act Four. Polo announces their task immediately: to bring home these foodstuffs and cook them here (in Ghirigoro’s home).22 Polo and Berto appear to be acquaintances, if not friends, in this conversation 21 In the prologue to La sporta, Gelli also speaks of his belonging to the artisan social class, as protection for the quality of his material but also as a point of pride. 22 We learn from other parts of the comedy that Berto is a fixture in Lapo’s household as a servant, and thus only Polo lo zanaiuolo is employed short-term for this event. Elsewhere I have created an identikit of the zanaiuolo in sixteenth-century Florence and argued for his similar status to a cook. Other scenes in Gelli’s comedies confirm this: Berto even calls Polo a “cook” in conversation with Brigida, Ghirigoro’s servant, in Scene Three: “Piglia queste cose, e andate sù, tu e questo cuoco, e mettete in ordine la cena per le due ore” (4.3). This use of cuoco confirms what Tommaseo and Bellini quote from Pietro Fanfani’s study of Francesco D’Ambra. D’Ambra uses the two terms interchangeably. Additional comedies by D’Ambra and Antonio Francesco Grazzini (Il Lasca) also confirm the zanaiuolo’s culinary expertise.

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of kitchen chatter. As they work, we peek into the workings of the mercato vecchio and the mocking made of the old avaricious Ghirigoro: POLO Berto, non disse il tuo padrone, se io intesi bene, che noi portassimo a casa Ghirigoro de’ Macci suo suocero queste cose e le cocessimo quivi? BERTO Sì, disse. Perché? POLO Egli ha tolto la figliuola per moglie, eh? BERTO Tu vedi, Polo. POLO Oh! non ha egli il modo, cotesto vecchio, a fare una cena da sé, senza che ‘l genero vi abbia a pensare? BERTO Sì, credo io; ma egli è il più avaro uomo di Firenze. POLO Ah! Ah! Egli è quel vecchio che vien qualche volta in mercato con quella sportellina sotto che pare uno famiglio della grascia, e è tanto vantaggioso, che non truova ortolano né beccaio che gli voglia vendere, anzi tutti lo cacciano, faccendogli le baie? BERTO Sì, sì, cotesto è esso. POLO Oh! e’ si chiama degli Omacci in mercato, non de’ Macci.23

Polo’s tale suggests a funny mental image of the old greedy man’s misfortunes: sellers of all kind loudly refusing to sell to him and shoving him away, yelling insults at his back. This is a riotous and jovial place at the expensive of a man like Ghirigoro. Polo’s kitchen banter continues as he hypothesizes getting close to Ghirigoro and asking for an investment in his business plan. Here we notice not only the presence of Polo’s peers, but also of common borrowing practices: BERTO […] E credo, Polo, che gli abbia de’ danari; ché io ho conosciuti delli altri così fatti come è egli, che poi alla morte se n’è lor trovato qualche buon gruzzolo. 23 Giovan Battista Gelli, La sporta, in Opere (Torino: UTET, 1968), IV.2. (“[Polo] Berto, hasn’t your master said, if I understood well, that we should bring to the home of Ghirigoro de’ Macci’s his father-in-law these things and to cook them there? /Berto Yes, he said that. Why? / Polo He has taken the daughter for a wife, eh? Berto You understand, Polo. / Polo Oh! He has no way, this old man, to prepare a dinner himself, without his son-in-law taking care of it? / Berto Yes, I think so; but he is the greediest man in Florence. / Polo Ah! Ah! He is that old man who comes to the market sometimes with that small wooden chest under him that seems to be a servant of a chunky woman, and he’s so interested in taking advantage of others, that he can- not find vegetable vendor or butcher who wants to sell to him, what’s more they all send him away, mocking him at his back. / Berto Yes, yes, that is him. / Polo Oh! and he’s called of the Omacci in the market, not de’ Macci”).

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POLO Se io piglio sua pratica, io voglio a ogni modo vedere se e’ mi vuol prestare dieci ducati, per aprir anch’io un poco di treccone in mercato vecchio. BERTO Sì, tu hai trovato l’uomo! Io non credo che ti prestasse la fame, quando bene è se la potesse spiccar da dosso. POLO Tu la intendi male, Berto; ché questi simili si giungono più facilmente che gli altri, come si mostra loro qualche poco d’utile. E’ ne viene un altro in quel mercato, che non vi è pizzicagnolo né treccone né beccaio quasi che non abbia danari di suo: e dànnogli ogni dì qualcosa, e ‘l capitale sta fermo. Così vo’ fare io con lui.24

In spontaneous language almost as if it were today, Polo introduces the idea that a zanaiuolo like him has some economic freedom to climb the career ladder to become a pizzicagnolo or to open a bottega da treccone.25 This credit scheme of a suspect ethical character should remind us of the market described by Pucci: gentlemen strung along little by little by clever small-time shop-owners as aspiring zanaiuoli await their turn to become something more. Gelli’s other comedy, Lo errore (1555), features a zanaiuolo who appears onstage in an incredibly precise location on the streets of Florence. His casual street encounter with the upper class Gherardo becomes an expansive “day in the life” look into a zanaiuolo’s relationship with the city’s urban space: ZANAIUOLO Aggio facenna. GHERADO E dove vai? ZANAIUOLO In Via Pentolini. GHERADO Oh! odi: tu puoi fare un viaggio e due servigi. ZANAIUOLO E come? Di’ sù.

24 Gelli. La sporta, IV.2 (“Berto I think, Polo, that he has some money; because I learned of others who are like him, that then at death, they have found a good handful of money. / Polo If I can get close to him, I want at any rate to see if he wants to lend me ten ducati to open for myself too a small shop at the old market. / Berto Yes, you have found your man! I think he would let you starve even when he could help you. / Polo You have misunderstood, Berto; because these men are more easily reached than others, if you show them a little something useful. Another one comes to that market, that there almost isn’t a spice vendor or a small foods vendor or butcher who doesn’t have some of his money: and giving him every day something, the capital remains intact. This is how I want to handle with him”). 25 Sanesi notes that treccone, as indicated by Tommaseo and Bellini, is a rivendugliolo, that is, a rivenditore di cose commestibili di poco prezzo. Pucci’s poem also details some of the items that pizzicagnoli sold and where they obtained their foodstuffs.

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GHERADO Posa anche queste cose in casa mia, ché sto quivi in quelle case nuove da Santo Ambruogio ZANAIUOLO Orsù, mette qua. GHERADO Sai tu il nome mio? ZANAIUOLO Eh! Io ti conosco ben, sì, ché ti veddi l’altra sera quando ero a cuocere in casa Binno Bostichi GHERADO Ah, sì, sì, Oh! tien qui; va’ via. ZANAIUOLO E che vuoi tu che faccia d’un quattrino? GHERADO E che vuoi tu? Che io ti dia una dote, che non rallunghi venti passi la via? ZANAIUOLO Dammi tre quattrini, se vuoi che ci vada; se no, non ci voglio annare. GHERADO Io non me ne meraviglio, poi che tu di’ che sei un di quel che vanno a cuocere. ZANAIUOLO E che facciamo noi altri che anniamo a cuocere? GHERADO Cavate tanto, la prima cosa, da il pollaiolo, da il pizzicagnolo, da il treccone, e da tutti quegli da chi voi fate comperare le cose; e, d’ poi, rubate tanto, oltre lo aver trovato che i colli de’ polli e le spezierie che avanzano hanno a essere vostre, nelle case ove voi entrate, che voi non stimate poi questi guadagnuzzi d’un quattrino. ZANAIUOLO Oh! ve’ bella cosa che ha trovato questo vecchio. GHERADO E io ti direi delle altre cose che tu non pensi che io sappia; ché vi beete in cucina, quando voi non siate veduti, insino alla peverada de’ capponi, come si fa propriamente l’acqua d’orzo. ZANAIUOLO Te dirò; questo si fa per star sano. GHERADO E tu vedi bene che voi altri che andate a cuocere avete certe carni fini e certi visi rossi che voi parete fanciulle lisciate; e non siate scuri, come questi altri che non attendono se non a far servigi.26

26 Gelli, Lo errore, in Opere (Torino: UTET, 1968), III.1. (“Zanaiuolo I’ve got things to do. Gherardo And where are you going? / Zanaiuolo In Via Pentolini. / Gherardo Oh! listen: you can make one trip and do two services. / Zanaiuolo And, how? Tell me now. / Gherardo Take also these things to my home, because I am near there in those new homes in Sant’Ambrogio. / Zanaiuolo Ok, let’s go! Put it here. / Gherardo Do you know my name? Zanaiuolo Eh! I know you well, yes, because I saw you the other evening when I was cooking in the home of Binno Bostichi. / Gherardo Ah, yes, yes, oh! Take this; go on. / Zanaiuolo And what do you want me to do with a quattrino? Gherardo What do you want? That I give you a dowry, for something that doesn’t lengthen your trip twenty feet? / Zanaiuolo Give me three quattrini, if you want me to go; if not, I don’t want to. / Gherardo I’m not surprised, given that you say you are one of those who go to cook. / Zanaiuolo And what do we do those of us who go to cook?

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This dialogue is rich with details of life in sixteenth-century Florence, including mentions of housing developments in the new neighborhood of Santo Ambruogio and Via Pentolini as a major street traffic between the core of the city center and the outer circles of its growth. The quickwitted back-and-forth dialogue brings the zanaiuolo and Gherardo alive as one negotiates better payment and the other balks at the folly of his request. If the scene itself were not enough, the contact zone of conoscenze among travelling kitchen staffs and dinner party guests of the growing upper middle class also embeds us in a web of Florentine social relations. Although playful, the conversation shifts into an expose of insults about “quelli che vanno a cuocere.” Even if we do not catch all the subtleties of Gherardo’s insults to the zanaiuolo’s profession, some social differences are noticeable. Compared to Gelli’s other zanaiuolo, this deliveryman has a markedly Southern dialect, indicating that he is a foreigner and an immigrant to the city. The fact that he is berated for his profession’s negative stereotypes was, and is today, comical. However, we should take these accusations no less seriously. They put on display the negotiations of categories of social relations in the urban reality of class, belonging, and mistrust.27 A final example can be drawn from Giovanni Maria Cecchi’s L’Ammalata. The encounter of the zanaiuolo Gian Pitto and a gentleman Alesso provides a vivid experience of the market. In Act Four of this comedy, Gian Pitto appears onstage to deliver a letter. He does not fail to advertise his talent in the kitchen and where to find him should his services be needed in the future: Gherardo You take a lot, in the first place, from the poulterer, the spice vendor, from the small foods vendor, and from all of those from whom you buy things; and, then, you steal a lot, other than having taken the necks of chickens and the spices that are left over you take to be your own, in the homes in which you enter, and you don’t consider small earnings of a quattrino. / Zanaiuolo Oh! well, what nice things this old man has found. / Gherardo And I’ll tell you other things that you don’t think I know; that you drink in the kitchen when you aren’t seen, even at the pepper sauce of the capons, like one does properly with the water of orzo. / Zanaiuolo I’ll tell you; this is done to stay healthy. / Gherardo And you see that you others that go to cook have certain fine skins and particular red faces that you seem glamorous young girls; and you are not dark-skinned, like these others that attend to performing services”). 27 When comparing Gelli’s La sporta and Lo errore it becomes even more apparent that Polo, who is gifted with a Florentine dialect for his lines, is a less marginalized member of the community. His dream to open his own shop is probably achievable in the era, and a sign of social mobility among zanaiuoli. Within the comedy La sporta, Polo notably defends himself and his integrity against Ghirigoro’s accusations in a later scene. The deliveryman appears more trustworthy and more honorable than the nobleman, and his variable social position is unusual amongst his peers.

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ZANAIUOLO Buon iorno a Vostra Sinnoria. Sta qui Un servidor che s’annomannna il Volpe? ALESSO Sì, sta. Che cosa volevi da lui? ZANAIUOLO Darli quista. Ello in casa, che tu sacci? […] ALESSO Dà qua, ch’io ti farò Servigio. ZANAIUOLO Tu me togli un’altra gita. Ma famme, ve’, di grazia buon servizio. ALESSO Sì, sì. ZANAIUOLO Me ne risposo, vedi, sopra De te. Vuo’ tu accomandarme niente? ALESSO Vatti con Dio. ZANAIUOLO O messer, se tu avessi A far convito, oh! i’ son valente coco, Potta de santa mamma mia! io saccio Far buon arrosti, pasticci […] ALESSO Sta bene; Io t’arò a mente. ZANAIUOLO Se tu hai bisogno, Vien pur là in Mercato, e si domanna Gian Pitto. ALESSO Or via. ZANAIUOLO Così me chiamo. Addio: Mi raccomanno.28

28 Giovanni Maria Cecchi, L’Ammalata, in Commedie, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1856), IV.4. (“Zanaiuolo Good day your Lordship. Is he here / a servant that is named the Fox? / Alesso Yes, he’s here. What did you want from him? / Zanaiuolo To give him this. Is he in the house that you know? / Alesso He’s not here, no. Zanaiuolo I’ll come back. Alesso Show it here. / Who’s it coming from? Zanaiuolo I don’t know, sir, but / I have to give it in hand to him. Alesso Give / It here, because he’s my servant, and it’s probably / Messages from women. Zanaiuolo Always when / A zana brings letters, you think /That they are chickens? Alesso Oh! Here we are again, that’s your usual. / Zanaiuolo To earn some money, I would bring messages // To the devil. Alesso Give it here, that I will do you / This service. Zanaiuolo You’re taking away another trip from me. / But you can do me this service, with thanks. / Alesso Yes, yes. Zanaiuolo I have answered, you see, above / From you. Do you not want to accommodate me with anything? / Alesso Go with God. Zanaiuolo O sir, if you should need / To have a banquet, oh! I am a valiant cook, / I swear on my mother’s cunt! I can / Make good roasted meats, pies and hashes… Alesso That’s well. / I’ll keep you in mind. Zanaiuolo If you need, / Come even there, to the Market, and ask for / Gian Pitto. Alesso Now go. Zanaiuolo That’s my name. Goodbye; / Remember me”).

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The emphasis on Gian Pitto’s southern vernacular confirms an unavoidable status of outsider, marginalized, yet vividly present in the discordant characterization of the city. This deliveryman cannot pass up the opportunity for self-promotion; his pitch for his services and how to ask for him in Mercato leads us to believe that he and other zanaiuoli congregate there awaiting short-term labor requests to deliver goods (or post) or to prepare a meal for an event. Pucci’s Proprietà di mercato vecchio two centuries prior provided a similar image of congregation in the market space: a crowded labyrinth of sellers, buyers, loiters, and passersby.

Who Belongs in the Market? Diversity and Encounters in Urban Space In these examples, it is clear that the market sustained diverse social classes and employed new immigrant populations. We come to discover and appreciate the multiplicity of experiences in early modern society in pursuing more popular-leaning works such as Pucci’s poetry and comedy. For comedy’s part, the market’s dynamic f ield of rendezvous is brought to life by the deliverymen’s navigation of urban space. The comic vein in comedy mirrors the spirit of zanaiuoli’s inclusion and of the market itself: a place of opposites and a place of discovery.29 Cassiani argues that Gelli’s main intent is to portray a Florentine reality in which “alto e basso non sono separati ma possono dialogare.”30 Nowhere is this proven more than in market scenes. Urban streets surrounding the market are truly the spaces in which opposites meet one another and sustain social life, laying bare, without moralizing, the lack of harmony amongst its peoples. With Pucci’s poetics of inclusion and heterogeneity on display, the market was not a peaceful place of urban dialogue either. Remarking on the “tumultuous beauty” of the market, Atkinson suggests: It was clearly an ambivalent beauty, but one that could exist in real space, a space that could tolerate human heterogeneity […] such beauty was 29 Cassiani summarizes Machiavelli and Gelli’s poetics: “la fiorentinità e il forte impegno civile […] la concezione del comico come spazio degli opposti e strumento di conoscenza.” Cassiani, “Le commedie di Giovan Battista Gelli,” 132. 30 Cassiani, “Le commedie di Giovan Battista Gelli,” 142.

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never morally pure but was, nevertheless, profoundly resilient. Pucci displays a deep sympathy for the weaknesses of his fellow compatriots, and he understands how even tricksters deserve a place at the table. In its stubborn refusal to separate the entire range of social classes living cheek by jowl or even distinguished between bankers and gamblers, the mercato provided the space not for some misplaced social cohesion but for the expansive inclusiveness of a more chaotic and variegated civic belonging.31

These tales and representations of early modern Florence’s urbanity do not write out marginal characters. In the market space, we all rearticulate our identity and perform our social status, and we cast our values in proximity and in dialectic with other socio-cultural figures, languages, and professions. However, much like in our current debates, diversity and social mixing do not automatically produce inclusive communities for the most vulnerable populations. Markets and their populations are often under siege today from the demands of a global, mobile tourist economy for clean, orderly public spaces. Atkinson recalls his early encounter with the contemporary Central Market in Florence that not only the tourist’s gaze and needs, but also our scholarly gaze can limit our appreciation of a local community’s street life. By seeking solely an ideal and harmonious architectural Florence, its real, every day, messy, heterogeneous self loses space to perform its function: “it was that very clutter that, to a social geographer, represented the last spasms of an active communal life in a city choking on its own artistic past.”32 I believe that we can emphasize the lives of the people too, locals and the migrants whose professions and lives characterized the early modern space, in order to see beyond the Signoria even as we enter market today. The loud dynamics of negotiation and professions hardly distinguishable from loitering occur in our markets and public squares every day. Having reviewed its early modern representations, the next time we visit the market we might open our eyes, listen, and meet precarious day laborers who help create the space and contribute to the culture just as much as the vendors, the customers, the strollers, the wanders, and the tourists. 31 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 32. While acknowledging that neighborly behavior was codified and ritualized in this early modern space, Atkinson also points to Pucci for evidence of how categories of social relations were constantly negotiated in space and time (31–32). 32 Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance, 36–37.

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Bibliography Atkinson, Niall. The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life. University Park: Penn State Press, 2016. Cassiani, Chiara. Metamorfosi e conoscenza: i dialoghi e le commedie di Giovan Battista Gelli. Roma: Bulzoni, 2006. Cassiani, Chiara. “Le commedie di Giovan Battista Gelli nella tradizione fiorentina.” In La commedia italiana. Tradizione e storia, edited by Maria Cristina Figorilli and Daniele Vianello, 132–142. Bari: Edizione di pagina, 2018. Cecchi, Giovanni Maria. Commedie. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1856. Ciappelli, Giovanni. Quaresima e Carnevale: comportamenti sociali e cultura a Firenze nel Rinascimento. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1997. Archivio di Stato, Firenze. Descrizione delle bocche della città et stato di Firenze fatta l’anno 1562. Miscellanea Medicea, Busta 224. Gelli, Giovanni Battista. Opere. Torino: UTET, 1968. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua. Edited by P. Cosentino. In Scritti in poesia e in prosa. Edited by A. Corsaro. Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2012. Nanni, Paolo. “I georgof ili nella Firenze Capitale d’Italia: spazi verdi urbani e periurbani”. In Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere “La Colombaria”. Atti e memorie, vol. LXXXI, 203–214. Firenze: Olschki Editore, 2016. Pucci, Antonio. “Proprietà di mercato vecchio.” In Poeti minori del Trecento. Edited by Natalino Sapegno. Napoli: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952. Salzberg, Rosa and Rospocher, Massimo. “Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication”. Cultural and Social History 9, no. 1 (2012): 9–26.

About the Author April D. Weintritt, PhD in Italian Studies, is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of French and Italian and Director of the Italian Language Program at The Ohio State University. She specializes in intercultural learning in world language pedagogy and research focused on the lives and representations of culinary professionals in early modern Italian literature, theater, and society. Within the early modern sphere, her research explores the food trade and the identity of its workers within the context of growing urban spaces and in conjunction with historical archives and the visual arts of the period.

2.

“Noble Edifices”: The Urban Image of Papal Rome, 1417–1667 Matthew Knox Averett

Abstract Through a survey of important buildings and urbanistic forces in Rome, this chapter considers to what extent and in what ways a city is a necessary tool for gaining, retaining, and using political power. In the wake of demographic changes in Europe and urban growth in the Po River valley in the late Middle Ages, Rome emerged as a new center of political power with the revival of the papacy after Avignon. The city was in poor material condition following the fourteenth century, and there was a need to restore urban functionality, but also to shape it into a site consistent visually and symbolically with its role being a major European capital. Early modern popes dedicated themselves to rehabilitating Rome, and the success and failures of papal performative architecture and urbanism demonstrate the links between political power and urbanism. Keywords: Rome; papacy; architecture; urban history

Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of St Peter.1

This chapter discusses the urban image of papal Rome from 1417 to 1667, a 250-year period bound by the elevation of Pope Martin V to the Throne of St. Peter, which ended the Great Western Schism and ultimately led to the return of the papal court to Rome after the Avignon Papacy; and the death of Pope Alexander VII Chigi, after which papal coffers were left empty and 1

Bartolomeo Sacchi called Il Platina, Life of Pope Nicholas V, 1455.

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch02

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the flood of building campaigns of the previous two and a half centuries dwindled to a trickle. Through this period dozens of popes spent millions of scudi to erect thousands of buildings, all in an effort to establish the papacy as both a dominant political entity in Europe as well as the unchallenged religious authority across the continent. Rome was facing a number of urban challenges: it neither appeared beautiful nor functioned well, and it lacked the basic urban elements of peer cities. Throughout the early modern period, Rome’s elite dreamt of a new city. To that end, they built churches, palaces, monuments, streets, and fountains in order to promote the papacy, glorify noble families, and restore functionality and grandeur to the Eternal City.

“The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire”2 Rome had materially declined dramatically in the millennium that followed the glory days of the ancient empire.3 Time and neglect, Christian iconoclasts, barbarian invasions, sacks, and burnings; floods, earthquakes, and natural fires; looted and eroded building materials combined to devastate the architectural glory of ancient Rome. Medieval Romans left the hills of Rome in favor of the low-lying regions along the banks of the Tiber River, primarily in the Campus Martius on the east bank of the river, and Trastevere and the Vatican on the west bank.4 Medieval Rome grew, re-orienting the city from the Capitoline/Forum area towards the south of the intramural city, to the northwest Borgo district anchored by Old St. Peter’s Basilica, emphasizing the city’s new Christian identity. Two distinct zones developed within the Aurelian walls, clearly visible by the early Middle Ages: the abitato, an inhabited area, and the disabitato, an uninhabited area that “encircled the 2 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, 80, line 1. 3 A dramatic telling of this decline is the standard view. Cola di Rienzo attempted a catalog of the decline of the city in the Descriptio Urbis from 1344-47. Dramatic accounts of the “fall” appear in print at least as early as Giorgio Vasari and continue with authors such as Edward Gibbon and Rodolfo Lanciani. For a general review of Rome at this time, see Peter Partner, The Lands of St. Peter: The Papal States in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). For a response to the narrative of a tragic decline, see Hendrik W. Dey 2021. The Making of Medieval Rome: A New Profile of the City, 400–1420 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Torgil Magnuson, The Urban Transformation of Medieval Rome, 312–1420 (Stockholm: Swedish Institute in Rome, 2004). 4 Matthew Knox Averett, “‘Veggendo Roma’: The Urban Image of Papal Rome in the Age of Dante,” in Le città di Dante. Trasformazioni urbane e territoriali tra XIII e XIV secolo, ed. Damiano Iacobone (Rome: Tab Edizioni, 2021), 109–124.

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Figure 2.1. Sebastiano di Re after Giovanni Antonio Dosio, Topographical Map of Modern Rome, 1561. Source: National Gallery of Art.

town proper and [extended] to the Aurelian Walls.”5 Renaissance maps give a sense of the difference between the abitato and disabitato (Figure 2.1). By the Renaissance, three-quarters of intramural Rome was under cultivation. The disabitato was pastoral: ruins (some converted into houses), cottages, farmhouses, and barns were sparsely interspersed among trees, fields, vineyards, olive groves, pastures, and apple orchards.6 The Quirinale and Pincio hills were “markedly rural, set with small houses, sheds, and straw huts, tiny churches, gardens, fields, and ancient ruins” and remained that way until in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when they became a suburb of elegant villas.7 Materially distinct districts emerged as almost satellite towns, such as the habitation around Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano. Maps refer to the forum area (once the political center 5 Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 311. 6 The pastoral character of the intramural city is attested to in the place names given in Medieval itineraries. The ninth-century Einsiedeln Itinerary, for example, cites places such as Piazza dell’ Olmo, Piazetta del Fico, and the Via dell’ Arancio, while Regione IX becomes known as Regione della Pigna. 7 Krautheimer, 1980, 312.

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of the Roman Empire) as the “Campo Vaccino” (the cow pasture), and the Capitoline Hill (the religious center of the ancient city) as the “Monti di Carpi” (the goat hill).8 Ever fewer people inhabited this new Rome, as the population sank from around 800,000 in the year 400 to perhaps 100,000 a century later, and continued downward until finally bouncing around between 20,000 to 40,000 people from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.9 It was perhaps in the fourteenth century that Rome reached its lowest point.10 With political and economic instability in the Papal States and across Italy, French influence became increasingly powerful within the Church. In a contentious conclave in Perugia in 1305, Bertrand de Got, a Frenchman, was elected pope and took the name Clement V. After his coronation, following the age-old tradition Clement processed through Rome. A wall collapsed, killing Clement’s brother and a venerable cardinal. Clement was unhorsed, and as he fell, the papal tiara smashed into the ground dislodging one of its most valuable gems, a carbuncle, that was never found. Considering the warfare, poverty, crime, disease, and civil strife, this episode was enough for Clement. He moved the papal court to France, arriving in Avignon in 1309. A memorable depiction of Rome comes from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Fazio degli Uberti’s Il Dittamondo (Fig. 2.2). In this image, the author and his companion, Solin, are shown visiting Rome. A handful of ancient buildings are scattered within the city walls, while a personification of the city is depicted as a poor widow, suggesting its abandonment by the papacy and the lowly state to which it had sunk. And indeed, in the absence of the papacy, Rome suffered greatly. During this time, Rome and the Campagna were devastated by wars between Roman aristocratic families, notably the Colonna, Orsini, and Caetani. Loss of the Curia in 1309 and associated religious and political traffic to Rome drove the city’s population still lower.11 The population bottomed out around 17,000 in the years after the Black Death, which arrived in Rome in early 1348.12 In September of that year, a powerful earthquake struck, devastating the city: parts of San Giovanni in Laterano collapsed, as did the nave and right side of the Basilica of Maxentius and the entire southern side of the outer shell

8 See Pope Martin V’s bull Etsi in cunctarum from 1425. 9 Krautheimer, 1980, 65. 10 Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 11 Cola di Rienzo’s Descriptio Urbis (1344-47) cites “a clerical army” of 1303 people, or 15% of Rome’s population. 12 Rodolfo Amadeo Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome: A Sketch of the History of Monuments (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 198.

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Figure 2.2. “Fazio degli Uberti and Solin at Rome”, illustration from Il Dittamondo di Fazio degli Uberti, (Paris, BnF, Italien 81 f.18), 1447. Source: Bibliothèque National de France.

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of the Colosseum.13 New hope appeared with the election of Gregory XI in 1378, which portended the return of the papal court to the city. But almost immediately following his election began the Great Western Schism in which multiple popes vied for control of the Church between 1378 and 1417. The schism was finally settled in 1417 when Martin V was made pope by the Council of Constance (1414–1418). Martin resolved to return the papacy to Rome (though political conflicts prevented this until 1420).14

Roma instaurata15 The removal of the papacy from Rome not only diminished the political importance of Rome, but the lack of an urban power base diminished the political power of the papacy. Though the architectural magnificence of Rome may have been reduced through the Middle Ages (Old St. Peter’s notwithstanding), Rome still remained an essential place in the historical imagination of Europe.16 A beautiful and functioning Rome thus emerged as an essential element for hopes for a politically powerful and independent papacy, just as control of this power by Italian families would mark the capture of power away from feudal France and Germany.17 The act of returning the papacy to Rome demonstrated Martin’s recognition of the importance of the city to the strength, authority, and legitimacy of the Church and the Papacy.18 Later, in 1455, Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) would (according to his biographer Platina) comment on this link between the Church and Rome. In one of the most important formulations of prestige architecture, Nicholas contended that: 13 Rodolfo Amadeo Lanciani, The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906), 8. 14 Charles Burroughs, “A Planned Myth and a Myth of Planning: Martin V and Rome,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. Paul A. Ramsey (Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982); James Ackerman, “The Planning of Rome, 1450-1580,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. Paul A. Ramsey (1982). 15 De Roma instaurata (Rome Restored) was an important reconstruction of and guide to ancient Rome by Flavio Biondo, published in three volumes between 1444 and 1448. More than its understanding of ancient Rome, the text outlined humanist visions of how a restored Rome should look. 16 Elizabeth McCahill, Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 17 Frommel, Christoph Luitpold. “Papal Policy: The Planning of Rome During the Renaissance,” in Art and History: Images and Their Meaning, ed Robert I. and Theodore K. Rabb Rotberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 18 Burroughs, 1982.

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Only the learned who have studied the origin and development of the authority of the Roman Church can really understand its greatness. Thus, to create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured masses, there must be something that appeals to the eye; a popular faith sustained only on doctrines will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself, belief would grow and strengthen from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions would immensely conduce to the exaltation of the chair of St Peter.19

At the dawn of the Renaissance, therefore, the link between politics and the city was clearly understood by Rome’s leaders: papal authority was empowered by a beautiful Rome, and Rome could be an expression of papal authority. But this was not the Rome that Martin inherited or in which Nicholas lived. Again, according to papal biographer Platina, the city Martin V returned to in 1420 was “in such a state of devastation that it could hardly be considered a city fit for human habitation: whole rows of houses abandoned by their tenants; many churches fallen to the ground; streets deserted and buried under heaps of refuse; traces of plague and famine everywhere.”20

“In tempo che tutta Roma era in Fabrica”21 The city needed to be renovated to meet the demands newly placed upon it as the capital of Catholicism and a major European capital city, and over the course of the next two centuries two-dozen popes and hundreds of architects worked to realize the dream of a new Rome. This meant clearing streets, repairing buildings, and clearing the city of refuse. A functioning street network had to be established to connect the major monuments of Rome and to fill the vast tracts of intramural land void of urban development. Sewer systems were restored and aqueducts re-opened, significantly 19 Platina, Life of Pope Nicholas V, quoted in Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome 1500-1599 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 16. 20 Platina, The Life of Pope Martin V, quoted in Lanciani 1906, 10. 21 Dorothy Metzger Habel, “When all of Rome was under construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 85.

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improving hygiene in the city and allowing for urban expansion beyond the banks of the Tiber. Laws were passed that encouraged private urban development by providing financial incentives for construction projects in new quarters or renovation projects in older ones.22 Soon, hovels were cleared, and new houses built, while the towers of medieval clans were demolished and replaced with new familial palaces. The eastern hills of Rome were free to be covered by an elite villa district. Old churches were renovated, and new ones were built. Artists and scholars poured into the city, establishing colleges and academies. International colonies were founded throughout the city, and foreign embassies gave proof of Rome’s status as the diplomatic center of Europe. Between 1550 and 1600, all of Rome was under construction. The air was filled with the sounds of construction, as well as dust, and the streets were choked with innumerable wagonloads of building materials. To illustrate the scale of projects, no fewer than 150 palaces and 300 churches were built ex novo or were substantially rebuilt.23 The monuments of antiquity stood cheek by jowl with the splendors of the modern era, attesting to Rome’s status as Caput mundi. By the seventeenth century, Rome was one of the largest city in Europe and undisputed artistic and cultural capital of the continent; it was indeed full of noble edifices.

“A spiritual empire there embodied stood”24 Perhaps the best place to start is at the Vatican. It was always a pretty awful part of Rome. Low-lying, it was marshy and malarial. What we think of today as the Vatican palace itself was in the fourteenth century merely a miserable Medieval castle. Venerable Old St. Peter’s Basilica erected a century earlier, was listing and in disrepair. Interventions were needed. By 1500 Donato Bramante undertook the herculean tasks of demolishing and rebuilding Old St. Peter’s, as well as building the Belvedere Courtyard at the Vatican Palace. As important as these projects were, they were actually begun only after another famous building at the Vatican: the Sistine Chapel. The building was built for a specific purpose: to elect the pope. The goal was clear: never again would foreign powers seize control of the Papacy. Instead, the College of Cardinals (dominated by Italian families) would convene in Rome and 22 Jean Delumeau, Vie economique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1957), 230. 23 Habel 2013, 3. 24 Aubrey Thomas de Vere, “St. Peter’s by Moonlight,” 1855.

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be locked up with a key (cum clave hence conclave) to elect a new Italian Pope (all popes elected between 1522 and 1978 have been Italian, while even between 1417 and 1978, all but three popes are Italian). Moreover, the conclave also stood as a bulwark against the conciliar movement, which was empowered with the success of ending the schism at the Council of Constance in 1414–1418, and which would go on to serve as the basis for the rise of the Reformation a century later.25 The fresco program inside the chapel makes clear the papal argument that authority was passed down from Jesus to Peter then to all the other popes and this authority cannot be challenged.26 Notably, Perugino’s Jesus Delivery the Keys or Heaven to Peter (1481–1482) depicts the Biblical passage Matthew 16:19, set within an ideal Italian Renaissance city with a large regular piazza displaying triumphal arches and perfect “Brunelleschian” temple. In the passage, Jesus says to Peter, “I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The Church of Rome considered Matthew 16:19 as a clear source of both religious and secular authority for the papacy. But popes also claimed secular authority through Constantine by means of the Donation of Constantine, which contended that Constantine bequeathed suzerainty over the Western Roman Empire to the popes. Though the Donation was proven a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio (1439–1440), the assertions of the Donation were nonetheless tacitly accepted by the Church for a long while.27 The post-Tridentine Church used Constantine and his purported donation to enforce the idea that European rulers were “subservient to the christological and universal power of the Roman tiara.”28 Ancient churches became important links for the Catholic Church as material manifestations of the Church’s long and ancient pedigree.29 Ancient churches, especially those connected to Constantine, however, had more 25 C.M.D. Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, 1378–1460: The Conciliar Response to the Great Schism (Kingston, Ont: Limestone Press, 1986); J.H. Burns and Thomas Izbicki, Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26 Leopold D. Ettlinger, and H. O. Fein, The Sistine Chapel Before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 27 Matthew Knox Averett, “The Annual Medals of Pope Urban VIII Barberini,” American Journal of Numismatics Second Series 25 (2013), 307. 28 Marc Fumaroli, “Cross, Crown, and Tiara: The Constantine Myth Between Paris and Rome (1590-1690),” in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy. Studies in the History of Art, no. 48, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 90–91. 29 Christopher Johns, Papal Art and Cultural Politics Rome in the Age of Clement XI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39–54.

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than a religious significance: they connected the pope to Roman emperors and through this line, provided popes with a basis for temporal authority in addition to their religious authority. In short, the material remnants of ancient Christian Rome were physical demonstrations of summa potestas, secular and ecclesiastical authority. While several Roman churches could fill this role, the most important was St. Peter’s Basilica. The new building by Michelangelo, with its dome looming over all the city and during the Renaissance visible from miles around, was simultaneously a symbol of the ancient imperial Church of Constantine, while also a beacon of the resurgent post-Tridentine Catholic Church.30 And indeed, that building itself was linked to the emperor: it was re-consecrated by Urban VIII on 26 November 1623, on the purported 1300th anniversary of the original consecration, supposedly by Constantine himself. Nearby, the popes established a massive defensive fortification: the Castel Sant’Angelo. The ancient Mausoleum of Hadrian was transformed into the city’s primary defensive fortification and it helped broadcast an image of the city as the capital of a powerful sovereign state and the popes as secular rulers (though it was mostly used as a prison, and famously served as a bunker for Clement VII during the Sack of Rome in 1527). Urban VIII constructed the star-pattern bastions and redoubts (today a green park) between 1625 and 1627.31 Urban also added eighty-four cannons to the Castel, made of bronze infamously removed from the Pantheon.32

“[A]ll the way from San Pietro to San Giovanni was decorated”33 Popes are elected in the Sistine Chapel, but they are coronated only later and across town at the church of San Giovanni in Laterano. The coronation ceremony begins with a long procession called the Possesso, which consciously evoked both ancient Roman triumphs and Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.34 An idea of the procession is conveyed in a print by Antonio de 30 Marie Tanner, Jerusalem on the Hill. Rome and the Vision of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Renaissance (London: Harvey Miller Publishers 2010). 31 Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, Volume 29, trans. Ernest Graf (St. Louis: Herder, 1952), 361. 32 William Kirwin, Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (New York: P. Lang, 1997), 126; Louise Rice, “Pope Urban VIII and the Pantheon Portico,” in The Pantheon in Rome: Contributions to the Conference, Bern, November 9-12, 2006, ed. Gerd Grasshoff, Michael. Heinzelmann, and Markus Wäfler (Bern: Universität Bern, 2009), 155. 33 Giacinto Gigli, Diario di Roma, ed. Manlio Barberito (Rome: Colombo, 1994), 80. 34 Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 53–56; Irene Fosi, “Court and City in the Ceremony of the possesso in the Sixteenth Century,”

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Figure 2.3. Antonio de Paolo, The Possesso of Pope Leo XI, 1605. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library.

Paolo that commemorated the Possesso of Leo IX, who ruled for less than a month in 1605 (Fig. 2.3). During the possesso, a pope would progress through Rome visiting important sites before arriving at San Giovanni in Laterano, where he would take possession of that cathedral and be installed as the Bishop of Rome, completing his claim to the Church as successor of St. Peter. With the ceremony in San Giovanni closed to the common Roman, the main public celebration of the Possesso took place at the Campidoglio, the ancient Capitoline Hill overlooking the Forum. The Campidoglio was both a symbol of the power and spirit of ancient Rome, as well as the actual seat of the civic government. Celebrating here demonstrated the passing of possession of the city to the papacy, a transfer symbolically demonstrated by the pope’s procession through the city.35 Michelangelo renovated the Capitoline between 1536 and 1546, including fitting it with the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (believed at the time to be Constantine). The renovated Capitoline, at the terminal of the Corso, a main route into the city from the northern entrance at the Pizza del Popolo, celebrated the ancient Roman in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31–52. 35 Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 43.

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Empire. After Michelangelo, it was no longer a goat hill. Also, on the route of the Possesso was the new Jesuit church of the Gesù. It was a very large building, built in the brand-new Baroque style, and located almost exactly in the center of early modern Rome. Its size, location, and grandeur speak to the astounding rise of the powerful, and fearsome, Jesuit order, which was confirmed by Pope Paul III a mere 25 years before this massive church was begun. The Possesso route ran past a number of new churches, as well as through the forum itself before heading into the disabitato, the unoccupied portion of intramural Rome.

“[O]n a hill of pine and stone”36 By the seventeenth century, the eastern hills of Rome were the most fashionable area for the city’s patrician families.37 The area emerged as the most fashionable and desirable new district of the city in part because the land was largely empty and easy to acquire. Note that one neighborhood around the lower slopes of the Quirinale hill was called Capo le Case, or end of the houses. Along with the clean air and beautiful view, the area afforded Romans a pleasant pastoral retreat, quite unlike the noisy, pungent, and crowded conditions of the urban core. The land on the Quirinale was affordable, plentiful, and scattered with antiquities. Amidst the orchards, vineyards, and ruins, the elite families (anxious to demonstrate their standing in society) jockeyed for space to build villas, establish gardens, and excavate ancient treasures.38 Villas were used for day trips out of the hustle and bustle of city life, for breaths of fresh air gained by walks in green spaces, as a setting for important dinners, masques, plays, operas and other such entertainments, and a place to display sculpture collections.39 This was the quintessential old villa quarter of Rome, where humanists taught Greek in the villas and gardens, and edited the texts of Roman agricultural authors. The lex hortorum, an old tradition undoubtedly linked to ancient 36 Cesare Pavese, “Passerò per Piazza di Spagna,” 1951. 37 Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1990). 38 Mirka Benes, Mirka. “Landowning and the Villa in the Social Geography of the Roman Territory: The Location and Landscapes of the Villa Pamphilij, 1645–70,” in Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler, ed. Alexander von Hoffman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 187–209. 39 David David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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precedents, maintained that the gates of gardens were to be open to the public.40 Those inclined to humanist pursuits could wander under the bows of elm and cypress trees, stop by a murmuring brook or bubbling fountain, and contemplate the sculpture of antiquity. 41

“[S]o much twisting of necks to lay straight streets” Getting through Rome, however, was a real challenge. In the disabitato functioning roads were lacking (though a palimpsest of the ancient network remained) and important sites, like the ancient churches along and outside the walls, were far flung. In the abitato, the narrow and confusing Medieval street network was overloaded by the constant crush of pilgrims, retinues, religious processions, farm animals, and everyday movement. Tens of thousands of visitors descended on Rome every year, and hundreds of thousands in Jubilees. Papal entourages, as well as those of cardinals, diplomats, and the wealthy elite, habitually clogged the streets of Rome. The crowded streets produced by the Jubilee of 1300 became Dante’s source for the image of teeming, writhing masses in Hell.42 Fights, sometimes resulting in deaths, could occur in disputes over prestige and right-of-way.43 This massive crush of people, along with the traffic of permanent residents, overwhelmed the existing street network, necessitating the construction of a new street network with the goal of alleviating congestion and linking the disparate districts of the city. Grand schemes for a comprehensive street network were proposed, but never really realized.44 Successive popes in early modern Rome sought to improve circulation with new and better roads and imagined a street network superimposed 40 Coffin, David. “The ‘Lex Hortorum’ and Access to Gardens of Latium During the Renaissance,” Journal of Garden History 2 (1982): 201–232. 41 Francis Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 42 Dante, Inferno, 18: 22-18:33. 43 In Baroque Rome, prestige was a serious matter. Disputes over protocol often erupted in the streets of Rome when something as simple as two carriages would meet. The noble of lesser rank was expected to stop and let the other noble pass first but deciding exactly who was the lesser noble was often hotly contested. These impasses could lead to outright violence, as was the case in September 1634 when Carlo Colonna and Gregorio Caetani met in the streets of Rome. They and their entourages took to swords, and the fight resulted in the death of Gregorio. See Judith Hook, “Urban VIII: The Paradox of a Spiritual Monarchy,” in The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty, 1400–1800, ed. A.G. Dickens (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 230. 44 Charles Burroughs, “Absolutism and the Rhetoric of Topography: Streets in the Rome of Sixtus V,” in Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, ed. Zeynep Çelik, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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on the ancient city, although only minor but significant roads projects were completed. Wide, straight long streets, uncluttered and lined with new and impressive buildings, offered relief from the maze-like character of Rome’s streets. Perhaps the first such street built in Rome was the Via Pia, antiquity’s Alta Semita and today’s Via Venti Settembre.45 The road was repaired, cleared, and widened under Pius IV by Michelangelo, and ran from the Porta Pia to the Palazzo Quirinale. Almost immediately, new and extravagant constructions were begun all along its length and intersecting streets. It became popular for people to parade around in carriages. John Evelyn describes such a scene at Piazza Farnese, but that piazza was cramped.46 The Via Pia emerges as the preferred place in Rome to go out and be seen, as it was the broadest and most scenic. People walked and rode up and down the street. This activity was quite regular and normally occurred in the evening. Carriages become fashionable in the second half of the sixteenth century across Europe, and Rome had more than any other city.47 By 1594, there were 888 carriages in Rome, owned by 675 people; in that year Ambrosio Spinola completed a single trip across town accompanied by 80. 48 It has been widely claimed that Cardinal Charles Borromeo asserted that two things were necessary for success in Rome: “to love God and to own a carriage.”49

Donne e “Donne di vita male” Rome was a very male city.50 In 1600, Rome’s population was 107,729, of which 45,596 were women and 63,133 were men, producing a 3:2 ratio of men to women.51 This male majority was a reflection of the presence of the Catholic 45 Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social History of Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 118–124. 46 John Evelyn, Diary, 6 November 1644. See John Evelyn and Austin Dobson, The Diary of John Evelyn, vols. 1-3 (London: Macmillan, 1906). 47 Girouard 1985, 118. See also John M. Hunt, “The Ceremonial Possession of a City: Ambassadors and their Carriages in Early Modern Rome,” Royal Studies Journal, 3, no. 2 (2016): 69–89. 48 Delumeau 1957, 445 49 Delumeau 1957, 443. 50 A dominant and dominating male presence in the city has at times obscured early modern Roman women, but thankfully, new scholarship is emerging. For an introduction, see Elizabeth S. Cohen, “Open City: An Introduction to Gender in Early Modern Rome,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 17, no. 1 (2014): 35–54. 51 Eugenio Sonnino, “The Population of Baroque Rome,” in Rome-Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter van and Elisja Schulte Kessel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 50–70.

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curia, political embassies, and construction labor. Women had little choice in social station, often with options limited to becoming a wife and mother, or a nun.52 Though professional trades were often closed to women, renting housing or lodging became an essential resource for women who had to act as family heads.53 Poor women could also find work as servants, as there was always laundry to be done. Sixtus V built the Lavaroio Felice, a public laundry on the Quirinale for reformed prostitutes working as laundresses (a depiction of the laundry is included among a series of frescoes by Cesare Nebbia in 1589 that celebrated the pope’s activities).54 The Quirinale was also an elevated and thus protected space for elite Roman women, and they spearheaded several projects in the eastern hills of Rome.55 Patronage was an important activity of Rome’s elite women.56 An Orsini widow-built Santa Maria Maddalena for the cloistered Dominican nuns, an order she later joined, while Caterina Nobili Sforza converted the Baths of Diocletian into the monastery Foglianti.57 Later, Camilla Peretti, sister of Pope Sixtus V, gave the land next to the Baths for a new convent for Foglianti nuns. Bernini built San Andrea al Quirinale for the Jesuits on part of the land of the widow of the Duke of Tagliacozzo; the other half of her lands were donated to an order of reformed Capuchin nuns, the Clarisse. For poor women, there was also the oldest profession.58 Sixtus IV attempted to contain prostitutes in the Bocca della Verità district, then called the Bordelletto.59 In 1500, prostitution was concentrated in district between the Jewish Ghetto and the Ponte Sistina. 52 For a fuller image, see Erin J. Campbell, “Prophets, Saints, and Matriarchs: Portraits of Old Women in Early Modern Italy”, Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2010): 807–849. 53 Eleonora Canepari, “Cohabitations, Household Structures, and Gender Identities in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17, no. 1 (2014): 142. 54 Katherine Wentworth Rinne, “The Landscape of Laundry in Late Cinquecento Rome,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, no. 1 (2002): 51. 55 Katherine A. McIver, “Matrons as Patrons: Power and Influence in the Courts of Northern Italy in the Renaissance,” Artibus Et Historiae / Istituto Internationale Per Le Ricerche Di Storia Dell’Arte (IRSA) (2001): 75–89. 56 Catherine King, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkin (Kirksville, MO.: Truman State University Press, 2001), 317–16. 57 Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and Their Convents,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (1994): 644–63. 58 Elizabeth S. Cohen, “Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the Cityscape of Late-Sixteenth-Century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 12, no. 3 (1998): 392–409; Georgina Mason, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). 59 Lanciani 1906, 68.

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By the seventeenth century, attempts were made to confine prostitutes to the Campus Marzio near Piazza del Popolo.60

“[F]ountains are made for the enjoyment of water”61 The expansion of Renaissance Rome would have been “impossible without an ample supply of good water,” and initially Rome had little.62 In 1453, Nicholas V and Leon Battista Alberti restored the Aqua Virgo (now Acqua Vergine) aqueduct from Salome to Rome. It terminated at the Trevi Fountain, but this supply would often run dry in the summer.63 As late as 1560, most Romans were still getting their water from wells, or from the Tiber: water came from upstream, carried in barrels on donkeys’ backs by acquariciarii, and sold in the streets.64 A second line was added to the Vergine in 1566–1575, while the Aqua Felice (completed by Sixtus V in 1586) watered the eastern hills. Finally, in 1609, Paul V restored the Trajan’s Aqua Traiana, creating the Acqua Paolo, which amply supplied Trastevere and the Vatican. By 1600, Rome had the greatest supply of drinking water of any city in Europe, with 20,000 cubic meters of aqueduct water flowing into the city per day.65 To distribute all this water, Rome began building fountains at a prolific rate: between 1575 and 1600, 35 new fountains were put into service. Fountains could be majestic monuments or simple drinking fountains. Of the former, perhaps the greatest example is Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona from 1648–1651 (Fig. 2.4). The fountain depicts four rivers, each symbolizing a continent and identified by a reclining river God: the Danube for Europe, the Ganges for Asia, the Rio de la Platta for the Americas, and the Nile for Africa. Yet the fountain is rich in layered political meaning and enacts the drama of post-Tridentine Catholicism expansion across Europe and around the world, while also transforming the piazza into a “scenographic representation of papal power.”66 Such monumental fountains 60 Girouard 1985, 135. 61 Filippo Baldinucci, The Life of Bernini, trans. Catherine Enggass (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966), 63. 62 Girouard 1985, 124. 63 Torgil Magnuson, Rome in the Age of Bernini, Volume 1 (Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982), 115 64 Lanciani 1906, 79. 65 Compare with the height of aqueduct water supply in antiquity when 1.1 million cubic meters of water flowed into the city every 24 hours. 66 Genevieve Warwick, Bernini: Art as Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 144. See also Cesare D’Onofrio, Le fontane di Roma (Rome: Romana Società, 1986), 450–457; Mary

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Figure 2.4. Lieven Cruyl, View of the Piazza Navona, 1666. Source: Ghent University Library

abound in Rome, but so do smaller fountains, such as Bernini’s Fountain of the Bees (1644), a small beveratori (drinking fountain) that stands near to the triumphant Triton Fountain in Piazza Barberini.67 The inscription on the Fountain of the Bees refers to both fountains and notes that Urban built the former for the “public ornament of the city” and with the latter “took care of the needs of the people.” This message is a central tenant of papal government: care for the Roman people. Urban VIII, who commissioned the Fountain of the Bees, completed a number of public projects for the benefit of the Roman people, including establishing silk and wool industries, building granaries and regulating grain supply, roads and building bridges, and introducing new flood control measures.68 The fountains of Rome Christian, “Bernini’s ‘Danube’ and Pamphili Politics,” The Burlington Magazine 128, no. 988 (1986); Tod Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 93–100; Rudolf Preimesberger, “Obeliscus Pamphilus: Beitrage zu Vorgeschichte und Ikonographie des Vierstoembrunnens auf Piazza Navona,” Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 75 (1974), 192. 67 Matthew Knox Averett, “The Political Rhetoric of Bernini’s Fountains in the Piazza Barberini,” Sixteenth Century Journal, XLV, no. 1 (2014): 3–24; Katherine Wentworth Rinne, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 68 Pastor 1952 XXIX, 368–373. See also Luciano Palermo, Mercati del Grano a Roma tra medioevo e rinascimento, vol. 1 (Rome: Instituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1990); Volker Reinhardt, “Annona and Bread Supply in Rome,” in Rome, Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century

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provided abundant water for both human and animal consumption. Even today, humble nasoni quenches the thirst of Romans and tourists in the city’s hot summers.

“[T]he streets […] should be ornamented”69 Rome was a city of spectacles as pageantry was fundamental to the cultural life of the city.70 Grand processions wound through the city for important events, while confraternities and pilgrims regularly paraded through the city.71 Processions followed by performances could welcome new monuments, such as the festivities for the unveiling of the Four Rivers Fountain in Piazza Navona in 1651.72 Piazza Navona witnessed “at all times of the year, jugglers, tightrope walkers, performing bears, and other forms of entertainment were always to be found there.”73 Piazze were regularly converted into festival spaces for jousts, naumachiae, and bullfights.74 Fireworks often lit the Roman night on important holidays, especially the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul and throughout Carnivale, as well as during visits of important dignitaries.75 Typical activities at any large celebration include feasts, plays, and musical performances, all of which often involved large and spectacular ephemeral art and architecture. The Council of Trent explicitly commanded that the faithful give “due honor” to saints.76 This unleashed a wave of canonizations that rolled through seventeenth-century Rome, producing great public spectacles consisting of lavish processions that terminated at St. Peter’s.77 Europe, ed. Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte van Kessel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997). 69 Gigli, 1994, 752. 70 Stinger 1985, 51. 71 Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116. 72 Antonio Bernal, Copiosissimo discorso della fontana, e guglia eretta in Piazza Nauona, per ordine della Santità di Nostro Signore Innocentio X. dal Signor Caualier Bernini (G. Tiberij: Rome, 1651); Warwick 2012, 147. 73 Girouard 1985, 133. 74 Luisa Cardilli, Feste e spettacoli nelle piazze romane: mostra antologica (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990). 75 Werrett, Simon. Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17. 76 Council of Trent and Henry Joseph Schoeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, Il: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978), 215. 77 Alessandra Anselmi, Alessandra, “Theaters for the Canonization of Saints,” in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. William Tronzo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005), 244.

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Figure 2.5. Filippo Gagliardi and Filippo Lauri, Carousel in the Courtyard of the Palazzo Barberini in Honor of Christina of Sweden, 1656. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps the greatest cultural event in seventeenth-century Rome was the arrival of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1655, an event fêted as a triumph for the Catholic Church. For reasons both political and religious, Christina abdicated her throne in 1654.78 The next year, Christina officially arrived in Rome on 23 December, and entered the city via the Porta del Popolo.79 The piazza was decorated for Christina’s arrival and Bernini’s new gate converted the piazza into a performative space in which Christina’s arrival became another act in the long drama of Catholic-Protestant antagonism.80 One of the most celebrated events marking Christina’s tenure in Rome was held on 29 February in the Leap Year 1656 (Fig. 2.5). On that day, the important Barberini family organized a Carousel on Shrove Tuesday, the last day of Carnival. Held in the courtyard of their familial palazzo, the celebration boasted of music, costumes, acting, and dancing.

78 Oskar Garstein, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia: The Age of Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina of Sweden, 1622–1656 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 719. 79 Christina actually arrived in Rome via the Vatican very late on 20 December. Her entry at the Porta del Popolo was a staged event designed to maximize its propagandistic effect. 80 Kandare, Camilla, “CorpoReality: Queen Christina of Sweden and the Embodiment of Sovereignty,” in Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome, ed. Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 54–55.

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The Twilight of Early Modern Rome Christina’s residence in the city was a highlight of Baroque Rome. But shortly after her celebrated entry into the city, Alexander VII died and with the end of his reign came an end to the major building campaigns that defined early modern Rome. Papal coffers were exhausted and could no longer sustain the vast scale of construction the previous two and a half centuries had seen.81 Rome remained a city of spectacles, though its pageantry was surpassed by the splendors of Versailles and other European capitals. Papal influence in European politics was similarly ceded to other powers. Still, the papal program launched by Martin V 250 years earlier was successful, and indeed must be regarded as one of the most remarkable eras of urban construction in European history. In 1450, the population of Rome was around 20,000; it nearly tripled to 55,000 in 1527 when the first official census was taken.82 That number would double to 110,000 in 1600, then inch up to 125,000 by mid-century before falling back to 110,000 at the end of the century.83 A summary of the architectural projects of early modern Rome would note that dozens of churches had been restore or built ex-novo; the abitato had been expanded and the eastern hills blanketed in villas and gardens; dilapidated buildings had been cleared and replaced; a new network of roads had been built which both relieved congestion and linked districts; piazze had been enlarged to accommodate spectacles, markets, and the like; monuments were erected to orient visitors and remind them of the city’s glorious history; and aqueducts and fountains kept the city amply supplied with water (Fig. 2.6). All these architectural projects contributed to the emergence of the Papacy as a significant political entity in Europe. And though the Vatican was unsuccessful in establishing itself as the singular religious authority across the continent, it nonetheless quashed conciliarism within the post-Tridentine Church, where papalism reigned supreme, and was able to wield unrivaled religious power. Early modern Rome was indeed full of “noble edifices,” from churches and palaces to monuments and fountains, that glorified elite families and exalted the Chair of St Peter.

81 Habel, Dorothy Metzger. The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 82 Girouard 1985, 116. 83 Sonnino 1998, 52.

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Figure 2.6. Giovanni Battista Nolli, La Pianta Grande di Roma, 1748. Source: Yale University Art Gallery.

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Dey, Hendrik W. The Making of Medieval Rome: A New Profile of the City, 400–1420. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. D’Onofrio, Cesare. Le fontane di Roma. Rome: Romana Società, 1986. Dunn, Marilyn. “Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and Their Convents,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (1994): 644–63. Ettlinger, Leopold D. and Fein, H. O. The Sistine Chapel Before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Evelyn, John and Dobson, Austin. The Diary of John Evelyn, vols. 1–3. London: Macmillan, 1906. Fosi, Irene. “Court and City in the Ceremony of the possesso in the Sixteenth Century.” In Court and Politics in Papal Rome, edited by Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, 31–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Freiberg, Jack. “In the Sign of the Cross: The Image of Constantine in the Art of Counter-Reformation Rome.” In Piero della Francesca and his Legacy. Studies in the History of Art, no. 48, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 67–87. Washington: National Gallery of Art. 1995. Frommel, Christoph Luitpold. “Papal Policy: The Planning of Rome During the Renaissance.” In Art and History: Images and Their Meaning, edited by Robert I. and Theodore K. Rabb Rotberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fumaroli, Marc. “Cross, Crown, and Tiara: The Constantine Myth Between Paris and Rome (1590–1690),” in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, Studies in the History of Art, no. 48, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 89–102. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Garstein, Oskar. Rome and the Counter-Reformation in Scandinavia: The Age of Gustavus Adolphus and Queen Christina of Sweden, 1622–1656. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992. Gigli, Giacinto. Diario di Roma, ed. Manlio Barberito. Rome: Colombo, 1994. Girouard, Mark. Cities and People: A Social History of Architectural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Metzger Habel, Dorothy. The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Metzger Habel, Dorothy. “When all of Rome was under construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Hammond, Frederick. Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Haskell, Francis and Penny, N. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Hook, Judith “Urban VIII: The Paradox of a Spiritual Monarchy.” In The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty, 1400–1800, edited by A.G. Dickens, 213–231. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977.

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Hunt, John M. “The Ceremonial Possession of a City: Ambassadors and their Carriages in Early Modern Rome,” Royal Studies Journal, 3, no. 2 (2016): 69–89. Johns, Christopher. Papal Art and Cultural Politics Rome in the Age of Clement XI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Kandare, Camilla. ‘CorpoReality: Queen Christina of Sweden and the Embodiment of Sovereignty.’ In Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome, edited by Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare, 47–63. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. King, Catherine. Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300–1550. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Kirwin, Willilam. Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. New York: P. Lang, 1997. Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Lanciani, Rodolfo Amedeo. The Destruction of Ancient Rome: A Sketch of the History of Monuments. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Lanciani, Rodolfo Amedeo. The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. Magnuson, Torgil. Rome in the Age of Bernini, Volume 1. Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982. Magnuson, Torgil. The Urban Transformation of Medieval Rome, 312–1420. Stockholm: Swedish Institute in Rome, 2004. Marder, Tod. Bernini and the Art of Architecture. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. Mason, Georgina. Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. McCahill, Elizabeth. Reviving the Eternal City: Rome and the Papal Court, 1420–1447. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. McIver, Katherine A. “Matrons as Patrons: Power and Influence in the Courts of Northern Italy in the Renaissance.” Artibus Et Historiae / Istituto Internationale Per Le Ricerche Di Storia Dell›Arte (IRSA) (2001): 75–89. Palermo, Luciano. Mercati del Grano a Roma tra medioevo e rinascimento, vol. 1. Rome: Instituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1990. Partner, Peter. The Lands of St. Peter: The Papal States in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Partner, Peter. Renaissance Rome 1500–1599. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Pastor, Ludwig. The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, Volume 29, trans. Ernest Graf. St. Louis: Herder, 1952. Preimesberger, Rudolf. “Obeliscus Pamphilus: Beitrage zu Vorgeschichte und Ikonographie des Vierstoembrunnens auf Piazza Navona,” Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 75 (1974): 192.

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Pavese, Cesare. “Passerò per Piazza di Spagna,” 1951. Reinhardt, Volker. “Annona and Bread Supply in Rome.” In Rome, Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter van Kessel and Elisja Schulte van Kessel. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997. Rice, Louise. “Pope Urban VIII and the Pantheon Portico.” In The Pantheon in Rome: Contributions to the Conference, Bern, November 9–12, 2006, edited by Gerd Grasshoff, Michael Heinzelmann, and Markus Wäfler, 155–156. Bern: Universität Bern, 2009. Wentworth Rinne, Katherine. “The Landscape of Laundry in Late Cinquecento Rome,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, no. 1 (2002): 34–60. Wentworth Rinne, Katherine. The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Sonnino, Eugenio. “The Population of Baroque Rome.” In Rome-Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter van and Elisja Schulte Kessel, 50–70. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997. Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Tanner, Marie. Jerusalem on the Hill: Rome and the Vision of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Renaissance. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010. Valone, Carolyn. “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome.” In Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, edited by Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins, 317–416. Kirksville, MO.: Truman State University Press, 2001. Waddy, Patricia. Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan. New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1990. Warwick, Genevieve. Bernini: Art as Theater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Werrett, Simon. Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010. Wickham, Chris. Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

About the Author Matthew Knox Averett is an Associate Professor of Art History at Creighton University. He took his PhD in Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri. He specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture, with a focus on the urban development of Early-Modern Rome.

3.

Perspective Cities: Staging Transferable Spaces in Learned Comedy Lucia Gemmani

Abstract The discovery of perspective as a visual technique in the arts introduced innovative ideas of space across a wide range of artistic mediums. In theater, its introduction fundamentally altered the stage setting, particularly that of learned comedy, which was commissioned to professional painters. These professionals often represented in detail spaces that reminded the viewers of well-known cities. Additionally, when paired with performed texts, perspective invited the audience to interrogate the interplay between their own lived experience and the fictional representation of city life. Since learned comedies were consumed in Renaissance courts, this interplay generated for the spectators a continuous negotiation between a search for order within a fixed city, and the possibility of going beyond the boundaries of social order. Keywords: learned comedy, Renaissance, stage setting, perspective

“I do not believe that anything has ever come closer to imitating reality.”1 So wrote Baldassar Castiglione upon first viewing Girolamo Genga’s scenografia (stage setting) for Calandria, the landmark work by Bernardo Dovizi from Bibbiena. These words attest to the innovative push toward realism brought

1 Baldassar Castiglione, “Lettera a Ludovico di Canossa (13–21 Febbraio 1513),” in Franco Ruff ini, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La “Calandria” alla corte di Urbino (Bologna: il Mulino, 1986), 310. All translations from Italian are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch03

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about by commedia erudita (learned comedy) in the sixteenth century.2 The connection between learned comedy and realism is at the basis of this chapter, which examines the key role played by the learned theatrical productions in establishing new ideas of space and the city through stage setting, and how these new ideas were informed by the technique of perspective developed in the fine arts during the Renaissance.3 By introducing perspective in stage design, the commedia erudita opened a game of interrelations between texts, visual set, and performance that engaged the viewer in drawing connections between his personal experience and the artificial representation of the city. Beyond drawing these connections, I further argue that the way the city was represented on stage suggests a changed conception of society overall. As the Renaissance court (whether it be a ducal or a prince court, or an oligarchic higher middle class) used learned comedies and art to promote its political and social functions, the use of the city in these performances emphasizes a tension between a search for an ordered and fixed image of the public space and the chaotic and disorderly perception of everyday life. During the early Renaissance, as humanistic scholars disseminated classical texts, the theater of Plautus and Terence stimulated and gave momentum to courtly theater with representations during festivities and special occasions, distancing them from public theatrical shows like saltimbanchi and sacred representations. 4 Around the end of the fifteenth 2 For a comprehensive summary of the characteristics that def ine learned comedy, see Luciano Bottoni, “Il teatro del Rinascimento,” in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, eds. N. Borsellino, and W. Pedullà, vol. V “L’età della Controriforma. Il Tardo Cinquecento” (Milano: Federico Motta, 1999), 27–65, where he also identifies the main names and works belonging to the genre. See in particular the section on “The form of the Comedy” (41–48), which explains the main traits of learned comedy. 3 Perspective brought about a revolution to the idea of space in European art. A few key studies that explore the introduction and evolution of perspective during the Renaissance and the possibility of its symbolic interpretation are Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991); James Ackerman, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994); Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994); James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Kristi Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge (New York: Springer 2007). 4 In 1429 Niccolò from Treviri found and published twelve new comedies by Plautus. See for example Mario Baratto, La commedia del Cinquecento: aspetti e problemi (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1977), 46. For a brief but detailed history of the birth and development of Humanistic theater, see Luciano Bottoni, “Il teatro: testi e spettacolo,” in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, eds. N. Borsellino and W. Pedullà, vol. III “Rinascimento e Umanesimo I. Dal Quattrocento all’Ariosto” (Milano: Federico Motta, 1999), 286–311; Ronald L. Martinez, “Spectacle,” in Cambridge

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century intellectuals and courtiers started to perform full comedies and to translate them into vernacular Italian. It is in the wake of these translations that original theatrical pieces in the vernacular appeared. More specifically, we can identify the beginning of the production of learned comedy with the carnevale of 1508, the year of the first representation in Ferrara of Ludovico Ariosto’s Cassaria in prose.5 This genre began in connection with the rise of Classicism, a movement that appropriated classical ideals—newly re-theorized thanks to the rediscovery, publication and study of classical texts—and re-elaborated them into new works. These new works were preoccupied with a variety of recycled ideals; for our purposes in this chapter, I will focus on the search for order and unity as they were adapted in learned comedy to a more modern setting and representations.6 These new works took the Roman theater as a model but engaged in a competition with their classical authors—a competition that pervaded all genres of literature and all forms of art in the Renaissance—to prove that modern authors and artists could be considered classics as well.7 As Companion to the Italian Renaissance, ed. M. Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 239–259. 5 The scholarship regards Ludovico Ariosto’s Cassaria and Suppositi as the founding works of the genre commedia erudita. In these works, the author does not translate from any specific text, but instead creates the full plot, inspired by classical plot lines and characters. See, in particular, Bottoni, “Il teatro del Rinascimento,” 27–28. However, Ariosto’s innovative creation belongs to a somewhat established tradition of performance of full comedies during carnevale season at the court of Ferrara. During the Carnevale 1502, for example, to celebrate the wedding between Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia, five comedies by Plautus were staged in Ferrara, translated into the vernacular (Epidicus, Bacchides, Miles Gloriosus, Asinaria, Casina). Furthermore, in 1503 in Mantua a comedy titled Formicone by Publio Filippo Mantovano was staged. This comedy takes its inspiration from Apuleius’s Metamorphosis. Even though the characters are revised and adapted to a new storyline, we can consider this comedy more a pedantic translation of the Latin text than an original work. For an analysis of the major authors and the works that defined key moments in the evolution of the genre, see Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: London, University of Chicago Press, 1969); Bottoni, “Il teatro del Rinascimento,” 27–70. For a thorough synthesis of all the works and authors belonging to the genre see Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960). 6 Classicism is a movement born within the dominant culture of the higher class, as a progeny of the Humanism of 1400s. Classicist authors, such as Pietro Bembo, Baldassar Castiglione, Giovanni Della Casa, Ludovico Castelvetro and so on, strove for de-municipalizing—internationalizing—their works, which are moved by a pedagogical interest, informed by the ideals of medietas, sprezzatura, and the pursuit of the simplex et unum, among others. The most compelling study of the traits defining Classicism is Amedeo Quondam, Rinascimento e classicismi: Forme e metamorfosi della modernità (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013). 7 From the very first learned comedy, Ariosto states his intention to compete with ancient authors, and challenges his audience to let go of the prejudice that only ancient authors can be proclaimed classics. Cassaria’s Prologue prudently poses this question about modern authors

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this competition became central to the creation of Renaissance art, the borrowings from classical authors, mainly Plautus and Terence, expanded to influence formal and thematic features. One of the key common elements in these comedies is a return to order at the end of the play, thanks to the mechanism of the conciliazione (conciliation).8 This mechanism was mandated by the form of the comedy, which was fully written, organized and performed by members of the court, for the court. As Mario Baratto maintains, these comedies are at the center of the “ritual organization” of a “selected audience,” both socially and culturally privileged. Therefore, while the comedy remains distracting and entertaining, it also “consecrates” the élite’s hegemony and prestige.9 Nevertheless, exactly because of the sponsorship and interest of the court, learned comedy produced and benefited from the fruitful collaboration of some of the most important names in the cultural history of the Italian Renaissance.10 These partnerships are at the raising to the level of classics, with the idea of a “new comedy” (v.1), that opens the competition between “modern ingenuity” and the “ancient” one (vv.8–9). See Ludovico Ariosto, La Cassaria (in prosa), in Tutte le opere, ed. C. Segre, vol. 4: “Commedie,” eds. G. Casella, G. Ronchi, E. Varasi (Milano: Mondadori, 1974), 3–4. This competition is clearly exposed in the works of Bibbiena, Machiavelli and Aretino, as a vital force that drives these authors to renew the genre and make it contemporary. To this end see Baratto, La commedia del Cinquecento, 44–48. 8 Conciliazione defines a mechanism that is used in the finale of a comedy, during the conclusion or solution of the action, to return the relationships and the story to an ordered universe. Giovan Giorgio Trissino calls these events “fortuitous instances beyond expectation.” More specifically, following the classical form of comedy, he divides the endings of comedy into “simple” and “complex.” “[S]imple” endings are brought about by the author, without the need of divine or other interventions. Within “complex” endings, Trissino calls “revoluzioni” or “ricognizioni” instances in which conciliation is constituted by the anagnorisis (recognition or discovery) of a character as being a long-lost family member (a child, a parent, a sibling). These allows for an integration of that member into the social consortium, and therefore the re-establishment of the social order. This particular mechanism also usually works in favor of the “rightfulness” of certain social relationships in the hopes of achieving a happy ending, ideally a wedding celebration. The main goal of the conciliation is to re-integrate and re-form the social community, re-establishing the original economical and civic order. See Giovan Giorgio Trissino, “La Sesta Divisione,” in La quinta e la sesta divisione della Poetica, in Trattati di poetica e di retorica del Cinquecento, ed. B. Weinberg, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 59. For an analysis of the ending of the comedy in classical and renaissance authors, see Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 122–129, which summarizes the different types of ending in relation to classical models, through commentaries on Aristotle. 9 Baratto, La commedia del Cinquecento, 49–50. 10 Ludovico Ariosto and Pellegrino da Udine (Cassaria, Ferrara 1508); Ariosto and Raffaello Sanzio (Suppositi, Roma, 1519); Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Baldassar Castiglione and Girolamo Genga (Calandria, Urbino, 1513); Bibbiena, Castiglione and Baldassarre Peruzzi (Calandria, Rome, 1514); Niccolò Machiavelli, Andrea del Sarto and Aristotele da Sangallo (Mandragola, Firenze, 1514, or 1515, with the Compagnia della Cazzuola). See Baratto, 57–58.

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center of the revolution of theatrical space at the root of modern theater architecture and stage setting. Historically, setting was rudimentary, horizontally conceived, and created to suggest a sequence of time and action. The evolution of this design began with moving the backdrop to the back of the stage and introducing artistic perspective into its craft, which transformed the classically inspired scaenae frons into a perspectival stage setting. Clearly the idea of “multiplicity” underlying this type of setting did not resonate with the core values of Classicism, particularly when the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics imposed a re-evaluation of the unities of time, place and action.11 In this search for unity, the perspectival stage setting has been regarded as a visual representation of the ideals of Classicism to the audience of the new comedy. Fabio Finotti proposes that perspective started to be used in stage setting from the sixteenth century, after it was thematized and became a common practice for painters at the end of the fifteenth century.12 This hypothesis is confirmed by witnesses of the time, which convey the audience’s expectation toward the use of perspective in stage design only after Ariosto’s Cassaria (1508). That representation was the fruit of a collaboration between Ariosto and Pellegrino da Udine, the painter hired to design the stage setting. The use of a professional painter brought forth a novelty to the setting, which produced wonder in the audience as they perceived its difference from former stage design, as registered by Bernardino Prosperi’s letter to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, The best part of all these festivities and performances were the scenes […] that consisted of a street and a perspectival view of a city with houses, churches, bell towers, and gardens, rendered with such diversity as to leave the viewer unsatiated; all this contrived with such ingenuity and skill.13 11 See Radcliff-Umstead, “Introduction,” to The Birth of Modern Comedy, 2–10. In the section titled “The neo-Aristotelian School of Theatrical Practice” he reconstructs the steps taken in introducing and elaborating Aristotelian ideas, in particular the “unities” of time, space and action, from the Poetics to Renaissance theater. The importance of Aristotle’s ideas became more substantial around the middle of the century, mainly after the 1548 commentary by Francesco Robortello. The apex of the Italian elaboration of Aristotle’s theories is Ludovico Castelvetro’s commentary, published in 1570, where he expands on previous scholarship particularly through the amplif ication of the importance of the audience, to the point of making the audience a “carefully restricted and described” character of the book (Bernard Weinberg, “Aristotle to Pseudo-Aristotle,” Comparative Literature 5 (1953): 101). 12 Fabio Finotti, “Perspective and Stage Design, Fiction and Reality in the Italian Renaissance Theater of the Fifteenth Century,” Renaissance Drama, 36/37 (2010): 21–42. 13 Bernardino Prosperi, letter to Isabella D’este, (Ferrara, 8 March, 1508) in Finotti, “Perspective and Stage Design”, 30.

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Figure 3.1. Circle of Girolamo da Carpi, Sketch of scene with a background illustrating the square of Ferrara, c.1550. Raccolta Iconografica Ferrarese, vol. 1, Raccolta di stampe relative a palazzi e chiese di Ferrara e in modo particolare del Castello e della Cattedrale. Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, H 5.1. 59/bis (Reconstruction of lost original drawing).

We do not have any drawing of the original setting for this first Cassaria. However, the perception of “ingenuity and skill” witnesses the audience’s awareness of the originality of this setting and of its technical execution. By analyzing a drawing of a stage setting representing Ferrara, housed at the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea (fig. 3.1), Ludovico Zorzi argues that perspective was in fact not as perfectly regulated in the theater as it was in the fine arts.14 As this drawing has been considered a sketch for the representation of Ariosto’s Suppositi (staged in 1509), Sergio Costola implies that perspective enters the theater only after the representation of Suppositi, and that perhaps Ferrara’s theater never really used a perspectival scene.15 Nevertheless, we can assume that perspective enters the stage setting with and through learned comedy, as professional painters started to be hired 14 Ludovico Zorzi, Il teatro e la città: Saggi sulla scena italiana (Torino: Einaudi, 1977), 27–30. Indeed, Zorzi believes that in the above description the word “prospettiva” would simply refer to the stage setting in general. 15 Costola implies that Ariosto “resisted” the application of perspective, to avoid its ideological implications of unity and the centrality of the figure of the Duke, in order to avoid an “illusory” conciliation (Sergio Costola, “The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi,” Mediaevalia 33 (2012): 217). Although I agree with Costola that the ferrarese scene can be analyzed as a “process” ever evolving and redefining the social and institutional boundaries, I believe that there was a use of perspective in Ariosto’s plays.

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to design the stage setting. It is in connection with linear perspective that this comedy evaluates and proposes a different order and the possibility of the intersection of fiction and reality on stage and for the audience. In fact, the introduction of a more or less precise perspective played a fundamental part in creating an illusion of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is not simply the capacity of imitating reality with truthfulness. During the Renaissance this word came to mean the fictional representation of what is real: the artificial interpretation of reality. This characteristic became important in all artistic productions as it was a way for the artist to produce wonder in the viewer. Baldassar Castiglione in his dedicatory letter to De Silva, in The Courtier, for example, describes his efforts and struggle in depicting a verisimilar portrait of the people at the court of Urbino. I am sending you this book as a portrait of the Court of Urbino, not indeed by the hand of Raphael or Michelangelo, but by a worthless painter, who knows only how to draw the outlines, and cannot adorn the truth with pretty colours or use perspective to deceive the eye.16

We can see here the correlation between the depiction of a portrait of reality close to the truth and the use of perspective as a tool that would “deceive the eye.” Castiglione understands that a talented painter can “use perspective to deceive the eye” and use his art to bring reality to the viewer. This technique of perspective thus opens a painting—and therefore a stage setting—toward reality; it adds depth, insight, expansion, and openness toward the real world. Peter Womack maintains that “the perspective set and the unities of time and place are historical twins” and, quoting Ludovico Castelvetro, that the “function” of these unities “is to protect ‘the appearance of fact’.”17 The viewer was expecting this game between illusion and reality, as Castiglione states in his letter to Ludovico of Canossa: Moreover, the scene gave the illusion of a beautiful city with streets, palaces, churches, towers, and streets that looked real, each of which appeared in relief, being enhanced further by the fine painting and wellrendered perspective. Among other things there was an octagonal temple in half-relief […] with fake windows of alabaster […] Certain areas were 16 Baldassar Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, ed. G. Carnazzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 2006), 50. Translation: Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. G. Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), 32–33. 17 Peter Womack, “The Comical Scene: Perspective and Civility on the Renaissance Stage,” Representations 101 (2008): 35–36.

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adorned with fake glass of precious stones that looked absolutely genuine, [and] freestanding fake marble figures.18

In this text we can see that in 1513, when Castiglione organized the representation of Bibbiena’s Calandria with the painter Girolamo Genga, there was already an expectation for illusion produced by the perspectival stage setting, although by then the backdrop had evolved into a fully tridimensional apparatus. The expectation of the audience further shows that by 1513 the set for learned comedy was already well-def ined in its elements: the stage setting needed to represent an urban landscape. If we look at Sebastiano Serlio’s Secondo libro di prospettiva (first publication in 1545, then included in the 1551 collection) we find a summary of how the Renaissance stage setting was organized. Although Serlio’s scene does not reference a setting for a specific comedy, we can assume, in Baratto’s words, that he was making an accurate account of practices in theater up to the mid-sixteenth century.19 According to Womack, Serlio’s drawing of the “comical scene” (fig. 3.2) illustrates the relationship between the two fundamental values of “unity” and “complication,” which he considers the main components of the Renaissance scene, in “structural opposition” with each other. In Serlio’s drawing the setting for the comedy is a perspective view of a street that, as Womack argues, does not continue to an infinite point, but ends in a humanly built construction because, according to Serlio, in order to study the human being, it is necessary to use what is human. In the scene, the relationship between the buildings and their “end” in perspective is used to make the theatrical world collide in dialogue with the real world. This dynamic is achieved by enhancing the possibility for the viewers to look beyond the buildings, at the same time occluding their view with those very buildings, thus keeping the audience from escaping the fictional world, and proposing a reflection on their own real one. Indeed, although the action of the comedy happens outdoors, the buildings portrayed function as boundaries between private and public space, between what is familiar and what is unexpected, thereby intensifying an exchange between the characters and the spectators.20 The viewers are provoked to see themselves 18 Ruffini, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento, 308. My emphasis. 19 Baratto, La commedia del Cinquecento, 35–89. 20 Womack (“The Comical Scene,” 42–44) maintains that female characters would often participate to the comedy from the inside of liminal spaces, such as doors and windows, which in the game of the comedy constitute also a sexual metaphor. See also Marlene Eberhart, “Performance, Print, and the Senses: Aretino and the Space of the City,” Early Theater XV (2012):

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Figure 3.2. Sebastiano Serlio, Scena Comica. In Il Primo [-quinto] libro di architettura. Venice: Melchiorre Sessa, 1551. Public Domain. Digitalized by University of California, https://hdl. handle.net/2027/uc1.c032439215. Unnumbered sheet, between 28-29.

reflected in the characters as they inhabit the audience’s city, and portray their everyday life. At the same time, the setting visually prevents an escape from the comedy, opening the action toward the audience, forcing a reflection on the spectators’ own reality. Serlio’s drawing and description remain, however, a synthesis of common practices. The buildings he portrays represent a typology of constructions for a model of fictionalized space. Artists would instead use recognizable buildings in the city to populate their setting. If we look back at Prosperi’s letter to Isabella d’Este on the first representation of Cassaria, previously quoted, we see that the stage setting already introduced the city as its main focus. As Carmela Pesca has accurately examined, the city in Ariosto’s comedies, and in learned comedy in general, is not just at the center of the 179–192, who clarifies that not only women inhabit these places but that also through them they are displayed and hidden to different degrees.

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play, it is its protagonist, it becomes a character itself.21 Analyzing Pellegrino da Udine’s stage setting for the Cassaria, Zorzi talks about the construction of a fictional environment that represented real-life locations in Ferrara. These specific places in the scene become a symbol of public life and the civic consortium. If we look again at Prosperi’s letter, we also know that the set would be saved and reused for other representations: “the scenes […] I doubt will be discarded, but rather preserved for late use.”22 If the set is reused, we may assume that the features of the city, while recognizable as specific buildings located in Ferrara, are viewed by the audience as mobile and interchangeable, not a fixed and univocal representation of one city in particular, but a summary of a city. In a recent study, Javier Berzal de Dios analyzes a wide variety of stage apparatuses starting with Baldassarre Peruzzi’s set for the representation in Rome of Bibbiena’s Calandria (1514). The scholar identifies the general tendency of representing on scene not a truthful portrayal of a specific city, but a “composite synecdoche,” which clearly manifested its artificial and synthetic purposes in illustrating a specific city on stage.23 The audience clearly recognizes the city as Rome or Florence or Pisa (according to each play), not because the buildings are measured and portrayed realistically, but because the spectators recognize it as a summary of a city. Berzal de Dios insists that these are not cities at all, but they create the experience of a city for the viewer. Although he disregards the possibility of these settings as being “ideal cities,” I would argue that they produce an “idea’” of a city, often of a very specific city for the audience. Hence, they may be regarded as “perspective” cities, insofar as they not only are “in perspective,” or designed with “linear perspective,” but they also needed an act of viewing to have meaning.24 The use of artistic perspective thus generates the audience’s perspective of the cities in front of them. As the use of perspective synthesizes the urban space, it also magnifies the idea of the city and deepens the performance toward reality. In other words, 21 Carmela Pesca, La città maschera: Geometria e dinamica della città rinascimentale (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2002), 21–38. 22 Finotti, “Perspective and Stage Design,” 30. 23 Javier Berzal de Dios, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 30. 24 According to the Merriam Webster definition, “perspective” is defined as “a mental view or prospect,” “a visible scene,” “the interrelation in which a subject and its parts are mentally viewed” and “the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance” (Merriam-Webster. com Dictionary, s.v. “perspective,” accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/perspective)

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by becoming a model city, the perspectival scene abstracts the referential aspects of the visual setting, expanding the possibilities, which that city can propose to the viewer. At the same time, as the comedy takes place on that stage and interacts with that city, the setting allows for an extension of the comedy toward the real life of the spectator. This dynamic is reflected in the full production of learned comedy, which shows that the authors added specificity to the city-scape itself, and used the setting as a key referential element in the interaction among the characters. One such move toward a more meaningful understanding of the visual city is found in the trend that sees the plays be transported from the imprecise location of the first Cassaria (originally the Greek-Levantine inspired city of Metellino, which became Sibari in the later version in verses) to the well-known cities of Ferrara, Venice, Florence, and Rome in the following plays, visually paired with the development and complication of the artistically-rendered city.25 Following this tendency, the texts—and therefore the characters—of the comedy also interacted more and more with the stage setting, transforming the synthesized city through the confusing and labyrinthic plot performed on stage. The texts point at the setting to emphasize the confusion created by the comedy. One clear example of this elaboration is in Act IV, Scene IV of Ariosto’s Suppositi (1509), where the servant Lizio, trying to make sense of the presence of people with the same name, asserts the mutability and interchangeability of places and names.26 By stating that “this” may not be “the same Ferrara” where Filogono’s son studies, and warning not to “confuse” or “exchange one place with another,” Lizio shows that the very setting illustrating Ferrara might not be the Ferrara they are looking for. This ambiguous quality of the dramatic city is not clarified by the stage setting. Instead, the set invites the confusion and the complex multiplicity of the concept of space. In other words, the fixed visual city becomes a tool in the hands of the author to amplify the “complication” of the play. In the prologue from Ariosto’s Negromante we see even more clearly the tension between the staged depiction of a recognizable city and the performance of an imagined city. The audience is reminded that the comedy is set in Cremona, however the stage setting is the same used a few days before for the Lena, which is set in Ferrara (Prologo, vv. 10–27). Drawing a connection 25 More specifically, Ferrara (Ariosto’s Suppositi and Lena), Cremona (Ariosto’s Negromante), Mantua (Aretino’s Marescalco) Florence (Machiavelli’s Mandragola and Clizia), Venice (Aretino’s Filosofo), Milan (Aretino’s Ipocrito), Naples (Bruno’s Candelaio) and of course Rome (Bibbiena’s Calandria, Aretino’s Cortigiana and Talanta). 26 Ludovico Ariosto, I Suppositi (in versi), in Tutte le opere, ed. C. Segre, vol. 4: “Commedie,” eds. G. Casella, G. Ronchi, E. Varasi (Milano: Mondadori, 1974), IV. 4, vv. 1404–1408.

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with the interchangeability of clothes and masks during the carnevale, the viewer is asked to imagine that the places described—with words and gestures—are in Cremona, even though visually they are set in Ferrara.27 The spectator’s perception of the visual city is doubly ambiguous: not only does the stage setting take inspiration from the real Ferrara, symbolically summarized by the unified scene in perspective, but it is also inspired by the previous theatrical performance, Lena, which already established the visual identity of that set as Ferrara. Now, as the audience is asked to imagine Cremona, the buildings on the scene are even more charged with metaphorical meaning, and the synthesized Ferrara is further abstracted as a model for the city of Cremona. This interchangeability between real locations and fictional ones is given by the stage setting, which even though fixed and recognizable, gives the illusion of being mobile and ambiguous. In enhancing the visual ambiguity of the set, the city loses its concrete reference to a specific place and its identity is transferrable. In addition to the words proclaimed on stage, we may assume that the actions of the actors destabilize and challenge the understanding of the visual city, provoking additional confusion in the audience.28 The most iconic example is the description of Rome from Pietro Aretino’s Cortigiana. At the beginning of the Cortigiana, both the Foreigner in the Prologue and then Messer Maco in the f irst scene arrive in the city and are shocked by its grandiosity and anonymity. In Act I, Scene I, instead of having a description of Rome the spectators hear a detailed illustration of Siena, all the while looking at a f ixed stage setting synthesizing Rome.29 The grandiosity and visual specificity of Rome in the apparatus becomes distant and disconnected, as Siena is precisely described in front of the viewer. This audience would be certainly more familiar with Rome, and maybe have experienced themselves a sense of shock and awe in entering the city, which would add to the tension between the recognition of the stage setting as Rome and a detachment from its realism. This game provokes a clash between the transferrable space of the “Roman” scene and the mental 27 Ludovico Ariosto, Il Negromante (II Redazione), in Tutte le opere, ed. C. Segre. Vol. 4: “Commedie,” eds. G. Casella, G. Ronchi, E. Varasi (Milano: Mondadori, 1974), Prologo, vv. 10–27. 28 Salvatore Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations (Lewisburg: Buckness University Press, 2002) brought attention to the fact that given the early stage of these scripts and scenarios we need to infer the stage directions from the semiotic elements in the text, such as the words that imply a direction or movement on the scene, to go inside or outside a building, and the reference to the buildings themselves. 29 Pietro Aretino, La Cortigiana, in Teatro Comico, ed. Luca D’Onghia (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 2014), Prologo, I.1.

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image of a “lived” Siena. Through the insistence on festivities and traditions participated by its people, the common life and experience of the city of Siena is superimposed on the Roman backdrop. Thus, Rome becomes distant in its visual, unpopulated, and artificial synthesis as a stage setting. The semiotic aspects of the language found in the texts of the learned comedy are a key element that influences the relationship between the performance and the stage setting. As the actors play the movements corresponding to these semiotic aspects of the texts, they define the space in and of the comedy. The characters interact with the visual space, modulating it according to the situation represented. These special references determine an inside-outside dialectic, which connects the private and public sphere. To this end, one particularly significant example comes from Aretino’s Marescalco, not only for the movements it describes, but for the overall significance in the comedy. Specifically, the Marescalco’s wedding, which should be a private matter, is, in fact, a very public beffa, attended by the whole cast of the comedy and the whole court viewing the comedy. The wedding is ideated by an unnamed Duke: he is absent as an actual character but is present in the comedy through the team of functionaries at his service.30 The play furthermore insists on making the audience an active participant in the beffa, as the characters invite “all” to “enter” and to “come in.” Additionally, the Duke, although absent and anonymous in the scene, was in fact present as a spectator in the room, most likely positioned at the center of the audience, in front of the stage. Thus, the physical person of the Duke becomes the focal point of the play and of its visual setting for the whole audience. The Duke’s point of view becomes the only point of view that matters, because his visual perspective of the scene is from the optimal point of view.31 In this case then, the anonymity of the Duke “character,” as well as the synthetic quality of the scene, use the perspectival stage to become a very precise and pointed reference to reality. These examples among others show a trend to invite the audience in the interchangeability among artificial setting, performed texts, and real spaces, present in learned comedy through the sixteenth century. As the theatrical space changed to collect and sublimate the disorder and complication of 30 Pietro Aretino, La Cortigiana, in Teatro Comico, ed. Luca D’Onghia (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 2014), V.5. 31 On the relationship between the Duke’s presence and the Marescalco see also, Deanna Shemek, “Aretino’s “Marescalco”: Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua,” Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 366-380; Michael Sherberg “Il potere e il piacere: La sodomia del Marescalco,” in La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento, ed. Sergio Zatti (Pisa: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1998), 96-110.

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the comedy of real-life situations, in order to reflect the values of unity and order central to Classicism, the authors of learned comedy started to re-arrange that very space through their texts. As the room becomes part of the scene, the spectator becomes part of the performance. The characters on stage share the same urban space as the viewer: both inhabit the city. Therefore, the theater gives the illusion of entering a well-known place, which is an appendix and a synthesis of the city and of people’s lived experience. As the city is transferred by virtue of its artificial representation of reality, the plot of the comedy likewise reinforces the communal experience of life: the human affairs presented on scene become a mirror of everyday life in the city. By participating in the representation, the spectators therefore experience their own city through the comedy. As a consequence, the spectator judges and elevates his own urban life through theater, experiencing a sort of catharsis through laughter. In doing so, these comedies allow for a re-definition of social order, but they also challenge it through the volatility of that very structure. This tension between the artificial city, recognizable yet abstract, and the performance, which destabilizes yet densifies the referential meaning of the setting, opens the possibility for the viewer of an ambiguous relationship with reality, and more importantly with the public space. Perspective, then, does not just expand fictional experience into a real world beyond the stage; it also projects the movements of the city, the order, the direction, the rhetoric of the space, toward human fallibility and active complexity in real life.

Bibliography Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. s.v. “perspective.” Accessed May 14, 2020: https:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perspective. Ackerman, James. Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. Andersen, Kristi. The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge. New York: Springer, 2007. Aretino, Pietro. Il Marescalco. In Teatro Comico, edited by Luca D’Onghia. Parma: Ugo Guanda, 2014. Aretino, Pietro. La Cortigiana. In Teatro Comico, edited by Luca D’Onghia. Parma: Ugo Guanda, 2014. Ariosto, Ludovico. Il Negromante (II Redazione). In Tutte le opere, edited by Cesare Segre. Vol. 4: “Commedie,” edited by Gabriella Casella, Gabriella Ronchi, and Elena Varasi, 447–542. Milano: Mondadori, 1974.

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Ariosto, Ludovico. I Suppositi (in versi). In Tutte le opere, edited by Cesare Segre Vol. 4: “Commedie,” edited by Gabriella Casella, Gabriella Ronchi, and Elena Varasi, 159–356. Milano: Mondadori, 1974. Ariosto, Ludovico. La Cassaria (in prosa). In Tutte le opere, edited by Cesare Segre. Vol. 4: “Commedie,” edited by Gabriella Casella, Gabriella Ronchi, and Elena Varasi, 1–64. Milano: Mondadori, 1974. Berzal de Dios, Javier. Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Bottoni, Luciano. “Il teatro: testi e spettacolo.” In Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino e Walter Pedullà, vol. III: “Rinascimento e Umanesimo I. Dal Quattrocento all’Ariosto,” 286–311. Milano: Federico Motta, 1999. Bottoni, Luciano. “Il teatro del Rinascimento.” In Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino, and Walter Pedullà, vol. V: “L’età della Controriforma. Il Tardo Cinquecento,” 27–166. Milano: Federico Motta, 1999. Castiglione, Baldassar. Il cortegiano, edited by Giulio Carnazzi. Milan: Rizzoli, 2006. Castiglione, Baldassar. The Courtier, translated by George Bull. London: Penguin, 2003. Costola, Sergio. “The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto’s I Suppositi.” Mediaevalia 33 (2012): 195–228. Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations. Lewisburg: Buckness University Press, 2002. Eberhart, Marlene. “Performance, Print, and the Senses: Aretino and the Space of the City,” Early Theater XV (2012): 179–192. Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Finotti, Fabio. “Perspective and Stage Design, Fiction and Reality in the Italian Renaissance Theater of the Fifteenth Century.” Renaissance Drama 36/37 (2010): 21–42. Herrick, Marvin T. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Herrick, Marvin T. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Martinez, Ronald L. “Spectacle.” In Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance, edited by Michael Wyatt, 239–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Pesca, Carmela. La città maschera Classici: Geometria e dinamica della città rinascimentale. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2002. Quondam, Amedeo. Rinascimento e classicism. Forme e metamorfosi della modernità. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013.

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Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Ruffini, Franco. Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La “Calandria” alla corte di Urbino. Bologna: il Mulino, 1986. Serlio, Sebastiano. Il Primo [-quinto] libro di architettura. Venice: Melchiorre Sessa, 1551. Public Domain. Accessed May 14, 2020: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1. c032439215. Shemek, Deanna “Aretino’s “Marescalco”: Marriage Woes and the Duke of Mantua,” Renaissance Studies 16, no. 3 (2002): 366–380. Sherberg, Michael. “Il potere e il piacere: La sodomia del Marescalco.” In La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento, edited by Sergio Zatti, 96–110. Pisa: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1998. Trissino, Giovan Giorgio. La quinta e la sesta divisione della Poetica. In Trattati di poetica e di retorica del Cinquecento, vol. 2, edited by Bernard Weinberg, 7–90. Bari: Laterza, 1970. Weinberg, Bernard. “Aristotle to Pseudo-Aristotle.” Comparative Literature 5, no. 2 (1953): 97–104. Womack, Peter. “The Comical Scene: Perspective and Civility on the Renaissance Stage.” Representations 101, no. 1 (2008): 32–56. Zorzi, Ludovico. Il teatro e la città: Saggi sulla scena italiana. Torino: Einaudi, 1977.

About the Author Lucia Gemmani is a Lecturer at The University of Iowa. She completed her Ph.D. in Italian at Indiana University in July 2018. Her main research interest is the literature and culture of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque and in particular the interconnection between literature, music, and theater.

4. The Lure of Shopping: The Mercerie in Early Modern Venice and the City as a Permanent Mall Isabella Cecchini

Abstract This chapter considers the Mercerie as an identity marker in early modern Venice, helping shape its perception as a luxurious city and a powerful commercial marketplace. The concentration of shops around Rialto and the urban route from Rialto to St Mark’s redefined itself between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the center of a clearly configured mercantile space. Albeit coexisting with several other crafts, the mercers dominated trade in this area. Their rich and often international clientele requested luxury items characterizing Venetian production, while the shops increasingly contributed to direct local production. Making use of contemporary guides, archival sources, and the existing bibliography, this case study of Venetian Mercerie stresses the importance of an urban route in shaping the identity of an early modern economy and society. Keywords: Republic of Venice; Mercerie; early modern retailing; Venetian manufactures

And if a stranger know not the way, hee shall not need aske it, for if hee will follow the presse of people, hee shall be sure to bee brought to the place of Saint Marke, or that of Rialto.1

1 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson Gent. […] Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell through the Twelve Domjnions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerland, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: John Beale, 1617).

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch04

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Figure 4.1. Unknown engraver, Partial perspective view of the city, 1583 (Venice: Biblioteca Correr, vol. 33 H 54).

Located in the heart of Venice, in its oldest and most significant part, the itinerary called Mercerie links Rialto, across the famous bridge, to Piazza San Marco (fig. 4.1). It stands in the foundational area of the city, still characterized by a dense presence of shops, warehouses, and landing points for transport boats on both edges of the route—the lagoon at San Marco on one side, and the Grand Canal on the other. From time immemorial, and still today (in a radically different era), this area—the route of the Mercerie and its equally dense branches full of shops—represents the quintessence of the city’s mercantile vocation and coincides with its identity. The street properly defined as Merceria starts from Piazza San Marco through the arch of the Torre dell’Orologio, from which this part of the street takes its name (fig. 4.2); it then proceeds past the parish church of San Zulian, crosses the wide bridge of the Bareteri (the sellers of woolen caps), touches the apse of the convent church of San Salvador, and ends in Campo di San Bartolomeo, close to the church of the same name and at the foot of the Rialto bridge (see Ill. 1). The area is densely interwoven with multi-story houses with shops on the ground floor, and crossed by dozens of calli where other shops and warehouses face. From the very beginning it was inhabited almost exclusively by craftsmen and shopkeepers whose occupations gravitated towards the commercial center of Rialto; the area was so dense that at the end of the sixteenth century Francesco Sansovino,

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Figure 4.2. The Torre dell’Orologio in Piazza San Marco, c. 1960 (Venice: Comune di Venezia, Area Sviluppo del Territorio e Città Sostenibile, AFU – Archivio Fotografico di Urbanistica).

the author of a reasoned and eulogistic description of Venice, represented the arch of the Torre dell’Orologio in the Mercerie as “a gateway through which one enters the city” (“vna porta per la quale si vada nella città”):2 a true triumphal entrance to the city, almost in the Roman manner, for a city that had no Roman origin. As a hinge between two meaningful physical and symbolic places, in fact, the Mercerie represented a particularly relevant route for the image that the city (the government and its inhabitants) wished to project to the outside world. Piazza San Marco was the visual and symbolic core of Venetian power. It was the site of the basilica, built as a ducal chapel at the service of the doge, and of Palazzo Ducale, where the activities of government and the offices of the various magistrates were concentrated. During the sixteenth century the area underwent a radical revision (a renovatio, with 2 Francesco Sansovino and Giustiniano Martinioni, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, descritta in XIIII libri da M. Francesco Sansovino […] Con aggiunta di tutte le cose notabili della città, fatte, et occorse dall’anno 1580 fino al presente 1663, da D. Giustiniano Martinioni […] (Venice: Stefano Curti, 1663), 317 (author’s translation).

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the ambition of giving Roman facies to a forum that was not Roman), but it was precisely the entrance to the Mercerie that received a new definition in 1499 with the construction of the Torre dell’Orologio (fig. 4.2), “combining practical value, civic splendor and urban improvement in a single work.”3 Civic clocks were still quite rare; the tower’s five levels and rich decoration expressed a conscious sense of civitas and urban renovatio. The tower consists of five stories or superimposed orders. The lowermost order forms a large, spacious archway, the top of which coincided with the level of the top of the façade of the old Procuracy building next to it [and that will be rebuilt shortly after]; its width corresponded to two of the narrow bays of the same Procuracy. Above this imposing arch—the dimensions of which are also very close to those of the portals on the façade of San Marco—there is a square story containing the face of the clock, which when built rose above the level of the roofs of the adjacent Procuratie. Above this is a lower story, in the center of which is a niche containing the statue of the Virgin and Child, and above this in turn a further story, slightly lower again, on the face of which was the prominent sculpted composition of the winged lion and the kneeling doge. Finally, the roof of the tower was not pitched but formed a raised platform on which was to stand the great bell and the two “Moors” striking the hours with their hammers. 4

The clock was given a second display on the Mercerie (fig. 4.3); although less decorated than on the Piazza, it bears gold stars on blue ground and the sun’s rays in the center. But the position of the tower placed it in a position of strong visual autonomy, in line with the long porticoed axis of the Procuratie Vecchie (the Byzantine palaces of the Procuratori di San Marco, rebuilt at the beginning of the sixteenth century), and at the top of another axis running along the façade of the basilica and Palazzo Ducale, between the gigantic red granite columns with St. Theodore and St. Mark’s Lion, ending in the waters of the lagoon. Seen from the water, instead, as happened with official public ceremonies starting or ending on the lagoon in front of Palazzo Ducale, the view of the tower imposed itself on the bottom of the Piazza: “the Piazzetta [the area alongside Palazzo Ducale] made a sudden deep penetration in the wall of buildings, pulling the eye 3 Richard J. Goy, Building Renaissance Venice: Patrons, Architects and Builders, c. 1430–1500 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 233. 4 Goy, Building Renaissance Venice, 237.

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Figure 4.3. The Torre dell’Orologio from the Mercerie (photo: Author).

back between the giant columns, past the palace, the campanile, and S Mark’s, to end in the brightly colored shaft of the tower.”5 The whole area of Piazza San Marco had been completely renovated during the sixteenth century: the Procuratie Vecchie were rebuilt and destined to be rented out, and on the opposite side the Byzantine hostel for poor sailors was grounded and replaced with a more magnificent arched building which was meant to serve as houses for the Procuratori—an elected position which gave honor and opportunities second only to the Doge’s, and which was kept for life, an exception in the Venetian political world where posts were assigned by election among the patricians, and had limited duration. The buildings of the Zecca and the public library were also erected. Architecture was thus linked with political debate on 5 John McAndrew, Venetian Architecture of the Early Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1980), 381.

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Figure 4.4. View of Piazza San Marco from the Piazzetta dei Leoni and San Basso, 1960s (Comune di Venezia, Area Sviluppo del Territorio e Città Sostenibile, AFU – Archivio Fotografico di Urbanistica).

an urban renovation (renovatio urbis), which aimed to use architectural magnificence and auctoritas to renew the urban fabric of Venice according to the new humanistic studies; Piazza San Marco was the cornerstone of this complex and lengthy program (fig. 4.4).6 In the first decades of the sixteenth century the reconstruction of the wing of Palazzo Ducale on the other side of the Piazza, on the Rio della Canonica, destroyed by fire in 1481, was completed; a second and third fire, in 1574 and 1577, would lead to a radical restoration of the Palace as well, with new and more impressive decorative cycles inside. The form of the city, especially in the area of the Piazza, was thus brought back to mirror the image of the Venetian state and its power, conforming the urban space and its signs as the image of the Venetian republic, and thus using the physical and visual form of the city as a representation of its own capacity, its economic and political strength, in a Mediterranean and European context that in the course of the sixteenth 6 Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, translated by Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The MIT press, 1995), 103–138; Deborah Howard, The Architectural History of Venice (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1980), 136–173; Bruce Boucher, “L’architettura,” in Storia di Venezia. Temi. L’arte, I, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1994).

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and especially the seventeenth centuries would instead relegate it more and more to the margins.7 It was precisely from the Piazza, and from the magnificence of its buildings, that the descriptions of the grand touristes usually began: Piazza San Marco is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent squares in Europe; not only because of its size; but also because of the sumptuousness of the buildings which surround it, and because of the constant flow of people of all nationalities. This square is built in power; or rather there are two different squares of which the first, which is the least large, is turned towards the south, and looks out over the sea; it easily gives the most beautiful aspect of Venice; moreover, it is this point which is usually depicted in paintings. (La Place de Saint Marc est assurément une des plus magnifiques Places de l’Europe; non seulement à cause de sa grandeur; mais encore pour la somptuosité des bâtimens dont elle est environnée, & pour le concours continuel de toutes sortes de nations. Cette Place est faite en potence; ou bien ce sont deux Places differents dont la premiere, qui est la moins grande, est tournée vers le midi, & regarde sur la mer; elle fait sans difficulté le plus bel aspect de Venise; aussi est ce cet endroit qu’on represente ordinairement dans les tableaux qu’on en fait).8

At the same time, the solemnity of the Piazza travelers’ guides emphasized the tone of the marketplace which had characterized the city from the very beginning. St Mark’s was home to street vendors of all kinds; there was a market on Saturdays, and in modern times it seems that the Wednesday market, which Marino Sanudo describes at Campo San Polo, had also moved there;9 and once a year, in spring, for a fortnight a great fair was held to celebrate the feast of the Ascension (and the ceremony whereby Venice “married the sea”), a great occasion for public ceremonies and private events of all kinds. Under the Procuratie Vecchie, under the shelter of the porticoes, a row of shops took their place, ostensibly continuing the progression of shops in the Mercerie. Fynes Moryson considers the entire Piazza as a “market 7 Ennio Concina, “Arca del seme antico. ‘Res publica’ e ‘res aedificatoria’ nel Lungo Rinascimento veneziano,” in Venedig und Oberdeutschland in der Renaissance: Beziehungen zwischen Kunst und Wirtschaft, eds. Bernd Roeck, Klaus Bergdolt, and Andrew John Martin (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1993), 209. 8 Alexander Toussaint de Limojon de Saint Didier, La Ville et la Republique de Venise (Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1680), 30–31 (Author’s translation). 9 Marino Sanudo, Cronachetta di Marino Sanuto (Venice: Tipografia del Commercio di Marco Visentini, 1880), 43.

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Figure 4.5. Unknown engraver, Topographical map of Venice, 1762 (Venice: Museo Correr, Gabinetto di Cartografia, inv. Cl. XLIVc n. 76). The main route of the Mercerie is marked in black.

place,” including the area of Broglio (between Palazzo Ducale and Libreria Marciana towards the sea), which was the usual meeting place for Venetian patricians before going to their offices at the Palace; 10 the usual crowd that gathered to stroll and the variety of goods displayed in shops under the Procuratie thus contributed “not a little to the beauty of the Piazza.”11 From Rialto to Piazza San Marco, therefore, there was nothing but shops (fig. 4.5). And it is from the foot of the Rialto Bridge, from the Campo di San Bartolomeo and the adjacent Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that the marvel of Venetian manufactures, especially textiles, unfolded, remembered with regret in the memories of foreigners, even with alienating effects as happened to John Evelyn in June 1645: 10 Moryson, An Itinerary, 85. Thomas Coryate considers, too, the Piazza as a market: “The fairest place of all the citie […] is the Piazza, that is, the Market place of St. Marke, or (as our English Merchants commorant in Venice, doe call it) the place of St. Marke, in Latin Forum, or Platea D.i Marci.” Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities; Reprinted from the Edition of 1611 with His Letters from India, &c. (London: W. Cater et alii, 1776), vol. 1, 210. 11 Saint Didier, La Ville, 33.

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I pass’d through the Merceria, which I take to be the most delicious streete in the World for the sweetenesse of it, being all the way on both sides, continualy tapissry’d as it were, with Cloth of Gold, rich Damasks & other silks, which the shops expose & hang before their houses from the first floore, & with that variety, that for neere half the yeare, which I spent chiefly in this citty, I hardly remember to have seene the same piece twice exposd, to this add the perfumers, & Apothecaries shops, and the innumerable cages of Nightingals, which they keepe, that entertaines you with their melody from shop to shop, so as shutting your Eyes, you would imagine your selfe in the Country, when indeede you are in the middle of the Sea: besides there being neither rattling of Coaches nor trampling of horses, tis almost as silent as the field: This streete, pav’d with brisk, and exceedingly cleane, brought us through an arch into famous Piazza San Marco.12

In the settlement process of what was to become Venice by the ninth century, the area of the parishes of San Bartolomeo and San Salvador hosted the first activities of a permanent market from the very beginning. Both were linked with the ducal seat at San Marco, the church of San Teodoro which was later incorporated into the basilica, the powerful monastery of San Zaccaria, and the area beyond the Grand Canal (the rivus altus), which in turn hosted considerable migratory movements from the mainland that began in the middle of the eighth century and continued until the tenth.13 The mercantile and commercial center (Rialto) on the other side of the canal also developed very early around these dates. The church of San Giacomo di Rialto is traditionally assigned to the city’s origins together with the founding of Rialto in 421, though it is attested from 1152 and probably erected in the eleventh century.14 The Rialto marketplace arose spontaneously as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries on the initiative of two families with properties in the area; it assumed, however, a progressive public guarantee with some control over trade and some settlement by the ducal government in the second half of the eleventh century, when work was carried out on the church of San Giacomo and an inscription was placed on the outside calling for fairness in contracts.15 The international range of the affairs 12 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond Samuel de Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 222. 13 Wladimiro Dorigo, Venezia romanica. La formazione della città medioevale fino all’età gotica (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze lettere ed arti; Cierre Edizioni; Regione del Veneto, 2003), vol. I, 14. 14 Dorigo, Venezia romanica, 89. 15 Dorigo, 397–398.

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Figure 4.6. The area of San Giacomo di Rialto from the bell tower of San Bartolomeo in 1966 (Comune di Venezia, Area Sviluppo del Territorio e Città Sostenibile, AFU – Archivio Fotografico di Urbanistica).

merchants negotiated at Rialto began to appear in the thirteenth century, following the economic rise of the city; it continued to coexist alongside the marketplace which was necessary for the city’s sustenance—the fish market, the butchers’ area, the herb trade (fig. 4.6). At Rialto, and near the church of San Giacomo, the activity of Venetian merchants, of their agents, and of many foreign merchants quickly concentrated. Merchants came to Rialto every day to be updated on market changes, and to conduct their business. The area was also home to the goldsmiths’ workshops with customers from all over Europe, and the ground floor vaults of almost all the palaces in the area stored wool and silk fabrics, spices, and products from the East on which Venice built the strength of its trade.16 16 Gino Luzzatto, Storia economica di Venezia dall’XI al XVI secolo (Venice: Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume, 1961), 78–79.

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Around the church of San Giacomo di Rialto, so central to the mercantile image of Venice, a concentration of offices linked to the needs of merchants and traders (such as those responsible for weights and measures) and to those of the government (such as the tax offices) established, alongside with private banks, moneychangers, insurers, brokers.17 When the wooden bridge burned down in 1514, the entire area was rebuilt and reorganized in the following decades to house the structures necessary to local and international trade, including the first public bank (the Banco della Piazza di Rialto) in 1587 and a second public bank (the Banco del Giro) in 1619 which later replaced the Banco della Piazza; both took over the functions carried out by private banks, which went periodically bankrupt; the last private bank failed in 1584.18 Finally, on the other side of the bridge, in the citra part of the city (“on this side” of the Grand Canal, the same as San Marco), the area around the church of San Bartolomeo housed until the fourteenth century the Zecca (later moved to Piazza San Marco) and the house of the German merchants, the Fondaco, so important for Venetian trade because the German region and the transalpine routes were one of the essential axes for the city’s intermediary trade, with functions of warehouse, intermediary center, fiscal control, and residence. The whole urban space at the foot of the Rialto bridge thus shared the mixed (commercial and residential) character of this large part of the city.19 The connection between Rialto and San Marco provided by the Mercerie, therefore, was filled with the commercial identity of the lagoon, with its being an international emporium and above all an emporium of precious products. And it is worth noting that the area in front of San Giacomo di Rialto is the only one in Venice that can be called a piazza (from the Latin word platea, with the parallel meaning of marketplace and forum), together with Piazza San Marco. Rialto and San Marco thus identify the 17 Roberto Cessi and Annibale Alberti, Rialto. L’isola – il ponte – il mercato (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli editore, 1934); Gherardo Ortalli, “Gli Uff iciali sopra Rialto: per gestire i luoghi al centro di un sistema,” in Il Capitolare degli Ufficiali sopra Rialto. Nei luoghi al centro del sistema economico veneziano (secoli XIII-XIV), ed. Alessandra Princivalli (Milan: La Storia, 1993), VII–XXVI; Reinhold C. Mueller, The Venetian money market: banks, panics, and the public debt, 1200–1500 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 1997). 18 Donatella Calabi and Paolo Morachiello, Rialto. Le fabbriche e il ponte (Turin: Einaudi, 1987); Ugo Tucci, “Monete e banche,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VII: La Venezia barocca, eds. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997). 19 Donatella Calabi, “Il Fondaco degli Alemanni, la chiesa di San Bartolomeo e il contesto mercantile,” in La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca a Venezia, eds. Natalino Bonazza, Isabella di Lenardo, and Gianmario Guidarelli (Venice: Marcianum Press, 2013).

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two focal points of a city that in the descriptions of foreigners seems to be overflowing with goods.20

A City Made of Shops The concentration of shops in the area from Rialto to Piazza San Marco (the Mercerie) was settled between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Standing as the center of a compact urban fabric it resembled an “umbilicus” (a navel) to which privileged attention was given, and from which dangerous functions were removed (two small pottery kilns were closed in 1487). It was located “in the geometric center of a mercantile space which was clearly configured, in multiple aspects and through complex articulations.”21 A series of contiguous districts which are defined by parish churches (the only exception being the convent of San Salvador), following one another at close intervals, still identify this urban space: on the Rialto side (ultra canalem) the parish churches of Sant’Aponal, San Silvestro, San Giovanni Elemosinario, San Mattio, San Giacomo; crossing the bridge (citra canalem), the churches of San Bartolomeo, San Salvador, San Lio, San Giovanni Grisostomo, San Zulian, San Geminiano, San Basso, and finally San Marco (fig. 4.7). Shops, vaults, warehouses were closely knitted, relegating the dwellings of artisans and shopkeepers to the upper floors of the buildings.22 The Mercerie were almost exclusively dedicated to retail: at the end of the plague epidemic of 1630–1631, the census conducted in all the city parishes revealed how a very small number of patrician and “citizens” (a sort of intermediate class that included the liberal professions) was living in or near this area. In the parish of San Zulian, the booksellers’ quarter, the only patrician family the census registered in 1632 was Zuanne Morosini with his wife and two servants; then followed the five priests serving the parish church, forty-five families of wholesale traders and lawyers (registered as citizens but only two of them had their own gondolas, a sign of status and wealth) with a hundred servants and maids (in all just under four hundred people); finally, at San Zulian there were 247 families of craftsmen and shop owners numbering 1,353 people. At San Salvador two patrician families counted 37 20 Sandra Toffolo, Describing the City, Describing the State: Representations of Venice and the Venetian Terraferma in the Renaissance (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020), 126–127. 21 Ennio Concina, Venezia nell’età moderna. Struttura e funzioni (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 35 (Author’s translation). 22 Concina, Venezia nell’età moderna, 35–52.

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Figure 4.7. The parish churches of Rialto and Mercerie in 1762 (detail of Ill. 5). 1: Sant’Aponal; 2: San Silvestro; 3: San Giovanni Elemosinario; 4: San Mattio; 5: San Giacomo; 6: San Bartolomeo; 7: San Salvador; 8: San Lio; 9: San Giovanni Grisostomo; 10: San Zulian; 11: San Geminiano; 12: San Basso; 13: San Marco.

people (more than half were servants), and twelve families of merchants, lawyers, and doctors who were listed as citizens had 73 people in all, with 25 servants and two gondolas; but 240 families of craftsmen and shop owners numbered 1,233 people.23 As in all early modern cities there were several places to shop: in the 1530s the patrician Francesco Priuli scrupulously recorded his daily purchases with occasional suppliers, bartering, at market stalls, at several auctions of clothes and second-hand objects, at the pawnshops in the Ghetto, at the Ascension fair in St. Mark’s, and of course at shops. And there were strictly separated spheres of consumption, determined by wealth and gender (Priuli’s wife, for example, is a mediated consumer, since she buys practically nothing on her own and like many women of her class spends a lot of time at home).24 23 Archivio di Stato, Venice (hereafter ASVe), Provveditori e Sopraprovveditori alla Sanità, b. 569 (Anagrafi 1633, San Marco), parishes of San Zulian and San Salvador. Both censuses were completed on 30 October 1632. 24 Evelyn Welch, “Sites of Consumption in Early Modern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 229–230.

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However, if the heart of the Rialto undoubtedly formed one end of the spectrum of purchasing possibilities with its permanent open-air market, the other being the itinerant trade around the city, shops were the real and widespread middle ground. The diffusion and growth in the number of shops, which seems to be found in other urban centers, necessarily relates their expansion to the development of early modern consumption. Patricia Allerston has linked the increase in the number of shops observed in Venice, whose population was substantially stable, to the development of a demand driven by the growth in visitors and tourists.25 A “consumer revolution” has to be characterized by a greater diversification of products in the consumer basket of the working classes even in the countryside, and not only in urban contexts where the “revolution” is usually more precocious. In order for it to begin in a geographically and temporally determined area, some elements need to be identified on the basis of the socio-economic structure of the most advanced European countries from the end of the seventeenth century: a diffused information through printed advertisements; a widespread retail system in both urban and more provincial contexts, so as to allow access to the new goods the technical and industrial innovations permit to new potential consumers; a sufficient technological know-how both in manufacturing and in the distribution of manufactured products; and a moderation of the moral negativity attached (particularly in Protestant societies) to the concept of luxury and the consumption of unnecessary goods.26 However, recent studies have suggested that the “consumer revolution,” if it can be 25 Patricia Allerston, “Meeting Demand: Retailing Strategies in Early Modern Venice,” in Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries, eds. Bruno Blondé, Eugènie Briot, Natacha Coquery, and Laura Van Aert (Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2005), 182. 26 Sara Pennell, “Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century ‘Britain’: The Matter of Domestic Consumption,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65–66; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The problem remains to find the extra income that allows for previously non-existent, unnecessary expenditure. In some cases, this was possible by extending working hours, and cancelling breaks and rests during the working week. HansJoachim Voth, “Work and the Sirens of Consumption in Eighteenth-century London,” in The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice, ed. Marina Bianchi (London: New York: Routledge, 1998). It should be noted that the f irst English industrial revolution tended to favor standardization over differentiation, quantity over quality, because of the weight of new products in exports. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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identified at all, should in many areas be reasonably dated back to at least the beginning of the seventeenth century, and in some others—such as Italian or Flemish cities—even further back. The so-called consumer revolution concerns goods that have been called populuxe, or new luxuries, luxury goods intended for an aristocratic clientele, such as pocket watches, that the Industrial Revolution enabled the production of cheap versions for consumers with lower fortunes.27 To broaden consumption there must be additional income that consumers decide to spend, or savings to use. Both concepts are difficult to determine for an early modern context, although one of the hypotheses proposed by Richard Goldthwaite for the expansion of the material world in fifteenth century Italy refers to wealth being redistributed to fewer individuals who survived the plague of 1348, and to a demand for products which were different and new.28 During the fourteenth century a sort of reclassification took place, particularly in the manufacturing and commercial cities of central and northern Italy. This reclassification implied the transformation of basic products—such as textiles—into luxury products through a careful finishing; in particular, textile manufactures and applied arts (enamel, glass) found themselves involved in a process of change in the styles of clothes and accessories, a process identified as fashion. As a consequence, the definition of new consumption preferences and the objective availability of money to spend triggered conspicuous consumption, which guided Italian manufacturers and the wholesale and retail network. And what is relevant is the fact, identified by numerous studies, that this diversification was not only limited to the urban élites, but extended with cheap versions of luxury products to other social classes as well, not to mention the resale networks of the second-hand market, which allowed for a new circulation.29 The fierce competition that could be observed in many cities such as Venice for the most advantageous position in the markets, and the definition by the public authorities of places and rules for competition in sales, certainly 27 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 55–56. The definition of populuxe belongs to Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-century Paris,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 228. According to Fairchilds populuxe products can be jewelry, watches, stockings, umbrellas, fans, snuff boxes, tea and coffee sets, board games, spreading in less expensive models in the eighteenth century. 28 Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993). 29 Susan M. Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 122–123.

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indicate, as early as the fourteenth century, the slow but inexorable shift from manufacture to sale.30 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Venetian manufacturers made an attempt to diversify their production, in order to meet a more varied range of consumers (both local and international) who were now less identified with luxury buyers. After all, a process of downward imitation, with lower quality products destined for the middle and lower classes, was what the north European manufacturers were experiencing. Venetian products were rapidly losing ground in their traditional markets in the eastern Mediterranean and were increasingly supplanted in the seventeenth century by the less expensive and more versatile and colorful English, Dutch and French textile productions.31 Silk and glass entrepreneurs, two essential sectors for Venetian manufactures, tried their hand at new productions such as silk stockings and conterie (colored pearls sold in threads), which were exported in significant numbers. Although production depended on centuries of know-how, which was protected and regulated, glass and mirror productions were also in difficulty at the beginning of the eighteenth century; the Austrian territories had banned them in 1712 in order to favor new manufactures in Vienna, as had happened with French silk manufacture which had supplanted Italian silk textiles.32 These productions employed in Venice a large number of craftsmen: in 1773 a survey listed 30% of the entire urban workforce as silk and glass workers. Less expensive materials (in the case of glass) or the employment of less skilled labor (in the case of silk) were continuously tested, in an attempt to adapt standard production to fierce international competition.33 The case of Venetian silk is quite striking. In other Italian manufacturing centers (such as Florence or Bologna) production was reorganized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with simpler fabrics, which were less subject to fashion changes, in order to counter competition from silk manufactures in Lyon, and to oppose the new English and Dutch productions made of cheaper fabrics of lesser quality which were sold in the eastern 30 Stuard, Gilding the Market, 146. 31 Overall, there is continuity and transformation at the same time, and the role of the guilds was not completely oppositional to productive innovations as has long been claimed. Francesca Trivellato, “Guilds, Technology, and Economic Change in Early Modern Venice,” in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800, eds. Stephan R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 32 Salvatore Ciriacono, Luxury Production, Technological Transfer and International Competition in Early Modern Europe (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2017), 91. 33 Trivellato, “Guilds.”

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markets where the competitive presence of textile manufacturers from northern Europe had increased. Venice, on the other hand, remained firmly oriented towards luxury fabrics, which still in the 1760s accounted for 65–70% of urban silk production, thanks to an increase in the flexibility of the workforce (especially women).34 And if the lagoon city had already shown itself to be bucking the trend in the sixteenth century, it managed to cut out for itself a specific niche of luxury textiles with silver and gold threads woven together with silk, thanks to the growing integration with the mainland which supplied raw materials and semi-finished products. Silk and gold textiles thus continued to be woven and sold, especially in the eastern Mediterranean.35 Textiles possess a decisive advantage over other consumer goods: they are subject to fashion. That is, textiles retain consumer-perceived characteristics that make them desirable, and in ever-changing fashions and patterns (fashionability).36 Every retail market thrives in sectors driven by phenomena that can be labeled, in general, as fashion, which in turn are drivers of wealth for those who deal with them; this is especially true for the textile sector, the variety of which increases incredibly in the late Middle Ages but continues well beyond.37 The Venetian textile industry thus maintained its importance until the end of the Venetian republic in 1797, despite the many difficulties highlighted in the survey on the state of the arts conducted in 1758, which implicitly, however, also illustrates its extension, counting for example 57 workshops where silk shirts worn even by the humblest classes were made, or 310 tailors (although most of them were declared inoperative due to 34 Marcello della Valentina, “The Silk Industry in Venice: Guilds and Labor Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in At the Center of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, ed. Paola Lanaro (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006). In 1705 out of a total of 2103 looms in 717 workshops (48% of which had two or three), 1461, or 69%, were working (Della Valentina, “The Silk Industry,” 122, tab. 4). 35 Luciano Pezzolo, “L’economia,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VII: La Venezia barocca, eds. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 382-390. 36 The term “fashionability” was used to refer to the cotton fabrics that became widespread in Europe in the eighteenth century: “consumers across the globe sought to be of the sytle, to be at the cutting edge, and to sport the novel. These desiders we label fashionability. Fashionability was often associated with the exotic, the hard to get, the item that came from afar.” Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, “From India to the World: Cotton and Fashionability,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 146. For a “fashion revolution” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France see Daniel Roche, La culture des apparences: une histoire du vêtement, 17–18 siècle (Paris: Fayard et Seuil, 1989). 37 Stuard, Gilding the Market, 224.

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their inability to adapt to the new fashion styles).38 Most of these products continued to be sold in shops or through the many peddlers around the city. Like many other early modern cities, Venice was overflowing with fabrics. Much of this production, local or foreign, left or passed through the city center in the direction of other centers of consumption; but an equally substantial part, although impossible to estimate, was sold in the city, through diversified sales circuits for a diversified demand.39 Each textile sector followed its own organization in selling its products. The textile entrepreneurs were kept distinct from those who materially produced the fabric—weavers, or manufacturers of trimmings and laces—although in Venice there was no clear division between merchants and merchant-entrepreneurs, nor a strict dependence of the workers of the various production phases (weavers, garment makers, etc.) on a single entrepreneur, as in the case of woolens. 40 Overall, the quantity of textiles sent to the main international market for Venice (the eastern Mediterranean) had decreased significantly during the seventeenth century. The decrease, however, was partly compensated by the growth of internal consumption (coming not only from the resident population) and by a flow of trade that took the land route. The early modern Venetian economy was increasingly structured around the lagoon as a sorting center for an inter-regional area, as the capital of an increasingly productive land-based state (Venetian mainland dominion extended westward to the Lombard cities of Brescia and Bergamo, and southward to Rovigo). From the sixteenth century onwards, Venice was responsible for the diffusion of highly specialized and in many cases explicitly luxury products and services, while the contribution of the mainland for the supply of raw and semi-finished materials and as a further outlet market became indispensable. The role of Venetian mainland was particularly important for the textile sector, both because some production phases that could not be carried out in the lagoon (as fulling the woolen cloth, a process which needed continuous clean water, or silk mills) had been delocalized there, and because of the origin of the yarns and increasingly also of cloth and fabrics, such as those from Carnia or the Salò Riviera. Moreover, it was through the fans of roads and waterways of the mainland state that the products of Venetian manufactures 38 Jean Georgelin, Venise au siècle des lumières (Paris; La Haye: Mouton; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1978), 145–146. 39 Allerston, “Meeting demand.” 40 Andrea Mozzato, “The Production of Woollens in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in At the Center of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, ed. Paola Lanaro (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 91.

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were now channeled away from the ports of the Levant. 41 Indeed, the Venetian economy of the eighteenth century was also characterized by the expansion of manufactures in the mainland state and its main urban centers, manufactures which then flowed back to Venice for export or consumption; the Venetian silk industry remained active, responding to the needs of the markets and using the high technical skills still existing. 42

Mercers and Mercerie The ancient name given to the urban route linking the commercial heart of Rialto with the political center in San Marco comes from the word merze (merchandise); it is obviously linked to the abundance and quantity of goods on sale in the shops that line the streets. The retail network centered on this area oscillated between the international wholesale trade and the local production and was mainly run by members of the mercers’ guild. In Venice mercers (marzeri) dealt with a long list of finished products related to textiles, clothing, and furnishings in general: fabrics by the meter, trimmings, feathers, gloves and perfumes, laces, spectacles, knitted wool products, sewing needles and brooches, fake pearls and rosaries, tin lanterns, suitcases, firework powder. Mercers could sell their merchandise either inside a shop, with or without shop boys and assistants (in the seventeenth century they were distinguished in a sub-guild called “major”) or be itinerants with boxes around their necks (who belonged to the “minor” guild because of their poverty).43 41 Luciano Pezzolo, “The Venetian Economy,” in A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, ed. Eric Dursteler (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), 280–282; Salvatore Ciriacono, “Industria e artigianato,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, V: Il Rinascimento. Società ed economia, eds. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996); Ivo Mattozzi, “Intraprese produttive in Terraferma,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VII: La Venezia barocca, eds. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997); Edoardo Demo, “Wool and Silk: The Textile Urban Industry of the Venetian Mainland (15th–17th Centuries),” in At the Center of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, ed. Paola Lanaro (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006). 42 Walter Panciera, “L’economia: imprenditoria, corporazioni, lavoro,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VIII: L’ultima fase della Serenissima, eds. Piero Del Negro and Paolo Preto (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1998), 479–481, 526. 43 Anna Messinis, Storia del profumo a Venezia (Venice: lineadacqua, 2017), 123–157; Isabella Cecchini, “Un mestiere dove non c’è nulla da imparare? I merciai veneziani e l’apprendistato in età moderna,” in Garzoni. Apprendistato e formazione tra Venezia e l’Europa in età moderna, eds. Anna Bellavitis, Martina Frank, and Valentina Sapienza (Mantova: Universitas Studiorum, 2017).

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Mercers were a huge and diversified trade. Between 1561 and 1568 more than five hundred new shops were opened throughout Venice: a third of them were marzeri, and in the same years the guild had to periodically impose limits on the number of shops a single member could open. 44 The shops along the Mercerie were not entirely managed by mercers, although their presence had always been so numerous as to identify the place-name. Mercers, however, occupied a very important space also in terms of visual impact, and formed the majority of shops until the late seventeenth century (see Table 1). For instance, the mercers selling romane, which were gold- and silver-threaded trimmings, were for the most part (96%) concentrated in this area, as were the fourteen shops selling merce di Fiandra (linen and hemp cloths) and the seven shops selling rascie (woolen cloths). Table 4.1. Location and number of shops in the central area between Rialto and San Marco according to the main sales sectors of the mercers’ guild in 1692, with the percentage of shops out of the total number of mercers surveyed.

Linen sellers Knitwear sellers Romane Silks Generic mercers merce di Fiandra Rascie

San Salvador

Bareteri/San Zulian/ Orologio

San Lio Fontego/ Rialto San BartoSan Gio. lomeo Grisostomo

Piazza/ Canonica/San Basso

4

18

1

3

1

79.4

1

13

3

1

6

4

90.3

5 1 1

15 10 2

2 2 4

1 1 8

11 2

1 4 5

96 48.7 100

13

11 3

Calle % delle Rasse

1

100 7

100

Source: ASVe, Arti, b. 397, fasc.28, 1692 (Iscritti all’Arte magior).

As a consequence, the luxuriously furnished Mercerie ended up being considered the manifesto of Venice as an international emporium, a sort of must-see for anyone visiting the lagoons, whether officially or privately, or as a source of leisure while waiting to leave. The Mercerie had to be covered 44 Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of Guilds in Venice and Europe c. 1250–c. 1650 (London; Sydney: Croom Helm, 1989), 84, 92–94.

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entirely on foot, walking—a fundamental act even in the city of water par excellence. 45 At least since the fourteenth century the Mercerie were identified as one of the fundamental markers of the city and of its myth, to be shown to important visitors. 46 In 1475, for example, a young member of the powerful Milanese Sforza family on an official visit was given a tour of the Arsenale, a visit to a small group of churches, and a final tour of the Mercerie, whose shops were richly decorated for his passage.47 In 1573 the incognito Duke of Mantua Guglielmo Gonzaga wandered happily among the shops of mercers, 48 and in 1645 John Evelyn declared himself literally stunned by the richness of “the most delicious streete in the World for the sweetenesse of it,” mentioning the damasks and the silks displayed. 49 It was through the Mercerie that the celebratory procession of the newly 45 Filippo de Vivo, “Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Mobilizing the Early Modern City,” in Shared Spaces and Knowledge Transactions in the Italian Renaissance City, eds. Roisin Cossar, Filippo de Vivo, and Christina Neilson (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 2016), 125. 46 Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe. La festa politica a Firenze e a Venezia in età rinascimentale (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 200–201. When the Emperor Frederick III on his return from Rome visited Venice in February 1469 he was received with an admirable welcome with water parades and private parties; on one of the visits to the Signoria he was shown around the Mercerie, and the Milanese resident commented how “they had set up all the shops, the stalls, and made great efforts to make him and those accompanying him and anyone looking on understand that they are rich and powerful and that they are great lords, and here they leave nothing out to make him understand this. Tomorrow they will show him the Arsenal” (“Avevano facto fornire tute le botige, banchi et fano tuto el suo perforzo per farli intendere a luj et chi è con lui et a chi vede che sonno riche potennte et che sono gran segnore, et qui non lassan mancari niente per farli intendere questo. Domane li mostrarono l’arsenà”) – “a subtle but resilient balance between the needs of prestige and the demands of politics” to involve the Emperor in the Venetian cause against the Turks, according to Matteo Casini (I gesti del principe, 201). 47 Marco Pistoresi, “Venezia-Milano-Firenze 1475. La visita in laguna di Sforza Maria Sforza e le manovre della diplomazia internazionale: aspetti politici e ritualità pubblica,” Studi veneziani n.s., no. 46 (2003): 50. 48 The Duke’s secretary wrote at court how “his excellency is as well housed as one could wish. Every morning he leaves the house and goes to pay a visit to the shop of Sir Bartolo dal Calice, then he hears Mass and rides in a gondola for a while and then comes [home] to dine. In the evenings, he goes out and sees antique collections and gardens, and so passes his time cheerfully, as we do the best we can” (“sua eccellenza sta tanto bene in alloggiamenti quanto si possa desiderare. Ogni matina ella esce di casa et va a dar una visita in mercaria alla botega di messer Bartolo dal Calice, poi ode messa et va in gondola un pezzetto et poscia se ne viene a desinare. La sere esce et va hor a veder studi di antigaglie, hor giardini et così passa il tempo allegrissimamente, sì come fussimo ancor noi al meglio che possiamo;” Author’s translation). Bartolomeo Bontempelli (c. 1538–1616) called Del Calice from his workshop’s sign was one of the richest mercers of Venice. Daniela Sogliani, Le collezioni Gonzaga. Il carteggio tra Venezia e Mantova (1563–1587) (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2002), 188. 49 Evelyn, The Diary, 222.

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elected Procurators of St Mark—the highest office in Venice after that of the Doge—moved. In a city that had taken on the rituals of public feasting and civic parades as a fundamental element of its political ideal, the processions of the Procuratori were considered an indispensable event for celebrating individual families, their wealth, and the glory of Venice. The expenses for decorating the route along the Mercerie with precious fabrics had been limited several times by the government, apparently with little result.50 Francesco Sansovino, perhaps not exaggerating too much, described in length the Procurators’ walking processions: [A]ll the servants and relatives of the Procuratore walk in front, followed by the ministers of his office, then by two of his factors, in the middle of whom stands his chaplain. Then the Procuratore arrives, accompanied by the oldest Procuratore [in office], on his left. Two by two the other Procuratori also walk, and so in the same order all the guests, numbering 500 and 600 more or less (Caminano innanzi tutti i seruitori, e famigliari del Procuratore, seguono i Ministri della sua Procuratia, poi i due suoi Gastaldi, nel mezzo de quali sta il suo Cappellano. Viene finalmente il Procuratore, accompagnato dal più Vecchio Procuratore, tenendo la sinistra dal nuovo. Vanno à due, à due anco gl’altri Procuratori, e così con l’istesso ordine tutti gl’inuitati in numero di 500 e di 600 & hor più, hor meno).51

The funeral processions of the chancellors serving at the Senate and at the Maggior Consiglio also walked through the Mercerie. The same route to Piazza San Marco was covered by the representatives of the mainland territories when they paid homage to the newly elected doges, as was the case in 1676 with the three representatives of the Patria del Friuli (the eastern mainland region under Venetian rule): they dismounted off the gondola at San Salvador and walked along the Mercerie, richly decorated for the occasion, accompanied by six trumpeters and a retinue of pages in sky blue livery adorned with gold and silver.52 For this reason, too, the mercer trade could guarantee large earnings for the most skilled, or for the luckiest, and remained a much sought-after 50 Matteo Casini, “Cerimoniali,” in Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VII: La Venezia barocca, eds. Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 122–128. 51 Sansovino and Martinioni, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, 306 (Author’s translation). 52 ASVe, Luogotenenti della patria del Friuli, b. 14, cc. 108–110v, May 19th, 1676.

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profession, not least because of the ease of entry since no proof of skill or manual ability was required for accessing the guild. Mercers were likely to quickly adapt to changes in consumer tastes.53 In 1568 half a million ducats were invested in haberdashery shops—a disproportionate amount, concentrated in the hands of some twenty traders.54 According to this estimate, another forty-five shopkeepers earned between two and four thousand ducats in a year (in the same period a patrician could consider himself wealthy with an annual income of one thousand ducats); finally, about seventy mercers earned between 900 and 1800 ducats a year. These figures are far from surprising: some of these shops, the most important ones, needed a lot of capital to sell the precious fabrics and whatever else was required by the most demanding customers; but they indicate as well a “popular capitalism” for the variety and everyday nature of the goods sold.55 Of course, access to capital was needed: it was necessary to acquire a stock of goods and in some professions to procure raw materials, to rent a shop, to purchase the license (avviamento) to run the shop, and these elements were not equally accessible to everyone. On the other hand, street vendors had only the few goods they could afford to take with them as they roamed the city.56 Selling or sourcing from international markets required specific financial means and skills, which were possessed by relatively few mercers (the richest among the guild); but although the general rule for selling within the city was that craftsmen had to sell the product they made and register within the art they belonged to, cloth sellers could decide whether they would be registered among silk merchants within their own guild, among wool merchants (drapers, drappieri), among a few categories of cloth sellers (such as the tellaroli who had exclusive rights to sell German cloth usually made in linen and hemp) and trimmings, and among mercers. Membership extended beyond the mere sellers of fabrics and haberdashery, since it claimed to enroll “any seller and buyer of whatever kind of goods, who was not described in other professions.”57 53 Allerston, Meeting Demand, 182. 54 Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders, 95, tab. 3.2. 55 Richard Mackenney, “The Guilds of Venice: State and Society in the Longue Duree,” Studi veneziani n.s., no. 34 (1997): 33. 56 In 1621 the peddlers declared that they did not have “any means, being poor, to set up shop” and therefore “they go about with little capital, shouting.” Allerston, Meeting Demand, 174, note 17. 57 ASVe, Milizia da Mar, b. 547, unnumbered, undated but late-seventeenth century (“tutti quelli che vendendo, et comprando merci di qual si sia sorte non erano descritti in altre professioni;” Author’s translation).

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The easy entry and exit from the mercers’ guild, however, did not prevent their number from declining over the decades, following the cloudy fate of Venetian economy. A petition submitted on 6 September 1696 declared how the number of shopkeepers had fallen considerably from the already small group of mercers the guild registered some twenty years earlier. The causes were found in “a reduction of trade and [in] its diversion, being commerce restricted only to the simple use of this city and no longer spreading outside; the Mercerie were now filled with the shops of booksellers, comb sellers, furriers, and other professions that do not pay contributions along with us mercers, just as the silk merchants, who have most, and the best, shops in the Merceria; those who sell gold laces contribute little […] and just as in other times the Merceria extended as far as over the whole Ponte di Rialto, now above it stand the shops of greengrocers, comb-makers, notaries, barbers, occupying the spaces which had been profitably kept by the mercers only.”58 The fewer number of mercers had anyway been replaced by several other traders. The perception of early modern Venice as a center of production and consumption, therefore, does not simply tell of a city that is recognized as very rich and able to attract agents and representatives of the main Italian and European courts, who were looking for the masterpieces of Venetian painting but also for silk and gold lace and trimmings or glass beads imitating real pearls; it also tells of a city that had long known a diversification of the material world—and therefore of consumption—as a phenomenon in common with the most important urban centers of Renaissance Italy, reflected at all social levels.59 It was not only a matter of the goods representing the Venetian advantage in its trade with the East, although it may come as a surprise that, for example, a collection of ninety pieces of Chinese porcelain (which had shortly before appeared among the Medici’s or Isabella d’Este’s collections) and two hundred Islamic bronzes that had belonged to the secretary of the Senate Bernardino Redaldi were left by will in December 1526 to an apothecary, who a few decades later had already sold them all, as Redaldi’s collection of ancient coins: everything 58 ASVe, Milizia da Mar, b. 547, unnumbered, September 6th, 1696 (“ripiene di boteghe di libreri, petteneri, pellizzeri, et altre professioni che non contribuiscono con li marzeri, come non vi contribuiscono li mercanti da seda, che sono le più, e migliori boteghe della Marzeria, poco quelle de merli d’oro […] e come in altri tempi s’estendeva la Merzaria sino tutto il tenere del Ponte di Rialto, hora sopra di esso vi si vedono botheghe di fruttaroli, petteneri, nodari, barbieri, che occupano gli statij, ch’erano profficuamente tenuti dalli soli marzeri;” Author’s translation). 59 Goldthwaite, Wealth.

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was sold off bit by bit, by the day, in Venice.60 On the other hand, there was an expansion of the material everyday world, as witnessed for example in the increase in the number of handkerchiefs or napkins or ceramic dishes listed in Venetian homes between 1511 and 1615 and recorded in probate inventories, clear in the growth in the number of workshops.61 The sale of all these products, for all tastes and all budgets, had grown exponentially in early modern Venice, following its transformation from a city of warehouses, large and small, into a city of shops, particularly concentrated from the beginning in the heart of the city linked by the Ponte di Rialto, but also flowing beyond the Piazza towards the area of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and stretching along the banks of St Mark’s lagoon, around Campo dei Frari, around the church of Santa Sofia in the Cannaregio district. And what comment could a generous and enthusiastic visitor like Evelyn have left on leaving the city, other than to have packed up his purchases?62

Bibliography Allerston, Patricia. “Meeting Demand: Retailing Strategies in Early Modern Venice,” In Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries, edited by Bruno Blondé, Eugènie Briot, Natacha Coquery, and Laura Van Aert, 169–187. Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2005. Benussi, Paola. “Bernardino Redaldi.” In Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento, edited by Michel Hochmann, Rosella Lauber, and Stefania Mason, 308–309. Venice: Marsilio; Fondazione di Venezia, 2008. Boucher, Bruce. “L’architettura.” In Storia di Venezia. Temi. L’arte, vol. I, edited by Rodolfo Pallucchini, 609–684. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1994. Calabi, Donatella. “Il Fondaco degli Alemanni, la chiesa di San Bartolomeo e il contesto mercantile.” In La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca a Venezia, edited by Natalino Bonazza, Isabella di Lenardo, and Gianmario Guidarelli, 113–127. Venice: Marcianum Press, 2013. 60 Paola Benussi, “Bernardino Redaldi,” in Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento, eds. Michel Hochmann, Rosella Lauber, and Stefania Mason (Venice: Marsilio; Fondazione di Venezia, 2008), 308-309. 61 Isabella Cecchini, “Material culture in Sixteenth Century Venice: A Sample from Probate Inventories, 1510–1615,” Working Papers/Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche di Ca’ Foscari, no. 14 (2008): tab. 1. 62 Evelyn, The Diary, 243 (in Venice he bought “Books, Pictures, Glasses, Treacle, &c.”).

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Calabi, Donatella, and Paolo Morachiello. Rialto. Le fabbriche e il ponte. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Casini, Matteo. I gesti del principe. La festa politica a Firenze e a Venezia in età rinascimentale. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Casini, Matteo. “Cerimoniali.” In Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, VII: La Venezia barocca, edited by Gino Benzoni and Gaetano Cozzi, 107–160. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997. Cecchini, Isabella. “Material Culture in Sixteenth Century Venice: A Sample from Probate Inventories, 1510–1615.” Working Papers/Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche di Ca’ Foscari 14 (2008): 1–19. Cecchini, Isabella. “Un mestiere dove non c’è nulla da imparare? I merciai veneziani e l’apprendistato in età moderna.” In Garzoni. Apprendistato e formazione tra Venezia e l’Europa in età moderna, edited by Anna Bellavitis, Martina Frank, and Valentina Sapienza, 65-96. Mantova: Universitas Studiorum, 2017. Cessi, Roberto, and Annibale Alberti. Rialto. L’isola – il ponte – il mercato. Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli editore, 1934. Ciriacono, Salvatore. “Industria e artigianato.” In Storia di Venezia dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, V: Il Rinascimento. Società ed economia, edited by Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci, 532–592. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996. Ciriacono, Salvatore. Luxury Production, Technological Transfer and International Competition in Early Modern Europe. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2017. Concina, Ennio. Venezia nell’età moderna. Struttura e funzioni. Venice: Marsilio, 1989. Concina, Ennio. “Arca del seme antico. ‘Res publica’ e ‘res aedificatoria’ nel Lungo Rinascimento veneziano.” In Venedig und Oberdeutschland in der Renaissance: Beziehungen zwischen Kunst und Wirtschaft, edited by Bernd Roeck, Klaus Bergdolt, and Andrew John Martin, 209–222. Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1993. Coryate, Thomas. Coryat’s Crudities; Reprinted from the Edition of 1611 with His Letters from India, &c. London: W. Cater et alii, 1776. De Vivo, Filippo. “Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Mobilizing the Early Modern City.” In Shared Spaces and Knowledge Transactions in the Italian Renaissance City, edited by Roisin Cossar, Filippo de Vivo, and Christina Neilson, 115–141. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 2016. De Vries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Della Valentina, Marcello. “The Silk Industry in Venice: Guilds and Labor Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In At the Center of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, edited

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About the Author Isabella Cecchini received a Ph.D. in Economic and Social History at Bocconi University, Milan. She is presently a researcher at the Institute of History of Mediterranean Europe (ISEM), at the National Research Council of Italy. Her research focuses on practices and institutions that structure early modern commerce, the role of international merchants in credit networks, their activity, and the role of citizenship in promoting commerce in early modern Venice.

5.

Ancient Magnificence and Modern Design Roman Architecture and Identity in the Printed Works of Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) Abbey Hafer

Abstract This chapter focuses on how representations of early modern Rome were collected and disseminated through the medium of prints. By examining a selection of etched images, I discuss the ways in which two architects/ printmakers from the late baroque period, Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), presented Rome to the viewers. Both Specchi and Piranesi produced city views, or vedute, of ancient and modern architectural monuments and provided etchings for book publications on the city of Rome. Their vedute were often sold individually by print shops and bound into personalized books, a popular souvenir for travelers to Rome. Through their virtuosic etched images of Rome, these artists promoted an understanding and appreciation of the architectural layers of the city. Keywords: Rome, prints, etching, Alessandro Specchi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Throughout the early modern period, Roman printmakers took up the task of representing their city through the medium of print. Printer-publishers embraced a growing demand for architectural prints, commissioning etchers and engravers to produce individual city views and illustrations for book projects with a focus on Roman architecture past and present. These published works were in turn collected by Roman patrons and disseminated

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elsewhere in Italy and beyond; purchased as souvenirs from Grand Tour travels, for example. Upper class families often considered travel to Italy integral to the cultural education gained from a European Grand Tour. In the eighteenth century, artists and architects increasingly took part in this practice; over fifty British architects lived and studied in Rome between 1740 and 1797 alone.1 Etched images of Rome certainly contributed to the conceptualization of the city’s architectural identity, both for Roman elites and architects, and for foreigners. In these prints, local noble families found evidence of their urban interventions in the form of family palaces and architectural commissions. Prints gave architects within Rome and elsewhere in Europe access to exemplars from which to learn and take inspiration for their own designs, ranging from the great ruins of antiquity to celebrated buildings from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The interconnected nature of the city’s successive built iterations became central to the identity of the city in the early modern period, and printmakers often called attention to it in their works. This essay presents a selection of etchings by two printmakers working in Rome in the late baroque period, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), and his lesser-known predecessor, Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729), and considers the various ways that they presented their city to viewers. Both Specchi and Piranesi produced city views, or vedute, of architectural monuments and created the plates for successful book publications on Roman architecture. Through their virtuosic etched images of Rome, these artists provided their audiences with various ways of engaging with the architectural layers of the city and promoted an understanding and appreciation of its monuments, both ancient and modern. The ever-present interlacing of the ancient and modern urban fabric was integral to the identity of Rome. By recalling the grandeur of antiquity and highlighting the continued greatness of more recent architectural endeavors, Specchi and Piranesi presented Rome as a city of magnificence. Both etchers were also practicing architects (though they achieved vastly different levels of production in this arena), who each had an interest and stake in the direction of contemporary architectural practice. Specchi tended to focus on recent architectural feats in his etchings. He approached his printmaking as a formally trained, practicing architect, and drew on the potential of architectural prints as pedagogical tools. Piranesi’s published 1 Amalia Papaioannou, “Measuring Classical Architecture,” in Eighteenth-Century Architecture, eds. Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2017), 640.

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works were more explicitly embedded within an antiquarian tradition focused on studying the ancient past. As architects and etchers, both created projects that were ultimately about the modern city and the craft of modern architecture, but critically, an architecture that built upon the city’s wealth of ancient architectural knowledge. In the pages that follow, I will analyze a selection of vedute and plates from published volumes created by these two etchers, focusing on how their printed works promoted ideas about Rome’s contemporary architectural identity.

Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729) While Piranesi’s printed works have been closely studied in the centuries following his prolific career, an earlier architect and etcher who represented Rome’s architecture through prints has received far less attention. Alessandro Specchi’s career spanned the turn of the eighteenth century. 2 Decades before Piranesi, he produced vedute of the city and illustrated several books on Roman architecture. While he physically intervened in the topography by way of his built architecture, Specchi also took part in shaping the architectural identity of Rome through his printed works. He made images of ancient monuments but focused especially on the early modern feats of architecture that emerged alongside the city’s ancient ruins. His etchings of palaces and architectural ornamentation celebrated the tradition of Roman design and provided material for the study of architecture.3 Specchi’s lifelong dual practice of architecture and printmaking was rooted in his training and earliest professional projects. He was born in Rome in 1666 and likely entered the studio of famed architect Carlo Fontana (1638–1714) in the 1680s, around the age of twenty.4 In the following decade, Specchi was engaged on several of Fontana’s book projects, most notably 2 For chronologies of Specchi’s life and career see Alfredo Giuggioli, Il Palazzo De Carolis in Roma (Rome: Banco di Roma, 1980), Appendix II, 421–434; Barbara Principato, “Documenti inediti per la vita e l’opera di Alessandro Specchi,” Palladio 3, no. 6 (1990), 97–110; Tommaso Manfredi, “Specchi Alessandro,” in In Urbe Architectus. Modelli, Disegni, Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680–1750, eds. Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio (Rome: Argos, 1991), 445–447; Edward J. Olszewski, “Specchi, Alessandro,” Grove Art Online, 2003, https://doi. org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T080478. 3 For a more in-depth study of Specchi’s printed works and his involvement with late baroque architectural education, see the author’s forthcoming dissertation: Abbey Hafer, “Etching Architecture: The Intersection of Paper and Practice in the Printed Works of Alessandro Specchi (1666–1729)” (PhD diss., Emory University). 4 Principato, “Documenti inediti,” 98.

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a lengthy exposition on St. Peter’s Basilica called Il Templum Vaticanum, published in Rome in 1694, for which he etched the copperplates from Fontana’s drawings.5 Specchi began producing his own perspective views, or vedute, by the end of the 1680s.6 Several of these prints, which represented ancient and modern architectural monuments, were published by a prominent printshop in Rome run by the De Rossi family. The De Rossi also engaged the talented etcher in an ongoing, multi-volume project to represent the churches, palaces, and piazze of modern Rome titled Il Nuovo Teatro (1665–1699). The largest and most influential printed project of Specchi’s career was a three-volume publication of architectural plates, published by De Rossi, entitled Studio d’Architettura Civile (1702, 1711, 1721). The first volume consisted of plates featuring architectural details from some of the most celebrated buildings of early modern Rome. In addition to a robust output of printed works, Specchi also enjoyed a successful career as an architect. He engaged in the design and restoration of several palaces in Rome, participated in various projects for churches, and designed the papal stables at the Quirinal Palace. His most important architectural commission was a port along the Tiber River called the Porta di Ripetta, commissioned by Pope Clement XI in 1703 and finished the following year.7 Throughout his career Specchi was awarded various prestigious architectural positions. By 1702 he held the position of Architect of the Tribunale delle Strade, an organization responsible for the maintenance of public properties in Rome and the care of churches and convents under papal protection.8 He was elected to the premier artistic academy in Rome, the Accademia di San Luca, in 1711 and in 1713 Specchi was nominated Architect of the Popolo Romano, taking charge of restoration efforts at the Pantheon and several other ancient sites. Pope Innocent XIII appointed him 5 Giuseppe Beltrami, “Di alcune pubblicazioni riguardanti la Basilica Vaticana promosse dalla Rev. Fabbrica di S. Pietro,” La Bibliofilía 27, no. 1/2 (1925): 18–32; Martha Pollak, ed. Italian and Spanish Books: Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection, IV (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 141–148; Giovanna Curcio, ed. Il Tempio Vaticano 1694: Carlo Fontana (Milan: Electa, 2003); Aloisio Antinori, “New Light on the Production of ‘Il Tempio Vaticano’,” The Burlington Magazine 160, no. 1378 (January 2018): 22–30. 6 Thomas Ashby and Stephen Welsh, “Alessandro Specchi,” The Town Planning Review 12, no. 4 (1927): 238; Principato, “Documenti inediti,” 98. 7 On the Porta di Ripetta, see Tod A. Marder, “The Porto di Ripetta in Rome” (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 1975) and Tod A. Marder, “The Porto di Ripetta in Rome,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 1 (1980): 28–56. 8 Marder, “The Porto di Ripetta,” 37. Specchi’s position as the architect of the Tribunale led to the Porta di Ripetta commission.

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the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica (Architetto della Fabbrica di S. Pietro) in 1721.9 Specchi consistently engaged in a variety of urban projects, and his architectural achievements should be considered alongside his contemporary printed works. In the sections that follow, I will analyze several of Specchi’s prints, focusing on examples of vedute and selections from his two most important published volumes, Il Quarto Libro del Nuovo Teatro (1699) and part one of the Studio d’Architettura Civile (1702). Through these works and his architectural projects, Specchi contributed to Rome’s urban landscape and perceived identity. His prints represent the city’s greatest early modern architectural achievements and promote the process of architectural pedagogy in which modern architects closely studied both ancient exemplars and early modern models that continued the legacy of ancient Roman building. Through his prints, Specchi promoted the identity of the modern architect as inheritor of the knowledge imbued in Rome’s layers.

Specchi’s Vedute Specchi created vedute of both ancient monuments and important contemporary building projects in the city. Some of the most compelling of his individually published architectural views take a multi-view, anatomical approach to the structure depicted. Specchi’s 1703 print of the Colosseum presents the ancient architectural edifice in several distinct studies (fig. 5.1). The large perspective view stretching across the top half of the composition shows the contemporary, ruinous state of the amphitheater and its surroundings, which encompass the Arch of Constantine and the Meta Sudans (an ancient conical fountain), both of which are labeled and described in the caption. The cross affixed to the exterior of the Colosseum and the figures in modern dress, together with the vegetation that sprouts from the ruin’s jagged edges, emphasize the modern vantage point of the print. The three smaller images that line the bottom edge of the print reveal other aspects of the building: a scaled plan, an interior section view, and a reconstructed version of the Colosseum as it would have appeared in ancient Rome. The process of dissecting and graphically reproducing the Colosseum relates to methods of architectural study in the early modern period. Architects-in-training “learned” a given building by drawing it in situ or 9 As Architetto della Fabbrica di S. Pietro, Specchi submitted a design for the Spanish Steps, though the commission was ultimately awarded to another architect.

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Figure 5.1. Alessandro Specchi, Prospetto dell’Anfiteatro Flavio. Etching, 1703. The Vincent Buonanno Collection.

by copying existing prints and drawings. Technical, measured drawings of a structure in plan, elevation, and cross section were completed alongside perspective views to fully document a subject.10 This documentation process allowed the draftsman to absorb the architectural knowledge imbued in ancient monuments and inherited by early modern builders. In Specchi’s Colosseum print, he provides the viewer with a celebrated example of ancient Roman building in the language of the modern architect. He simultaneously presents the Colosseum as an awe-inspiring ruin set within the contemporary urban fabric and provides the framework for a close study of its architectural forms. While a growing number of architects traveled to Italy to study monuments in situ in the eighteenth century, due to the rise of the European Grand Tour and the development of architectural academies, a flourishing print trade also functioned to transport Roman architecture to distant places. Specchi’s print utilizes an increasingly standardized repertoire of architectural image types that encourages the viewer to study the architectural specimen presented. One of Specchi’s most spectacular prints employs a similar set of representational strategies but applies them to an architectural feat of his own design, the Porto di Ripetta (fig. 5.2). Commissioned by Pope Clement XI (r. 1700–1721) in 1703, the stepped terraces on the Tiber greatly improved 10 Papaioannou, “Measuring Classical Architecture,” 644.

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Figure 5.2. Alessandro Specchi, View of the Porto di Ripetta. Etching, 1704. The Vincent Buonanno Collection.

the functioning of the port and gave way to a broad piazza on the river’s bank. In Specchi’s three-plate etching a panoramic image of the newly constructed port unfolds before the viewer. Animated figures populate the undulating terraces of the port and the piazza beyond, while boats float tethered at its base. Specchi has rendered the buildings lining the port attentively, utilizing crisp, emphatic line work and extreme attention to detail. The bottom portion of the print is made up of three smaller scenes. The leftmost view reverses recent construction efforts, revealing the jagged hillside that existed before Specchi’s interventions at the site. The central one presents a detailed architectural plan of Specchi’s design and the right corner showcases the finished port from another angle. While many of Specchi’s vedute depict modern buildings, this print is distinctive because it documents his own contribution to Rome’s urban landscape through public architecture. In his scholarship on the Porto di Ripetta, architectural historian Tod Marder suggests that the public utility of the port was key to its meaning within Pope Clement XI’s architectural program, which, due to financial difficulties, was limited to restoration efforts and public works. Marder proposes that the Porto di Ripetta project not only fulfilled the city’s immediate needs, but also, through the use of antique motifs in the monument, revived the heritage of ancient Rome, and linked the papal custodianship of the city to imperial custodianship over the Roman empire.11 Architectural interventions like the port continued to transform the topography of Rome in the late baroque period, adding new 11 Marder, “The Porto di Ripetta,” 43–48.

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layers to the existing strata of ancient, Renaissance, and baroque building. By representing his recent urban achievement in the medium of print, Specchi inscribed himself into the architectural legacy of Rome, proclaiming his identity as an architect who is both innovative and integrated within a historical tradition of Roman building. With this etching Specchi promotes his personal architectural practice and at the same time endorses Rome as a site where modern invention flourished alongside its historic layers.

Early Modern Architecture Takes Center Stage: Specchi’s Il Quarto Libro del Nuovo Teatro (1699) and Studio d’Architettura Civile (1702) In addition to his individual prints of Roman monuments, Specchi produced illustrations for numerous book projects that took the architecture of early modern Rome as their subject. Two of his most notable publications, Il Quarto Libro del Nuovo Teatro (1699) and the first volume of the Studio d’Architettura Civile (1702), were published by the prominent Roman printer Domenico De Rossi around the turn of the eighteenth century and together consisted of well over one hundred plates designed and etched by Alessandro Specchi. While they overlap significantly in subject matter, the volumes make use of two discrete representational strategies. Specchi’s Nuovo Teatro volume represents prominent Roman palaces and villas in perspective views, while the Studio contains measured line drawings of architectural ornament from Rome’s greatest buildings. Together, these publications demonstrate a sustained interest in early modern architectural invention on the part of Specchi and his publisher and indicate a market for the genre in Rome and beyond. Through these two printed projects, Specchi contributed to the cultivation and dissemination of an image of Rome centered on its contemporary architectural achievements. Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi had commissioned Il nuovo teatro delle fabriche, et edificii, in prospettiva di Roma moderna […] in the late 1650s to meet the demand for printed views of the contemporary city under Pope Alexander VII (r. 1655–1667).12 The first three volumes, etched by the talented Giovanni Battista Falda, represented the churches, palaces, and piazze of modern Rome, highlighting the urban improvements that occurred under 12 Francesca Consagra, “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop: A Study in the History of the Print Industry in Seventeenth-Century Rome” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 413.

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the direction of the pope. In the final years of the seventeenth century, Giovanni Giacomo’s heir Domenico De Rossi commissioned a fourth volume, Il Quarto libro del nuovo teatro delli palazzi in prospettiva di Roma moderna […], a curated collection of the most prominent palaces in the city and villas from the Roman countryside (fig. 5.3). Specchi contributed all fifty plates of architectural views for the volume as well as a dedication page. He often represented a palace straight-on, with a focus on its elevation and the piazza or street in front of the building, or from an angled perspective that revealed the façade and a side flank of the palace. Occasionally, Specchi produced multiple plates that show a single building from various vantage points, providing a more three-dimensional understanding of the palace in its urban context. Shortly after the Nuovo Teatro volume came out, Specchi was already at work on what would arguably be the largest and most influential printed project of his career; a three-volume publication of architectural plates entitled Studio d’Architettura Civile (1702, 1711, 1721). The first volume, Studio d’architettura civile sopra gli ornamenti di porte e finestre tratti da alcune fabbriche insigni di Roma con le misure piante modini, e profile […] parte prima, published in 1702 by Domenico De Rossi, contained 139 etched plates featuring architectural ornament from some of the most celebrated buildings of modern Rome (fig. 5.4).13 Windows, doorways, and other architectural details from palaces and churches built by influential architects like Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini fill its pages. Most of the plates depict a single portal (a window or doorway) in elevation, either isolated from its surroundings, or embedded in its architectural framework. A measured plan of the opening accompanies the elevation. Each plate is labeled with a title that credits the architect of the illustrated specimen. The innovative publication received attention in Rome from practicing architects as well as from students and patrons of architecture, and the books proved influential for architectural communities elsewhere in Italy and beyond.14 13 Seventy-seven plates from the first volume are signed by Alessandro Specchi as draftsman and engraver. See Aloisio Antinori, “Rappresentare Roma moderna. La stamperia De Rossi alla Pace tra industria del libro e cultura architettonica (1648–1738),” in Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, ed. Aloisio Antinori (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2012), 46–56 and Paola Placentino, “I tre volumi dello Studio d’Architettura Civile,” in Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, ed. Aloisio Antinori (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2012), 271–276. 14 Aloisio Antinori, ed. Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2012).

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Figure 5.3. Alessandro Specchi, Palazzo Barberini (plate 17). Etching, 1699. Illustration from: Il Quarto libro del nuovo teatro delli palazzi in prospettiva di Roma moderna, Rome: Domenico De Rossi, 1699. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Photo credit: Collection of the author.

The fourth book of the Nuovo Teatro and the first Studio volume both contain a lengthy series of plates on the Palazzo Barberini.15 An existing smaller palace on the site was purchased in 1625 by Pope Urban VIII (r. 1623–1644), born Maffeo Barberini, and transformed into a stunning example of palace architecture by celebrated baroque architects Carlo Maderno, Bernini, and Borromini. The Nuovo Teatro includes a series of four views of the palace. In the first view (plate 17), the principal facade of the palace dominates the composition (fig. 5.3). The U-shaped building consists of a central threestory loggia and two lateral wings that extend from the ends of the central section. Specchi deploys a variety of textures and detailed architectural ornamentation in his representation of the palace facade. He has carefully drafted each window, using layers of incised lines to build up the surface of the building. This attention to minute detail contrasts with the obvious monumentality of the palace, as it dwarfs the surrounding urban landscape and the figures that populate it. The three plates that follow represent the palace from other viewpoints. Plates 18 and 19 shift the position of the viewer to reveal the sides of the palace, while in Plate 20 the rear façade and 15 Several palaces are featured in both books, including the Palazzo Farnese, the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, and the Palazzo de Montecitorio.

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Figure 5.4. Alessandro Specchi, Third story window of the Palazzo Barberini. Etching, 1702. Illustration from: Studio d’architettura civile sopra gli ornamenti di porte e finestre tratti da alcune fabbriche insigni di Roma con le misure piante modini, e profile…parte prima, Rome: Domenico De Rossi, 1702. The Vincent Buonanno Collection. Photo credit: Collection of the author.

gardens are on display. Together, these four plates place the palace within a dynamic urban setting, capturing the activity of the city as horse-drawn carriages pass by, pairs of onlookers study the building before them, and dogs bound through the piazza. The views simultaneously relay the virtuosity of the design, the grandeur and monumentality of the palace, and its role in a vibrant urban culture to the viewer. Specchi’s plates of the Palazzo Barberini in the Studio d’Architettura Civile represent the palace quite differently. A series of 18 plates, the longest on a single building in the volume, illustrates architectural details from the Palazzo Barberini (fig. 5.4). A plate of a window from the third story of the

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palace’s facade presents an up-close view of the window and its surrounding framework, including a bit of one of the archways from the central loggia along the left edge of the print. Other elements to the right of and below the main image illustrate the window in profile and outline the moldings of the cornice and window frame. Two separate scales in Roman palmi correspond to the elevation and profile drawings.16 The caption identifies the placement of the window on the palace façade and attributes its design to “Cavalier Borromini.” Specchi’s crisp line work and close attention to detail are here marshalled to create graphic architecture with stunning clarity. The measured elevations and prof iles presented in the volume allowed readers to perform a close study of the chosen exemplars. In fact, several scholars have suggested that the Studio d’Architettura Civile served as a sort of textbook from which architects-in-training made drawings, as both the mode of representation and the selection of examples is strikingly similar to the academic exercises assigned at the Accademia di San Luca, the main artistic academy in Rome throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.17 In his contributions to these two book projects, Specchi provided a thorough representation of the architectural marvels of modern Rome, utilizing different representational strategies to produce detailed depictions of key sites. The Nuovo Teatro plates depict the palaces and villas of Rome in their monumental entirety. Together, the fifty perspective views convey the rich tradition of private building commissions by members of the Roman nobility, depicting an urban environment created by noble (and papal) patrons and their architects. In contrast, the edif ices represented in the Studio are defined as the sum of their parts. The Studio emphasizes architectural invention and encourages readers to learn the craft of architecture from the city’s greatest early modern fragments. The fragments depicted in the Studio volume retain an implicit link to the art of ancient building, forged through the rebirth of antiquity in Renaissance architecture and architectural 16 The palmo was a standard unit of measurement in early modern Italy. 1 palmo=22.34 centimeters. 17 Sarah McPhee, “The Vatican Album,” in Filippo Juvarra: Drawings from the Roman Period, 1704-1714, part 2, eds. Andreina Griseri, Sarah McPhee, Henry A. Millon, and Mercedes Viale Ferrero (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1999), 21–25; Henry A. Millon, “Filippo Juvarra and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Projects and Monuments in the Period of the Roman Baroque, eds. Hellmut Hager and Susan Scott Munshower (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 19; Simona Ciofetta, “Lo Studio d’Architettura Civile edito da Domenico De Rossi (1702, 1711, 1721),” in In Urbe Architectus. Modelli, Disegni, Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680–1750, eds. Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio (Rome: Argos, 1991), 16–17.

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theory. Overall, Specchi’s printed works provide evidence of his interest in the power of ancient monuments, while emphasizing the great feats of local early modern architecture.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) Giovanni Battista Piranesi is widely regarded as one of the most talented etchers working in eighteenth century Rome. Throughout his career, he produced an impressive number of images of the city of Rome and its surroundings. His prolific artistic output includes vedute of Roman ruins and early modern structures, reconstructions of the imperial city (at once fantastical and thoroughly researched), and large printed volumes of text and image. His printed works reveal a deep engagement with Roman ruins as archaeological objects, enduring centuries and manipulated by modern actors. His books convey both his antiquarian knowledge and theoretical beliefs as an architect. Piranesi was born near Venice and first came to Rome in 1740. He quickly entered into the studio of Giuseppe Vasi (1710–1782), a talented printmaker who specialized in city views, and began an etching practice that would bloom into a robust and prolific career. In addition to numerous vedute, Piranesi produced twenty-six publications, twelve of which are large folio volumes filled with pages of letterpress text and etched images. In 1756 Piranesi published his first large format book, Le Antichità Romane.18 In its four volumes on the monuments of Roman antiquity, Piranesi relied on various types of architectural images and extensive passages of text to argue for the necessity of modern architectural reform inspired by ancient buildings. Throughout his career, Piranesi would continue to produce publications on antiquarian and architectural themes, some of which were polemical in nature. While Piranesi was a learned antiquarian and immensely talented printmaker, he seems to have conceived of himself principally as an architect. However, Piranesi engaged in a very limited number of building projects. He executed only one work of architecture, the restoration of S. Maria del Priorato, the church of the Priory of Malta in Rome.19 Despite this lack of 18 On Le Antichità Romane, see especially Heather Hyde Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), chapters one and two. 19 Piranesi also produced a design for the interior restoration of the apse of San Giovanni in Laterano but did not receive the commission. See John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and

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built works, he referred to himself as an architect and signed his plates as such. In his etchings he focused almost solely on architecture, representing ruins of ancient monuments, architectural ornament, and aqueduct systems, and producing his own designs in print. He also authored texts, which often worked alongside his plates, that engaged directly with architectural theory and spoke to fellow contemporary architects, urging them to find inspiration for their own designs in the variety, creativity, and magnificence of ancient architecture.

Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane (1756) With the publication of the luxurious Le Antichità Romane, Piranesi entered into an antiquarian discourse and declared his beliefs regarding contemporary architectural theory. In its four volumes, Piranesi relied on architectural etchings and passages of letterpress text to both preserve a record of antiquity for scholars and argue for the necessity of modern architectural reform. Volume I of the Antichità focuses on aqueducts and baths, Volumes II and III represent tombs and funerary monuments, and Volume IV includes bridges, theaters, porticos, and other monuments in Rome and its surrounding countryside. In these pages the magnificence of ancient Roman architecture was on full display. Piranesi engaged thoroughly with individual monuments, relying on a diverse set of representational strategies to communicate information to the viewer. He isolated particular details from monuments (such as carved inscriptions and column capitals), but also presented the remnants of the ancient past as they appeared in the modern city, encased in centuries of vegetal and urban growth. As author he cited modern excavation or restoration efforts as sources for information on ancient construction and highlighted the achievements of early modern popes as well as drawing from ancient texts. In this initial book project, Piranesi worked to uncover knowledge of the ancient past, but also insisted on the monuments’ status as ruins and their relevance to the modern architect. Several pages from the Antichità demonstrate Piranesi’s thorough engagement with the ancient city and simultaneous insistence on its presence within, and significance for, the modern city. The Plan of Ancient Rome (fig. 5.5) appears early in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, following an ornate dedicatory frontispiece and the requisite preface and imprimatur, Designer (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 65–66.

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Figure 5.5. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720-1778). Plan of Ancient Rome. 1756. Etching. Gift of the Patrons of Paper and the John Howett Fund. 2011.41.1. Photo credit: © Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University. Photo by Bruce M. White, 2012.

which provided proof that the papacy had granted proper permission for the publication. The plan of Rome begins a lengthy section focused on two specific types of antique fragments. The etched plates and printed text that follow work together to index ruins of ancient Roman monuments as they appeared in the eighteenth century and the fragments of an ancient marble plan of Rome known as the Severan Marble Plan, or the Forma urbis romae. Fragments of the Severan Plan were discovered in 1562 but in the mid-eighteenth century had recently been installed in a public display at the Capitoline Museums. This fragmentary evidence of ancient Rome’s urban layout influenced early modern cartographers and antiquarians, who attempted to reconstruct Roman topography from extant ruins and writings from antiquity.20 Piranesi was well acquainted with the Severan fragments, and frequently drew inspiration from them when creating his own plans and images of antiquity.21 20 John Pinto, “Forma Urbis Romae: Fragment and Fantasy,” in Architectural Studies in Honor of Richard Krautheimer, ed. C.L. Striker (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1996), 143–144. 21 Pinto, “Forma Urbis Romae,” 144–146 and John Pinto, Speaking Ruins, Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), 132–144. Cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli (1701–1756) was put in charge of the arrangement of the fragments at the Capitoline Museums at around the same that Piranesi was working with him

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Figure 5.6. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Plan of Ancient Rome and Index of Ancient Fragments. Etching, 1756. Illustration from: Le Antichità Romane, Vol. I, Rome: Angelo Rotili, 1756. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Photo credit: Collection of the author.

In the Plan of Ancient Rome, Piranesi scatters pieces of the marble plan around a map of the walled city. The numbers that appear alongside the marble fragments in this print correspond to entries in the detailed index that follows, in which Piranesi lists each surviving fragment and posits its identity and location in the city (fig. 5.6). The index pages were designed to work alongside the Plan of Ancient Rome, so when unfolded, each index page could lie open while the reader flipped back to the plan. Piranesi encouraged his readers to undertake an active process of consultation by ingeniously designing the pages to be opened simultaneously. The map of Rome in the center of the print shows ancient monuments (in plan) as they appeared in Piranesi’s day (fig. 5.5). The small numbers labeling these sites link the reader to text entries on subsequent pages. Here, Piranesi’s Rome emerges from the old fragments that surround it. This plate visualizes the continuity between the ancient and modern city, and in fact actively defines contemporary Rome by the surviving pieces of its ancient past. For on a map of the city. Images of the Forma urbis romae fragments had also been published in an accessible 1673 volume by Giovanni Pietro Bellori. Later in his Antichità publication and others, Piranesi would inscribe reconstructed plans on slabs of fragmented marble, often illusionistically held to the surface with metal clamps.

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Figure 5.7. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of Ponte Fabrizio. Etching, 1756. Illustration from: Le Antichità Romane, Vol. IV, Rome: Angelo Rotili, 1756. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Photo credit: Collection of the author.

Piranesi, the monuments of antiquity are integral to the city’s identity, but he chose to depict them as ruins, as opposed to reconstructing the structures ichnographically (in ground plan) as he does elsewhere in this volume and in other publications. The identity of modern Rome is not identical to the ancient one but builds upon its legacy. Throughout the second, third, and fourth volumes of the Antichità, Piranesi presents individual Roman monuments to the viewer through multi-plate series that provide in-depth studies of each structure, paying particular attention to aspects of construction. He relies on diverse types of architectural representation to convey information, including perspective views, elevations, ground plans, sections that slice through monuments, and details of architectural ornaments, inscriptions, and related objects. In the fourth volume of Le Antichità Romane Piranesi presents several series of prints on ancient Roman bridges. In a spectacular plate of the Ponte Fabrizio, Piranesi combines distinct strategies for representing architecture to produce a comprehensive composite view of the monument (fig. 5.7). An elevation of the bridge’s exterior stretches across the top portion of the print. Through the open archways, perspective views of the Tiber River and the buildings on its banks are revealed, reminiscent of Piranesi’s vedute. The elevation then morphs into a section view, as the artist slices through the water to reveal the pier supports and bed of ancient stone that rests at the

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bottom of the river. The blocks labeled “A” and the elements that surround them show the bridge’s supporting piers in plan, as if viewed from above. Two architectural details appear at the bottom of the plate. On the left Piranesi presents an ornamental detail of a pilaster capital and entablature from the face of the bridge, and on the right one of the stone blocks used in its construction. This print is part of a five-plate series on the Ponte Fabrizio that includes a dramatic veduta of the bridge, an image that excerpts the monument’s inscriptions, and several composite views. This thorough representation of a single monument is typical of Piranesi’s engagement with architectural subject matter. In the Ponte Fabrizio composite view (fig. 5.7), Piranesi embeds the ancient monument within the modern city, both physically and conceptually. Crumbling stone blocks and vegetation sprouting from cracks in the ancient structure visualize the passage of time the monument has endured. Modern buildings that line the banks of the river are visible through the bridge’s archways, formally interweaving the ancient and modern city. The crumbled rocks and pieces of stone visible at the bottom of the Tiber in Piranesi’s print visualize his conception of the modern city as built on the bedrock of ancient design. A thorough understanding of the principles of ancient Roman building and design was integral to modern scholarly and artistic pursuits and to an understanding of the city’s architectural magnificence. Part of Piranesi’s pursuit was to harness ancient architectural knowledge and creativity and channel it into contemporary architectural theory, promoting a tangible effect on the urban fabric of the city.

Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma Piranesi is perhaps best known for his urban views, produced in considerable number throughout his career. Situated within the workshop of Giuseppe Vasi, the foremost engraver of vedute in Rome, Piranesi made significant advances in his etching technique. Over the next thirty years, from around 1748 until his death in 1778, Piranesi produced a series of one hundred and thirty-five prints called the Vedute di Roma.22 These views of ancient and 22 The 135-print edition was published posthumously. It included 135 views plus two title pages, and two plates by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s son, Francesco. Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luigi Ficacci, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (Köln; New York: Taschen, 2016), 726. See also John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) 26–29.

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Figure 5.8. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720-1778). Bird’s Eye View of the Flavian Amphitheater, Called the Colosseum (Veduta dell’Anfiteatro Flavio detto il Colosseo). 1776. Etching. Art History Department Fund. 2003.72.1. Photo credit: © Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University. Photo by Bruce M. White, 2006.

modern Roman buildings were sold as individual sheets or in sets to scholars, artists, and tourists to serve as souvenirs of their Roman travels.23 Many of his vedute can be categorized as dramatic representations of ancient ruins embedded within their modern urban environment. Piranesi often relied on dramatic angled perspectives, exaggerations in scale, striking contrasts in light and dark, and crumbling stone and vegetal growth to convey the monumentality and magnificence of his city. Many of Piranesi’s vedute focused on individual ancient monuments and reveal the artist’s intense interest in ruins as archaeological objects, replicating the structures in their ruined form and often incorporating information gained from their excavation. The last of Piranesi’s four views of the Colosseum demonstrates this approach (f ig. 5.8). He reveals the overall plan and the interior of the Flavian amphitheater as if seen from the air, exposing the masses of masonry that supported the seating. Piranesi emphasizes the scale of the structure by tightly cropping the edges of the plate to the circumference of the building and depicting minute figures 23 Surviving puncture marks on the edge of some sheets evidence that they were bound with other prints.

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scattered about the amphitheater floor. Scrolls of text in the lower corners correspond with letters placed throughout the composition to provide details on ancient seating capacity and customs. While deep shadows engulf much of the monument, light illuminates the center of the amphitheater, revealing the crucifix recently erected by Pope Benedict XIV (r. 1740–1758) and the altars representing the Stations of the Cross at the edge of the arena. These additions, which would remain in place until modern restorations, culminated an effort to commemorate the resting place of early Christian martyrs that had begun in 1675 (of which Piranesi certainly would have been aware).24 Piranesi’s veduta emphasizes the Colosseum’s presence in the modern city; a monumental, cavernous ruin and a powerful image of the greatness of imperial Rome that had been enveloped by papal authority in the early modern period, but ultimately retained its ancient form. Many of his other vedute also represent ancient monuments in their contemporary state, nodding to both their ancient context and modern significance in the city. The Egyptian Obelisk Erected by Sixtus V centers on a massive obelisk, originally brought to Rome by Emperor Constantius II (r. 337–361) and re-erected at the important catholic basilica San Giovanni in Laterano by Pope Sixtus V (r. 1585–1590) (fig. 5.9). At that time the obelisk was exorcised of pagan demons and topped by a cross and the pope’s coat of arms, transforming it into a Christian monument. The Lateran Palace, also commissioned by Sixtus V, is visible along the right side of the print, but Piranesi’s focus is on the ancient obelisk and its preserved hieroglyphs.25 But the early modern importance of this monument as a marker of papal Rome is implicit in the image; the erection of obelisks at key sites in the city was an urban design effort imposed by Sixtus V in the late sixteenth century. Popes used these massive ancient objects intentionally to demarcate the modern urban landscape, and modern Christian landscape, of papal Rome. As in Le Antichità Romane, Piranesi performs an intertwining of ancient and modern aspects of the city’s fabric to promote its identity as a city of magnificence. The rich history of the city remains integral to its early modern identity. 24 Hellmut Hager, “Carlo Fontana’s Project for a Church in Honour of the ‘Ecclesia Triumphans’ in the Colosseum, Rome,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 323–336. Carlo Fontana’s treatise on the Colosseum (L’anfiteatro Flavio, descritto e delineato dal cavaliere Carlo Fontana), published posthumously in 1725 but likely complete in the mid 1690s, detailed his own designs for a church inside the ancient amphitheater. 25 Specchi made a view of the same Lateran piazza, published by Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi in 1694. While the obelisk rises near the center of the composition, Specchi’s print focuses on the entire piazza and the complex of buildings that surround it. In comparison, Piranesi’s near singular focus on the obelisk is striking.

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Figure 5.9. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720-1778). Egyptian Obelisk Erected by Sixtus V in the Piazza of S. Giovanni in Laterano. 1750. Etching. Gift in honor of Peter Lacovara from Betty and Billy Hulse, Ginny and Craig Magher, and Sylvia and Bill Teasley. 2005.035.1. Photo credit: © Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University. Photo by Bruce M. White, 2006.

Alessandro Specchi and Giovanni Battista Piranesi were prolific printmakers who contributed to a wide range of printed projects throughout their careers. They both engaged almost exclusively with the genre of architectural, or topographical printmaking, creating etchings that reflected the built environment of Rome in all of its layers. At first glance, Piranesi’s work seems to provide a romantic vision of ancient Rome, while Specchi’s appears to replicate the early modern city. In fact, both shared a deep commitment to modern Rome and the state of contemporary architectural theory and invention. They saw the ancient history of Rome’s urban fabric as integral to its modern identity and found ways to intertwine the city’s ancient and early modern strata in their printed works. Specchi and Piranesi alike

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created projects that were ultimately about the modern city and a craft of modern architecture that built upon the great wealth of ancient architectural knowledge inherent to their great city.

Bibliography Aceto, Angelamaria. “From Building to Print: Giovanni Giacomo De’ Rossi and the Making of Architectural Books”. In The Burlington Magazine 159, no. 1374 (September 2017): 697-705. Antinori, Aloisio, ed. Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento. Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2012. Antinori, Aloisio. “Rappresentare Roma moderna. La stamperia De Rossi alla Pace tra industria del libro e cultura architettonica (1648-1738)”. In Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, edited by Aloisio Antinori. Rome: Edizioni Quasar (2012): 11-69. Antinori, Aloisio. “New Light on the Production of ‘Il Tempio Vaticano’”. In The Burlington Magazine 160, no. 1378 (January 2018): 22-30. Ashby, Thomas, and Stephen Welsh. “Alessandro Specchi”. In The Town Planning Review 12, no. 4 (1927): 237-48. Beltrami, Giuseppe. “Di alcune pubblicazioni riguardanti la Basilica Vaticana promosse dalla Rev. Fabbrica di S. Pietro”. In La Bibliofilía 27, no. 1/2 (1925): 18–32. Blunt, Anthony, Domenico De Rossi, and Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi. Studio d’Architettura Civile di Roma: Three Parts, Rome 1702, 1711, 1721. Brookfield, VT: Gregg International, 1972. Bonardi, Giulia. “Disegni di Alessandro Specchi per palazzo De Carolis a Roma nella collezione di Lord Coleraine”. In Palladio 25, no. 49 (2013): 57-80. Ciofetta, Simona. “Lo Studio d’Architettura Civile edito da Domenico De Rossi (1702, 1711, 1721)”. In In Urbe Architectus. Modelli, Disegni, Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680-1750, edited by Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio. Rome: Argos (1991): 214-228. Consagra, Francesca. “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop: A Study in the History of the Print Industry in Seventeenth-Century Rome”. PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1992. Consagra, Francesca. “De Rossi and Falda: A Successful Collaboration in the Print Industry of Seventeenth-Century Rome”. In The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, edited by Andrew Ladis and Carolyn Wood, 187-203. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

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Contardi, Bruno and Giovanna Curcio, eds. In Urbe Architectus. Modelli, Disegni, Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680-1750. Rome: Argos, 1991. Curcio, Giovanna, ed. Il Tempio Vaticano 1694: Carlo Fontana. Milan: Electa, 2003. Friedman, Terry. “De Rossi books and England”. In Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, edited by Aloisio Antinori. Rome: Edizioni Quasar (2012): 213-231. Giuggioli, Alfredo. Il Palazzo De Carolis in Roma. Rome: Banco di Roma, 1980. Hager, Hellmut. “Carlo Fontana’s Project for a Church in Honour of the ‘Ecclesia Triumphans’ in the Colosseum, Rome”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 319-337. Hager, Hellmut. “Carlo Fontana: Pupil, Partner, Principal, Preceptor”. In The Artist’s Workshop, edited by Peter M. Lukehart, 122-155. Studies in the History of Art, 38. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1993. Kieven, Elisabeth. “’Mostrar l’invenzione’ – The Role of Roman Architects in the Baroque Period: Plans and Models”. In Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe, 1600-1750, edited by Henry A. Millon. London: Thames and Hudson (1999): 172-205. Kieven Elisabeth. “Cascades and Steps: The Porto di Ripetta and Other Changes to the Urban Fabric of Rome in the Eighteenth Century”. In Fragmenta: Journal of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, 1 (2007): 122-40. Krautheimer, Richard. The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655-1667. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Maier, Jessica. “Archaism and Innovation: Giuseppe Vasi as Cartographer”. In Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai Catasti, edited by Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo. Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma. Rome: Artemide Edizioni (2012): 360–69. Manfredi, Tommaso. “Specchi Alessandro.” In In Urbe Architectus. Modelli, Disegni, Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680-1750, edited by Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio. Rome: Argos (1991): 445-447. Marder, Tod A. “The Porto di Ripetta in Rome.” PhD Diss., Columbia University, 1975. Marder, Tod A. “The Porto di Ripetta in Rome.” In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 1 (1980): 28-56. McPhee, Sarah. “The Vatican Album.” In Andreina Griseri, Sarah McPhee, Henry A. Millon, and Mercedes Viale Ferrero, Filippo Juvarra: Drawings from the Roman Period, 1704-1714, Part 2. Corpus Juvarrianum. Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, (1999): 13-151. Millon, Henry A. “Filippo Juvarra and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in the Early Eighteenth Century.” In Projects and Monuments in the Period of the Roman Baroque, edited by Hellmut Hager and Susan Scott Munshower. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, (1984): 13-24.

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Minor, Heather Hyde. Piranesi’s Lost Words. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Minor, Heather Hyde. “Architectural Discourse in Rome: Academies, Ruins, and Books.” In Eighteenth-Century Architecture, edited by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (2017): 546-565. Olin, Martin. “Nicodemus Tessin the Younger and the De Rossi books: a vision of Roman architecture in eighteenth-century Sweden.” In Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, edited by Aloisio Antinori. Rome: Edizioni Quasar (2012): 185-211. Olszewski, Edward J. “Specchi, Alessandro.” In Grove Art Online. 2003. Papaioannou, Amalia. “Measuring Classical Architecture.” In Eighteenth-Century Architecture, edited by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (2017): 635-660. Pinto, John. “Forma Urbis Romae: Fragment and Fantasy.” In Architectural Studies in Honor of Richard Krautheimer, edited by C.L. Striker. Mainz: P. von Zabern (1996): 143-47. Pinto, John. Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista and Luigi Ficacci. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings. Köln; New York: Taschen, 2016. Placentino, Paola. “I tre volumi dello Studio d’Architettura Civile.” In Studio d’Architettura Civile: Gli atlanti di architettura moderna e la diffusione dei modelli romani nell’Europa del Settecento, edited by Aloisio Antinori. Rome: Edizioni Quasar (2012): 259-283. Pollak, Martha, ed. Italian and Spanish Books: Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection, IV. Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2000. Principato, Barbara. “Documenti inediti per la vita e l’opera di Alessandro Specchi.” Palladio 3, no. 6 (1990): 97-118. Schmidt, Freek. “Open to All: Architectural Education.” In Eighteenth-Century Architecture, edited by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (2017): 5-32. Smith, Gil R. Architectural Diplomacy: Rome and Paris in the Late Baroque. New York; Cambridge: Architectural History Foundation, MIT Press, 1993. Spagnesi, Gianfranco, and Alessandro Specchi. Alessandro Specchi: Alternativa a Borrominismo. Universale di Architettura; Gli Architetti, 25. Turin: Testo e Immagine, 1997.

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Thomas, Robin Lemuel. “Architects’ Libraries.” In Eighteenth-Century Architecture, edited by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (2017): 33-53. Tice, James, James G. Harper, and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour. Eugene: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2010. Van Eck, Caroline and Sigrid de Jong, eds. Eighteenth-Century Architecture. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2017. Werner, Sarah. Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800: A Practical Guide. Chichester, West Sussex; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2019. Wilton-Ely, John. The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. Wilton-Ely, John. Piranesi as Architect and Designer. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Yerkes, Carolyn. Drawing after Architecture: Renaissance Architectural Drawings and Their Reception. Centro internazionale di studi di architettura Andrea Palladio. Venice: Marsilio, 2017. Yerkes, Carolyn and Heather Hyde Minor. Piranesi Unbound. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Zorach, Rebecca. “The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome—and Beyond.” In The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum romanae magnificentiae,” edited by Rebecca Zorach. Chicago: Joseph Regenstein Library (2008): 11-23.

About the Author Abbey Hafer is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Emory University where she received her MA in Art History. She specializes in Italian Baroque art, focusing on architecture and architectural printmaking. Her interests include architects’ books, the early modern publishing industry, architectural education, and the intersections between ancient and early modern art and urban planning in Rome.

Part II The City in Times of Crisis: Urban Spaces in Modern Italy.

6. Le piazze d’Italia: De Chirico’s Prophetic Vision of Public Space in Destination Italy Julianne VanWagenen

Abstract Inspired by a 1910 experience of Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, Giorgio de Chirico began in 1912 to paint iterations of his Piazza d’Italia urban landscapes, reworking across decades their uncanny elements. While his art and theories of urban space have been much discussed within the context of modernity, tourism as an aspect of modernity has received little attention. In conversation with recent tourist theory, this chapter analyzes de Chirico’s multiple perspectives, unnatural light/shadow, and overwhelming sense of timelessness, objectification and alienation, through the lens of tourism, as it has forced the reification of Italian public space, and, in turn, suffocated the piazza to the point of an apocalyptic collapse of presence. Keywords: de Chirico; mass tourism; Metaphysical art; Modernism; tourist studies

According to Roland Barthes, tour-guide books present destinations as an “uninhabited world” where “the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments.” A consequential choice, he argues, as it abstracts the tourist site from the “real” place, which “exists in time” (emphasis his). The portrayal of tourist destinations, Barthes goes on, suppresses “the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless.”1 Many scholars since Barthes have argued that such tourist expectations, of an empty and 1

Roland Barthes, “The Blue Guide,” in Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1991), 75–76.

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timeless space purified of its mundane daily uses and local significance, have had concrete and lasting effects on physical spaces, particularly in cities.2 Heritage management expert, Britt Baillie, for example, sees in heritage sites like Italy’s art cities “the ultimate reduction of the dimensionality of time,”3 and cultural-heritage scholar, Ilaria Agostini, states that the Italian città storica has experienced an “obliterazione” and, as a result, is “esangue per l’esodo di abitanti e di attività.”4 Cultural economist, Pier Luigi Sacco, argues that “La città si trasformerà in un fondale per foto ricordo, quando i negozi chiudono, i tessuti turistici della città si trasformano in desolate città fantasma, e finiscono per assomigliare a quei ‘non luoghi’.”5 He goes so far as to liken it to an apocalypse, calling cities like Florence zombie-like, and stating that what had been promised as uno scrigno (treasure chest) of Italian heritage, has proven itself una tomba (tomb).6 These descriptions are strikingly similar to those of Giorgio de Chirico’s Piazza d’Italia paintings, which Lorenzo Canova describes as “dystopian” squares “fossilized in the midday sun.”7 In the same strain, the British art gallery, Tate Modern’s “Metaphysical Art” entry on the Art Term section of its website, says his early piazze are “unnaturally empty”8 and Vicenzo Trione likens the 1913 “Melancholy of a Beautiful Day” to “the start of a journey that leads to cities without time,” where “only buildings and monuments remain. The inhabitants have left, almost like ‘the day after’.”9 There seems an uncanny affinity in description between these two twentieth-century monoliths, de Chirico and tourism.10 Yet, the “horror vacui”11 of the painted 2 Sacco argues that Italian heritage cities, regarding tourism, “non fanno che replicare banalmente le competenze e le aspettative del pubblico a cui si rivolgono.” Pier Luigi Sacco and Christian Caliandro, Italia reloaded: Ripartire con la cultura, e-book (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), kindle 121–122. 3 Britt Baillie, Afroditi Chatzoglou, and Shadia Taha, “Packaging the Past: The Commodification of Heritage,” Heritage Management 3, no. 1 (2010), 57. 4 Ilaria Agostini, “La cultura della città storica in Italia,” Scienze del territorio 3 (2015), 101. 5 Sacco, Italia reloaded, kindle 14. 6 Sacco, kindle 2815–2818. 7 Lorenzo Canova, “Metaphysical, Spectral and Post-Human: De Chirico’s Shadow on Art’s Visionary Path,” Metaphysical Art, 11/13 (2013), 76. 8 “Tate Modern. Art Term: Metaphysical Art.” Tate, 2 March 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/art-terms/m/metaphysical-art 9 Vicenzo Trione, “Metapolis: Metaphysics and the City,” Metafisica, 5–6 (2006), 354, 355. 10 “To be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the ‘modern’ experience.” Urry, Tourist Gaze, 5.; De Chirico’s seriality incorporated “a sort of proto-postmodern sensibility.” Michael R. Taylor, Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne (Philadelphia: Merrell, 2002), 134.; “The attraction de Chirico’s later work exerted upon postmodern critics and younger painters” included Warhol. Neil Printz, “On Warhol’s ‘After de Chirico’,” The Brooklyn Rail (May 2017). 11 Wieland Schmeid, “De Chirico and the Realism of the Twenties,” in De Chirico, ed. William Rubin (New York: MoMA, 1982), 103.

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piazze hasn’t been considered from the perspective either of the mass-tourist gaze arriving in fin-de-siècle Italy, or of the effects of that tourism on the subjectivity, agency, and gaze of others sharing the square. This chapter proposes another look at de Chirico’s Piazze d’Italia beginning with the inspirational moment for his Metaphysical painting, to reconsider the mystery, or in dechirican terms, ‘enigma,’12 at its center, from the standpoint of external, rather than internal, stimuli. De Chirico was influential on Surrealism and his Metaphysical style of painting, like Surrealism, is known for its deep connection with the unconscious and dreamworld.13 For this reason, the majority of criticism around Metaphysical painting, and the central enigma which de Chirico insisted on across his career, focuses on Freudian theories of dream analysis and on the dreamlike nostalgia of the inner life.14 Critiques that engage potential external influences generally go so far as to point to philosophers the artist is known to have read, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.15 Ascertaining concrete changes in the urban landscape that may have been influential on de Chirico is difficult, for he didn’t much mention external motivations, rather maintaining his story, across his career, of an ineffable inner inspiration. Thus, as Joan Lukach points out, something as simple as if he “was saddened by the incongruity of the juxtaposition of Renaissance and twentieth century or by the seeming ineffectiveness of the modern in the Italian setting is hard to say.”16 Yet, we can say that any inner stimulus came from gazing first at real piazze: Piazza Santa Croce in Florence in 1910, Piazza San Carlo in Turin on his way to Paris in 1911,17 and, as he began in earnest “Piazza d’Italia” variations in the 1960s, what he saw outside his apartment at Piazza di Spagna in Rome. 12 Many of de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings include the term “enigma” in their titles (The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, The Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon, The Enigma of a Day, The Joys and Enigma of a Strange Hour). In an early self-portrait, de Chirico is shown holding an engraving that states: Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?. With de Chirico’s emphasize on this particular term, together with an essential seemingly unnamable quality of his work, “enigma” has become one of the terms most used by art historians to talk about de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings. 13 De Chirico was “the father figure of the Surrealist movement.” Jennifer Hirsh, “Representing Repetition: Appropriation in de Chirico and After,” in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, eds. Mario Maroni and Luca Somigli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 406. 14 Hirsh, 406.; James Thrall Soby, De Chirico (New York: MoMA, 1955), 119. 15 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “De Chirico in Paris, 1911–1915,” in De Chirico, ed. William Rubin (New York: MoMA, 1982), 11. 16 Joan Lukach, “De Chirico and Italian Art Theory, 1915–1920,” in De Chirico, ed. William Rubin, (New York: MoMA, 1982), 37. 17 Fagiolo dell’Arco, “De Chirico in Paris,” 33.

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Thus, that de Chirico inspired the Surrealists and that his painting is described as an attempt to “see beyond” the present and concrete, in art that Tate Modern describes as “typified by dream-like views,”18 need not exclude his artistic motivation from having some basis in the urban environment. There are, in fact, other examples of dreamlike cityscapes that have their inspiration, at least partly, in actual rather than sleeping visions. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, for one, was partially inspired by the Surrealists in its attempt to reconceive of the city, yet his engagement with Surrealist thought is quite outwardly focused when it comes to his treatment of dreams. As Susan Buck-Morss points out, the theoretical framework of the project is a “sociopsychological theory of modernity as a dreamworld.”19 That is, Benjamin’s city-as-dreamworld is partially external to the individual, both as it is communally dreamed/imagined and as it exists in material objects/ relics in the urban space. De Chirico’s affinity with Benjamin has been pointed out before, and it will continue to be important here, particularly in theorizing the figure of the tourist vis-à-vis that of the flâneur,20 who proves a meaningful counterpart when the tourist is contextualized in the historical setting of the earliest dechirican piazze. This contextualization is useful, in turn, as the tourist was regarded by modernist artists and writers quite differently than he is by postmodernists and today. It turns out that de Chirico was not the only modernist to gaze on Italian urban space and either willfully erase tourists from the actual and rhetorical canvas or minimize the significance of their presence. By comparing de Chirico’s memory of the inspirational 1910 moment in Santa Croce with other early-twentieth century accounts of Italian cities, one sees that there was a tension of competing gazes. The square was a battleground, as it were. At stake, I argue, was the determination of whose gaze perceived the “correct” piazza, and whose gaze, in turn, would project the space into modernity: the gaze of the intellectual or artist, that of the nascent mass-tourist, or that of the local city-dweller. I suggest that we might better understand the mystery at the center of de Chirico’s haunting piazze by re-inserting tourists into the frame and investigating how the actual urban space may have sparked, at least in part, the inscrutable prophetic 18 “Tate Modern. Art Term: Metaphysical Art.” Tate, 2 March 2022, https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/art-terms/m/metaphysical-art 19 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 253. 20 Emily Braun argues de Chirico is “the f irst in the visual arts to acknowledge the loss of meaning inherent in allegory […] providing a visual parallel to […] Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama.” Hirsh, “Representing Repetition,” 412.

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feeling that the artist maintained as both his inspiration and a central motif of his work.21

Defining de Chirico’s Piazze d’Italia Cataloguing de Chirico’s art has proven difficult, as demonstrated by the various introductory disclaimers (one by the artist himself)22 found in the eight-volume Catalogo generale Giorgio de Chirico. As Jennifer Hirsh summarizes the issue, “forgeries and fakes have affected the history of de Chirico reception and scholarship in complicated and elusive ways, for not only have other artists passed off their own work as that of de Chirico, but the artist himself passed off later paintings as earlier ones.”23 Curator and modern-art expert, Michael R. Taylor, states that the difficulty in talking about a precise Piazza d’Italia series, in particular, is threefold: that of linear progression, de Chirico’s tendency to make verifalsi (falsely dated reproductions) and near-replicas, and the massive number or paintings involved.24 Thus, the Piazza series is referred to variously in the scholarship; some state it begins in 1913, others that it gets underway in the 1920s, while an endpoint is left largely undefined.25 This chapter is not concerned with exacting a series or placing parentheses around a time period or production style (Metaphysical, Reformed Metaphysical, New Metaphysical, etc.). From the moment of inspiration for Metaphysical painting in 1910 to some of the last works de Chirico produced, this investigation considers all paintings that take up the formal and emotional elements that have come to be seen as nearly synonymous with dechirican urban space: archetypal square, clock, tower, train, arcade, statue, shadowed figures, warped perspective, unnatural light and time, disconcerting emptiness, mystery, anxiety, foreboding, alienation, loss. 21 Giorgio De Chirico, “On Metaphysical Art,” Metaphysical Art 14/16 (2016), 38.; Ara Merjian, “Untimely Objects: Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘The Evil Genius of a King’ (1914) Between the Antediluvian and the Posthuman”, Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 57/58 (Spring/Autumn 2010), 194. 22 “Ho dovuto, però, constatare che il mio giudizio, non sempre è stato sufficiente a stabilire l’autenticità o meno delle opere.” Claudio Bruni Sakraischik and Isabella Far, eds., Catalogo generale Giorgio de Chirico, vol. II. (Milano: Electa editrice, 1971), 11. 23 Hirsh, “Representing Repetition,” 431. 24 Michael R. Taylor, “The Piazza d’Italia Paintings,” in Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, ed. Michael R. Taylor and Guigone Rolland (Philadelphia: Merrell, 2002), 133. 25 William Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” in De Chirico, ed. William Rubin (New York: MoMA, 1982), 57.; Taylor, “Piazza d’Italia,” 133.

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Indeed, even de Chirico’s verifalsi, which he began as early as 1924,26 and imitations like Andy Warhol’s 1982 Piazza d’Italia, could become part of the piazza series as it will be imagined here, as simulation, reproduction, and loss of authenticity across the twentieth century will play key roles in validating and thus heightening the prophetic emotional tone of the paintings. For a selected list of piazza paintings and reliable sources to see those and others, see the note at the end of this chapter.

The Flâneur and the Tourist Since the time of the Grand Tour, travel to Italy was considered a formative experience for young aristocrats, artists, and philosophers, and for an even longer time, travel writing has been a staple of sociological and philosophical thought. Yet, in the late nineteenth century, the rise of mass tourism changed the face of travel, and scholars, artists, and writers began to nurture a reluctance to either see themselves as akin to the tourist or to consider in any sustained and profound way the mass-tourist’s role in shaping the modern world. Only with the rise of postmodern thought, with theorists like Barthes (“The Blue Guide”) and Umberto Eco (Travels in Hyper Reality), and with the birth of tourism studies and works like Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist and John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze, did the figure of the modern tourist enter the scholarly theoretical cityscape as an agent of history. Theorists disagree on the effect of mass-tourism on the tourist, many argue that at its core it is unreflective consumerism;27 this investigation, however, is less concerned with the role of modern tourism in shaping individual subjectivity and more concerned with the nearly undisputed influence it has on shaping public space. That is, the emphasis here is placed on the subjectivity of the tourist’s desire and gaze only insofar as it translates into an impact on the destination landscape or population. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tourist had much in common with the flâneur, who was a requisite figure of portrayals of Paris in the nineteenth century and who became, for Walter Benjamin, the modern urban spectator par excellence. The figure of the tourist was also born in the nineteenth century, in Stendhal’s 1829 Promenades dans Rome, about Italy, 26 Sophia Maxine Farmer, “The Trouble with de Chirico: Verifalsi and the Study of Backdated Paintings,” The Brooklyn Rail, May (2017). 27 Welten cites Urbain, Baudrillard, and Bauman. Ruud Welten, “Stendhal’s Gaze: Towards an Hermeneutic Approach of the Tourist,” Tourist Studies 14, no. 2 (2014), 169.

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and his 1838 Mémoires d’un touriste, about his native France. Indeed, in a sort of chicken and egg scenario, some scholars see the flâneur as a forerunner to tourists, while others see Stendhal, the self-described tourist, as a precursor to flâneurs.28 For all their similarities, however, some crucial differences exist. Firstly, the flâneur is native to his city, while the tourist necessarily comes from outside. Secondly, the modifier “mass” comes increasingly to describe the tourist in the modern world and will become the most impactful aspect of his presence. These first two differences, then, cumulate in a third, which is that the figure of the flâneur, and his experience of the city, has long been important for urban planners, as he represents city dwellers who are affected by architecture and urban design. The tourist, on the other hand, has been important, not to urban development but to its commodification. This difference puts the mass-tourist’s gaze, in many ways, at odds with the flâneur’s, exposing him as a sort of negative image, rather than a brother. This description of the flâneur (as he represents the local and the solitary reflective spectator) and tourist (as he represents the foreigner and the spectator en masse) as negative mirror images of each other can help one conceive of their gazes on the urban landscape, each of which, I propose, sought to annihilate the other. Travelers have long essentialized locals or pushed them to the edges of the frame. In the popular turn-of-the-century literary genre depicting British gentry abroad in Italy, we see many examples of Italian spaces in which Italians only appear in the background, becoming part of the landscape itself. As E.M. Forster’s Miss Alan believes, in his 1908 A Room with a View, “the Florentine culture of churches, photographs, hillside views, and Renaissance villas” are “a legitimate vehicle for cultivating the young girl” while “actual contact with the city’s inhabitants is unseemly.”29 Forster’s tone is tongue-in-cheek here, yet this novel, overall, exposes an insidious prejudice. Forster’s Italy, like the Italies of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel—all novels coinciding with the first 80 years of mass-tourism in Italy—are virtually emptied of Italians. This tendency emerges, too, in early-twentieth century scholarly writing, like Georg Simmel’s 1911 essay, “The Ruin,” and some of Walter Benjamin’s writing from the 1920s. The figure that emerges here is a sort of flâneur abroad, who seeks to privilege his gaze, as we will see, above those of both 28 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011), 162.; Welten, “Stendhal’s Gaze,” 178. 29 In Suzanne Roznak, “Social Non-Conformists in Forster’s Italy: Otherness and the Enlightened English Tourist,” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 1–2 (2014), 40.

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the local and the tourist. In “The Ruin,” Simmel argues that the abandoned ruin has a transcendent effect on the viewer, while, in reference to Italy,30 he states that “the inhabited ruin loses […] that balance” and gives it, rather, a “problematical, unsettling, often unbearable character” as the ruins then “strike us as the settings of life.”31 That is, the writer expects the tourist destination to exist for him alone; it should be vacated for his viewing and edification. Tourists today are still promised this in travel-advertisement photography, and expect, aside from their own presence, the aura of an otherwise empty space.32 A search for solitude, authenticity, and aura has made certain travelers, at the turn of the twentieth century and today,33 seek to distinguish themselves from the “masses” and differentiate their own presence abroad.34 Walter Benjamin, for one, in writing about a trip to Naples, which Susan Buck-Morss calls “the origin of his Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project],”35 begins an engagement with mass-tourists that will eventually demonstrate at once how pivotal they were to his experience of the city and, at the same time, how disinclined he was to allow them to become central to his vision of modern urban space. In 1924, Benjamin wrote to his friend and fellow philosopher, Gershom Scholem, about a conference he was attending in Naples, remarking that “the entire enterprise very soon fell into the hands of Cooks Tours, that provided the foreigners with countless ‘reduced-rate tours’ in all directions through the countryside,” and mentioning that he did not join the tours, instead choosing to go alone to Vesuvius and its National Museum.36 Two years later, he again writes of tourism in Naples, this time not turning away from 30 Georg Simmel, “Two Essays: ‘The Handle’ and ‘The Ruin’,” The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958), 381. 31 Simmel gives three examples of ruins, all Italian. Simmel, 380, 381, 384. 32 Regarding travel advertisements, “some 24 percent of photographs show places without people (predominately landscapes and sights) and locals appear in only 7 percent (often […] reduced to cultural markers)”. Urry, Tourist Gaze, 175. 33 Dean MacCannell sees it as characteristically upper-class to believe that “other people are tourists, while I am a traveler.” The Tourist: A New Theory of Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1999), 107. 34 This desire for and promise of an empty space has grown in proportion with the rise in mass-tourism. Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma, among the most popular souvenirs for travelers during the Grand Tour (Stephanie Hom, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 40.), depict panoramas of a city alive with daily life, while today postcards generally capture monuments, avoiding the “out-of-place” or “undesirable,” such as crowds, or locals who do not “signify authenticity.” Urry, Tourist Gaze, 174–175. 35 Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 9. 36 Buck-Morss, 9.

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it, but dwelling on it, and recognizing its impactful presence. He states in Frankfurter Zeitung: “Traditional life goes on, except now, as a tourist show, everything is done for money. Tours and replicas of the ruins of Pompeii are for sale. […] One sees neither an ancient society nor a modern one, but an improvisatory culture released, and even nourished, by the city’s rapid decay.”37 The presence of the tourist, which is momentarily at the forefront here, nearly disappears in Benjamin’s notes for the Arcades Project, where only his shadow remains, most strikingly in the souvenir. The ordering of the fragments of the Arcades Project is certainly controversial, but it’s worth noting here that the folder on the flâneur begins by differentiating him from the tourist: “the great reminiscences, the historical shudder—these are a trumpery which he (the flâneur) leaves to tourists, who think thereby to gain access to the genius loci.”38 Then, Benjamin’s most significant meditation on the tourist in the Arcades Project follows a few fragments later: “Paris created the type of the flâneur. What is remarkable is that it wasn’t Rome. And the reason? […] The national character of the Italians may also have much to do with this. For it is not the foreigners but they themselves, the Parisians, who have made Paris the promised land of the flâneur.”39 Putting aside for now where he places blame— “on the national character of the Italians”—and the ways in which the mass-tourism industry stole public space from the cradle of the Italian nation before a so-called national character had time to appear, 40 it’s worth noting how Benjamin’s argument for why Paris and why the flâneur, in this instance, has everything to do with a negative definition of that which the flâneur is not and, in turn, that which Paris can be. It was already clear to Benjamin that mass tourism, particularly the rule wielded by foreigners on cities, was negatively impactful on urban space. Yet, rather than dwell on it further, he erases the tourist and tourist-city from further consideration. This willful removal, either removing himself from the tourists, in the first instance, or the tourists from his meditations, in the second, proves quite characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1864 with Thomas Cook’s first tour of Italy, there was, as Stephanie Hom argues, a “remarkable intensification and acceleration of mass tourism” across Italy, 41 which by the 1870s meant “daily departures 37 Buck-Morss, 27. 38 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), [M1, 1], 416. 39 Benjamin, [M1, 4], 417. 40 Hom, Beautiful Country, 103. 41 Hom, 88.

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from London to Italy were required to meet demand.”42 Yet, decades later, modernist literature and art practiced various modes of heightened seeing, which combined nostalgia, abstraction, and innovative new imaginings to convey contemporary urban spaces that did not deal in the mundane transformations of modernity, such as Cook’s hoards. At the time of de Chirico’s inspirational vision, we can say that the Italian piazza exists as a tense space where various gazes, including the modernist’s, attempt to excise others from the frame, as their presence does not fit, somehow, into incipient narratives and representations of modernity.

Santa Croce with no Baedeker With these competing gazes in mind, let’s return to de Chirico. For he too, as an Italian and, as a modernist, cuts a hole in the city so as to erase traces of the vulgar or undesirable, tourists included. When asked what inspired Metaphysical painting, de Chirico inevitably gave some variation of this account from a 1970 interview: Empty space can mean something or not mean anything; the architecture, especially of many Italian cities, and particularly of Turin, provided me with ideas that I translated into those subjects that I call the ‘Italian Piazza,’ but beyond the idea and intuition there is no other explanation, and it is useless to ask how, when and why, although I remember that I began to paint these paintings around 1911 when I was in Italy, precisely in Florence, on the eve of travelling to Paris for the first time. The first was a painting inspired by Piazza of Santa Croce where there is, or at least there was, a monument to Dante. 43

Empty space, baroque and gothic architecture, and a nineteenth century statue of Dante Alighieri are the elements that inspired Metaphysical painting according to the artist. The city is presented as the artist imagines it, pure and abstract. Yet, I cannot help but think of E.M. Forster’s depiction of Florence from a few years prior, in Chapter Two of A Room with a View, “Santa Croce with no Baedeker.” In 1908, the city is depicted by Forster as teeming with Brits abroad, tourists and expats alike. Cook Tours of Italy had by then been underway 42 Hom, 93. 43 De Chirico, “L’Europeo Asks de Chirico for the Whole Truth,” 265.

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for nearly half a century and were highly popular, and the time period, as John Urry points out, coincides with a new way of seeing, as, by 1890, “Kodak cameras were common among European tourists.”44 By the second-half of the nineteenth century, Urry argues, “the ‘tourist gaze,’ that combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel and the techniques of photographic reproduction, had become a core component of western modernity.”45 He calls the changing experience of space a “‘time machine’ of the tourist industry and photography,” which “freezes townscapes in an idyllic and untouched chocolate-box vision where time moves slowly if at all.”46 With Urry’s assertions in view, and bearing in mind the tourist site it has since become, we can read turn-of-the-century Florence as one of the points at which the space of certain European cities began to be changed by modern mass tourism. Thus, I see two competing views of Santa Croce—Forster’s and de Chirico’s—overlaid on the piazza and presenting two versions of “Santa Croce with no Baedeker.” The first, which turns out to be, in a sense, the realer of the two, is Forster’s vision of a Florence that exists for its tourists, with Italians only visible at the edges, and which suggests an Italian piazza that loses all meaning if one cannot interpret it through guidebook descriptions.47 It is in tension with the other view, de Chirico’s, which takes the Baedeker guidebook as a synecdoche for the tourist, as modern artists and Italians attempted to experience the piazza as it had been, and would be, without the crowds of tourists, guidebooks and kodaks in hand. De Chirico, in the first instance, may force the tourists out of view so as to imagine Piazza Santa Croce purified: empty, tranquil, and therefore, necessarily, of the past. As he returns to the piazza in his paintings time and again, however, I argue that he increasingly performs an uneasy fusion of perspectives. That is, he again depicts a deserted space, but one that has been hostilely emptied this time by competing gazes. Thus, his piazze increasingly emphasize the aura of the empty space, not as it is idealized, but as it is realized. We can 44 Urry, Tourist Gaze, 170. 45 Urry, 14. 46 Urry, 175. 47 “Tears of indignation came to Lucy’s eyes partly because Miss Lavish had jilted her, partly because she had taken her Baedeker. […] Now she entered the church depressed and humiliated, not even able to remember whether it was built by the Franciscans or the Dominicans. […] Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto […] But who was to tell her which they were? She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date.” E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, e-book, Penn State Electronic Classics (Pennsylvania State University, 2007), 21–22.

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interpret De Chirico’s piazza as twice emptied of life. In the first instance, it is emptied for tourists, and, in this case, the piazza’s blankness represents the powerful effect of the tourists’ teeming gaze. As Simmel said, it is unbearable when the site strikes us as the setting of life. That desired emptying, however, is simultaneously experienced in other gazes, in those represented by de Chirico, himself, as a local city-dweller and as an artist in search of new meaning. The emotional tone of de Chirico’s paintings, I argue, emphasizes this second experience of the emptying of life in the piazza. That is, seeing through the multitudinous eyes of gazers (which justifies his longstanding use of multiple perspectives), 48 I suggest that de Chirico paints a space that intuits the future feeling of Italian piazze if the demands of the tourist economy are allowed to re-sculpt the actual space. As stated above, flâneurs are to urban development as tourists are to urban commodif ication and, interestingly, in dechirican piazze, often the only living figures are shadowy businessman-types shaking hands. As if they have just sealed a deal and, at the same time, some ominous fate.

In Sum: De Chirico and Destination Italy De Chirico’s piazze are a Barthesian vision of monuments: towers, arcades, statues. There are sometimes trains, generally considered a reference to de Chirico’s train-conductor father, 49 but which also remind us that this new technology allowed for and implied the increasing numbers of tourists arriving daily. Beyond these objects, the squares are generally empty, much as tourist sites are depicted in postcards and travel advertising. Empty monumentalism might convey tranquil timelessness in postcards, but in de Chirico, when combined with the use of the color and perspective that help to create the emotional tone, the emptiness and timelessness lose all possible neutrality and come to signify a sense of anxiety, alienation, and loss. Indeed, scholars often don’t use the term “timeless,” but more loaded descriptions, saying the piazze are “immobile and removed from time”50 and referring to their atmosphere as “suspended” in “static nonsense.”51 This sense

48 49 50 51

Begun as early as 1912. Taylor, “Piazza d’Italia,” 140. Hirsh, “Representing Repetition,” 414. Trione, “Metapolis,” 354. Mario De Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del Novecento (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2005), 192.

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of unnatural suspense, of piazze stuck outside of time, in a sort of midday twilight, comes from the use of color, which is produced by introducing ocher into the mixtures for sky, ground, and shadows.52 This removal from time strikes the contemporary viewer uncannily, as I’ve argued, as time at the actual Italian heritage sites has been stopped in a similarly unnatural way. Indeed, their staying-the-same is a requisite for tourists and so they have been detached from the urban fabric and handed over, wholesale, to the economy of tourism, which demands they remain historic, picturesque, like de Chirico’s piazze, in a word, suspended.53 The unsettling effect of the light and shadow is heightened by the warped perspective, which portrays the piazza as if it were seen from multiple points of view at once.54 The use of perspective gives the sense of a space being observed by many unseen eyes, eyes that observe from outside an invisible boundary, without interacting. As discussed previously, this calls to mind, in the modern perspective, the tension of competing gazes. From a postmodern perspective, it is evocative of Baudrillard’s term “museumification,” which he chose, significantly, for its similarity to “mummification,” and which describes the ways in which towns are turned into open-air museums in order to better commodify their heritage.55 As we have seen in previous descriptions, the mummification of space, now read as its museumification, is one of the overarching emotional effects of de Chirico’s piazze. They are timeless in the sense that they are dead, stalled, or detached from the living world. Finally, and left largely undiscussed up to this point, there is a prevalent sense of anxiety, whose cause much de Chirico scholarship has sought to illuminate. Many agree that, formally, it is created by breaking with linear, one-point perspective.56 However, one might see the anxiety as coming, 52 Taylor, “Piazza d’Italia,” 141. 53 In Forster, “urban Italian spaces” attract tourists for “their charming timelessness.” Roznak, “Forster’s Italy,” 170. Pier Luigi Sacco claims Italy’s cultural patrimony has been entombed, which explains “l’immobilismo di fondo nella gestione dei beni culturali. […] Un immobilismo, una paralisi che mostra caratteri, ancora una volta, consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente funerei.” Sacco, Italia reloaded, kindle 366–371. 54 Dechirican perspective is detailed in Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” 58. 55 Sharon MacDonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London: Routledge, 2013), 139.; Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). 56 Taylor, “Piazza d’Italia,” 140.; Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “On the Line of the Horizon: Anxiety in de Chirico’s Metaphysical Spaces,” Religion and Public Life Annual Series 35 (2009), 2.

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increasingly, from the sense that de Chirico’s vision of Italian squares has somehow come true. The specific terms Michael Taylor uses to describe the generalized anxiety in the piazze are “alienation” and “loss,”57 the latter of which includes a loss of meaning. These same terms are used, today, to describe Italians’ sense of their own relationships to their art-cities, like Florence, and to their cultural heritage. For de Chirico, the sense of alienation was certainly, as well, the contemporary sense of alienation in the modern world, yet, that sense renews in the twenty-first century in unique relation to the Italian piazza. Marx argues that commodification alienates, and this is true for commodified urban space as well. As tourism scholars have discussed, in Destination Italy both the space and its inhabitants become alienated through tourism.58 Wieland Schmeid claims that one could derive a “complete theory of alienation” from de Chirico’s paintings, in which “architecture becomes a ‘thing’” that is separated “from the people who had created it: set loose, estranged, irrationalized,” in which “human history, human action is frozen. […] It is completely man-made, but it is not made for man.” This is a useful synthesis of dechirican alienation, yet, it is Schmeid’s f inal thought that strikes me as the most poignant here: “No one lives behind the arcades of the palazzi,” he says, “they are nothing but empty and menacing stage props.”59 This idea brings us to the sense of loss of meaning and authenticity that is so uncanny in de Chirico today, for it too seems to have come to pass. His piazze are absurd, empty themselves, and empty signif iers, becoming more like representations of simulacra than of reality. This excavation of substance has been one of the refrains of tourist scholars when speaking of the “authenticity” and “aura” that is sought by tourists and promised by heritage sites. Through the very act of being seen by multitudes, these spaces lose authenticity, are hollowed out, and become more akin to replica constructions (like the Venetian in Las Vegas or Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans)60 than to the actual things they are.61

57 Taylor, “Piazza d’Italia,” 142. 58 Baillie, “Packaging the Past,” 60.; Agostini, “La cultura della città storica,” 101.; MacDonald, Memorylands, 137. 59 Schmeid, “De Chirico”, 103. 60 For more on the relationship between Italian heritage sites and simulacra see Hom, Beautiful Country. 61 “La trasformazione di Venezia in una Disneyland.” Agostini, “La cultura della città storica,” 101.; “Firenze è diventata una sorta di Disneyland in pietra.” Sacco, Italia reloaded, kindle 308–312.

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Conclusion In consideration of the central enigma of de Chirico’s art, Italian historical avant-garde theorist, Maurizio Calvesi, states that contemplation of the “miracle—or of the tragic, but equally inscrutable, event—cannot exclude the obscurity of the mystery and the reference the mystery entails to a looming hidden entity, a presence or paradoxically active absence.”62 Could we see that “looming hidden entity” and “active absence” as the throngs of tourists that modern artists cut out of their considerations of European urbanity? If so, could the tourist’s gaze and the effects of tourism partially unravel the mystery that is part and parcel of the other essential elements of de Chirico’s piazze? The artist never claimed as much, he never named his prophetic feeling, and it has remained very much as he wanted it, an enigma. Yet, perhaps there is one possible solution here, one that could not have been named for decades, until recently, for it had not fully transpired. As Benjamin in his Arcades Project claims, images “attain to legibility only at a particular time” and “what has been comes together in a flash with the new to form a new constellation.”63 To gaze at de Chirico’s piazze is to have the eerie sensation that his hundred-year-old prophetic feeling in Florence came true, and to read tourist studies is to understand one perspective on what brought that future into being, a future that was already inevitable, if barely perceptible, in 1910.

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Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. “On the Line of the Horizon: Anxiety in de Chirico’s Metaphysical Spaces.” Religion and Public Life Annual Series 35 (2009): 1–14. Printz, Neil. “On Warhol’s ‘After de Chirico’.” The Brooklyn Rail (May 2017). Accessed March  3, 2022. https://brooklynrail.org/2017/05/criticspage/ On-Warhols-After-de-Chirico Roznak, Suzanne. “Social Non-Conformists in Forster’s Italy: Otherness and the Enlightened English Tourist.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 1–2 (2014): 167–194. Rubin, William, ed. De Chirico. New York: MoMA, 1982. Rubin, William. “De Chirico and Modernism.” In De Chirico, edited by William Rubin, 55–80. New York: MoMA, 1982. Sacco, Pier Luigi, and Christian Caliandro. Italia reloaded: Ripartire con la cultura. E-Book. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011. Schmeid, Wieland. “De Chirico and the Realism of the Twenties.” In De Chirico, edited by William Rubin, 101–10. New York: MoMA, 1982. Simmel, Georg. “Two Essays: ‘The Handle’ and ‘The Ruin’.” The Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 371–85. Simonetti, Massimo, and Massimo Di Carlo, eds. De Chirico. Gli anni Venti. Milano: Mazzotta, 1986. Soby, James Thrall. Giorgio de Chirico. New York: MoMA, 1955. (website) Tate. “Art Term: Metaphysical Art.” Accessed March 3, 2022. https://www. tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/metaphysical-art Taylor, Michael R. “The Piazza d’Italia Paintings.” In Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne, edited by Michael R Taylor and Guigone Rolland, 133–63. London, Philadelphia: Merrell, in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002. Taylor, Michael R., and Guigone Rolland. Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne. London, Philadelphia: Merrell, in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002. Trione, Vicenzo. “Metapolis: Metaphysics and the City.” Metafisica 5–6 (2006): 352–385. Urry, John. “The Tourist Gaze and the ‘Environment’.” Theory, Culture & Society 9 (1992): 1–26. Urry, John. “The Tourist Gaze ‘Revisited’.” American Behavioral Science 36, no. 2 (1992): 172–186. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011. Ursino, Mario. Giorgio de Chirico. L’uomo, l’artista, il polemico: Guida alle interviste 1938–1978. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2016. Welten, Ruud. “Stendhal’s Gaze: Towards an Hermeneutic Approach of the Tourist.” Tourist Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 168–181.

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About the Author Julianne VanWagenen completed her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at Harvard University in 2017. She has since held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan and Harvard University as well as lectureships at the University of Southern California and at the Institute of World Literatures and Cultures at Tsinghua University. You can find her articles in Italica, Forum Italicum, Gradiva: The International Journal of Poetry, and the South Central Review.

7.

Colonie Architecture and Fascism’s Cult of Youth Diana Garvin

Abstract Under the Italian Fascist regime, rationalist colonie (summer camps) promised to improve Italian children’s health through visibly structured mass playtime. At the same time, photographic representations of the colonie were disseminated as propaganda. In this chapter, first, I investigate the history of summer camps in Italy. Next, I examine the construction and use of three sites heralded as model colonie by the regime: Montecatini, Snia, and Nave. Then, I move from the topic of colonie design to that of colonie representations in the regime propaganda to understand how the Fascist party wrote narratives of healthy living around these architectural sites. To conclude, I return to the salvage of the bones of the camps as Urbanex sites. Keywords: colonie, camp, Fascism, youth, outdoor

The Northern Italian coastline is studded with brutal gems—concrete complexes linked by strict geometry and curvaceous streamlining. Nestled in the Alpine Mountain valleys and stretching along the Lombard lakesides, these Cubist campuses evoke miniature cities. Vast pathways lead to spiraling staircases that ascend to towering obelisks. Two styles blend: rigid Rationalism accented by whimsical Futurist forms. Housing blocks turn into living objects—buildings resemble ships, planes, and animals. Common architectural features suggest a total fusion of building structure and purpose. It is an open yet highly structured layout, built for the surveillance and display of Italian children at play. The origins of these sites lie under Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. The Fascist regime attempted a mass organization of its young citizens with the ultimate goal of enhancing the vitality of the future Italian race. To combat childhood

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diseases like tuberculosis, state-affiliated medics recommended fresh air and sunlight. To act on these recommendations, the regime would need to partner with architects to build youth colonie, essentially Fascist summer camps. Translated literally as “colonies,” these camps aimed to promote racial health and hygiene through exposure to the sun, the sea, and exercise. Children of industrial workers could visit these residential seats for month-long excursions to experience outdoor living. The history of these holiday hostels sheds light on Fascism’s eugenic approach to architecture and urbanism. At a historical moment when evidence of a large, youthful population visually implied national military might, the Fascist regime looked to summer camps to serve as architectural laboratories for building better Italians. In this chapter, I argue that the colonie provided the Fascist party with an opportunity to pursue two intertwined political goals. First, the design of the colonie promised to improve Italian children’s health through visibly structured mass playtime. Second, photographic representations of the colonie could be disseminated as propaganda. Three interwoven threads trace Fascist colonie architecture and related propaganda. In Section I, I relate the history of summer camps in Italy to contextualize their later use as childhood sanitariums under Fascism. Here, I examine Fascism’s cult of childhood and the role played by youth groups like the Figli della Lupa, Piccole Italiane, Ballila, and Giovani Italiane. Twinned policies of pronatalism and youth control were enacted upon through the regime’s employment of architecture as a form of social hygiene. Rationalist buildings, where form bowed to function, promised to reform unruly young people. Through exposure cures, like thalassotherapy and heliotherapy, colonie provided specialized rooms that purported to treat a range of physical and moral ailments (fig. 7.1). In Section II, I analyze the construction and use of three sites heralded as model colonie by the regime: Montecatini, Snia, and Nave. Fulvio Irace observed that these Rationalist buildings provided “a laboratory of experimentation for those young architects eager to test in a real project the effectiveness of their ethical and aesthetic ideals.” In addition to their utility as design, the Fascist regime intended the buildings to serve as “formidable propaganda machines dedicated to the working classes.” In Section III, I move from the topic of colonie design to that of colonie representations in the regime propaganda to understand how the Fascist party wrote narratives of healthy living around these architectural sites. To do so, I analyze “The City of Childhood,” an exhibit held at Circo Massimo in June 1937. Regime publicity for the colonie depicted multitudes of Italian girls and boys arranged in orderly rows, set against avant-garde buildings and spectacular natural panoramas. To conclude, I return to

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Figure 7.1. Photograph of children undergoing heliotherapy in a colonia solarium, “Le Scuole all’aperto in Italia,” Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale. Milan: Fieri and Lacroix, 1940, p. 40.

the salvage of the bones of the camps as Urbanex sites. In their afterlives, these complexes have become key sites for ruin tourism. Dystopian endings provide a fitting exclamation point to the uncomfortable political questions posed by Fascist utopias and their cult of youth.

History of the Colonie The Fascist dictatorship did not invent the colonie. Sending needy children— especially those from the industrial cities of the north—to rural sanitariums had been an Italian tradition since at least the late nineteenth century. But there was one key difference: prior to Fascist ventennio, management was private rather than state-run. In the holiday complexes of the 1870s, patrons from among the local gentry typically sponsored the buildings and their upkeep. Religious and philanthropic groups also helped by managing children’s daily lives in these spaces. By 1885, there were already 19 ospizi marini along the Northern Adriatic and Tirrenean coasts (Dogliani 2002, 34). Well before Mussolini marched on Rome, Italian medics prescribed fresh air and sunlight

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to children as both a prophylactic measure against tuberculosis and as a potential cure for its bacterial complications outside the lungs, like scrofula. Colonie came to the cultural fore during the 1920s in part to serve Fascism’s cult of youth. Fascism claimed to be a rebellious, insurgent movement that would lift up the values of the young. It prioritized energy, modernity, sobriety and sport—considered to be the requisite elements for enhancing female fertility and male militarism. Behind this obsession lay a tactical strategy. Mussolini correctly identified a cultural clash between the official culture of the ruling elite and the avant-garde of the intellectual youth. He attempted to embody youthful vigor through careful control over his public image. Propagandistic photographs show Mussolini threshing grain, soldering metal, racing cars, and even taming lions. Newspapers were forbidden from covering his illnesses and birthdays to suggest perpetual good health. The dictatorship’s triumphal hymn was “Giovinezza,” an ode to the “spring of beauty” of Fascism’s young workers and warriors. Fascism’s cult of youth looked ahead to the next generation through demographic policies aimed at encouraging pronatalism and decreasing childhood mortality. Fascist urbanists and medics alike feared that encroaching urbanism negatively impacted children’s health and social hygiene. In his Ascension Day speech, Mussolini went so far as to identify the Italian city as a demographic problem.1 To combat infant mortality, the Senate established the National Bureau for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy, known by the Italian acronym ONMI. Originally titled Opera Nazionale Fascista per la Protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia, a subsection of law #2277 created this office on 10 December 1925.2 ONMI identified tuberculosis as enemy number one in the fight against childhood mortality and suggested that urban living conditions were the primary collaborators with this enemy. Specifically, ONMI medics associated this disease with the rapid industrialization of northern cities like Milan and Turin, where urban peripheries were becoming increasingly dense. Rapid urbanism often resulted in poverty in the substandard public housing of the bassi of southern cities, like Naples, and in the borgate of Rome because of the unhealthy number of residents per apartment. Cities were described in biological terms, with dense neighborhoods compared to tumors and cancers. As concerns for sick children and fears 1 Benito Mussolini. “Il discorso dell’Ascensione [Address to the Chamber of Deputies].” 26 May 1927. In Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 22, eds. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice), 363. 2 This is the standard English translation for ONMI used by scholars of Fascist maternal policy, such as Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker, David Horn, and Maurizio Bettini. Translations are the author’s own unless otherwise specified.

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of delinquent adolescents rose, the regime utilized the colonie, with their vast panoramas and bright solariums (fig. 7.1), to provide an ideal solution for children from so-called “famiglie bisognose.” Admission to the colonie was at first reserved to poor children ages 6 to 13 years old whose parents possessed current membership in the Fascist party, with further preferences for the progeny of dead or injured veterans of the Great War, the Fascist Revolution, the East African campaign, or the Spanish Civil War. Only one exception was made: children in “famiglie numerose” were always welcome (1939 Regolamento 179). In many ways, the colonie were the opposite of what David Horn has termed “the sterile city.” To the regime, these sites provided the perfect setting to promote health, foster obedience, and ultimately shape the next generation of Italian mothers and soldiers.3 A 1935 medical conference held in Rimini underscored the importance of climate in promoting health. Here, conference-goers classified pre-existing colonie according to climate and period of curative stay, prescribing different environments (ocean, mountain, river, lakeside, plains, thermal) to treat different types of sickness. While this history shows that the colonie and their cures did not emerge wholesale under Fascism, it also highlights Fascist period changes. In 1926, provincial branches of the Partito Nazionale Fascista began to assume managerial and f inancial control over local colonie. During this same year, the regime founded the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), absorbing a vast array of preexisting youth groups, and then unifying them as a single cohesive entity under Fascist state control. Balilla were later subdivided by age and gender into groups like Figli della Lupa and Piccole Italiane for younger members; Avanguardisti and Giovani Italiane for older children. Balilla, and later the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), offered afterschool and Saturday activities like sports, gymnastics, military drills with toy rifles to school children between the ages of eight and fourteen. Their most popular offerings, however, were the holiday excursions to the sea or in the mountains, where they would stay in the colonie.

Architecture as Social Control Scholars of interwar Europe often approach architecture through style, as if it were possible to divorce a building from the circumstances of its 3 David Horn, “The Sterile City,” Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 108–109 and 120–121.

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production. We see this in the field’s insistence on a distinction between architecture under Fascism (architettura “fra le due guerre”) and Fascist architecture (architettura fascista). Such differentiations often create ad hoc political categories to suggest parables of good and evil, pitting figures like Marcello Piacentini (who Claudia Lazzaro memorably refers to as the “official architect of bureaucracy”) against “anti-Fascists” like Giuseppe Terragni, Edoardo Persico, and Giuseppe Pagano. 4 But, as Lazzaro maintains, most architects in 1930s Italy favored Fascist politics and modernist aesthetic movements, like Rationalism and Futurism. Indeed, they even competed with one another through concorsi to win the funding and creative rights to plan hospitals, prisons, schools, and camps for the Fascist state. Functional buildings like these are built around activities like healing, punishing, and instructing. The Fascist state made clear their vision of how people ought to be treated in these spaces. Rationalist architects, whose credo maintained that form should always follow function, then designed and built the physical forms to translate those visions into concrete and glass realities. Rational architecture first emerged in the same year as Balilla, in 1926, when a group of young architects (Giuseppe Terragni, Carlo Enrico Rava, Sebastiao Larco, Guido Frette, Adalberto Libera, Luigi Figini, and Gino Pollini) formed the Gruppo 7. Their manifesto, published in Rassegna Italiana, updated the Roman and classical elements of the Novecento movement with the industrial inspirations of Futurism. Italian Rationalist and Futurist architects contributed to the international prestige of Italian modernism, crafting many of their most iconic structures following the Italian Fascism’s ideology. They advocated for the primacy of technical and functional considerations, supported by time motion studies. Their vision rhymed with Fascism’s early self-portrayal as a rebellious party of the avant-garde youth.5 The “coming out” party for Italian Rationalism took place in Rome in 1928, at the first Esposizione Italiana di architettura razionale. Terragni at the time noted the predominance of “healthy squadrism” in these new expressions of 4 Piacentini led the Novecento group of Rome, earning from Claudia Lazzaro the memorable title “official architect of bureaucracy.” While they were successful in gaining commissions for certain large-scale projects like the University of Rome campus in 1938, the architecturally moderate Novecento group’s neo-classical reproductions often won the bids for big state buildings. 5 They wrote: “The hallmark of the earlier avant garde was a contrived impetus and a vain, destructive fury, mingling good and bad elements: the hallmark of today’s youth is a desire for lucidity and wisdom [..]This must be clear […] we do not intend to break with tradition […] The new architecture, the true architecture, should be the result of a close association between logic and rationality.”

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Italian architecture. Rationalists made further headway in 1933, when Giuseppe Pagano, future architect of the Palazzo della Civiltà, called the “Colosseo Quadrato” for its monumental grid, became editor of Casabella in 1933. As editor of the influential magazine, Pagano prominently featured the new constructions of fellow Rationalist architects. Editorials pressed the Fascist state to adopt Rationalism as the state’s official style. Domus editor Gio Ponti promoted similar ideas in the industrial north, in Milan. The Triennale di Milano, under the leadership of both Gio Ponti in 1933 and Pagano in 1936, advocated for a tighter relationship between architecture and industrial production. Major urbanism projects following the canon of Rationalist architecture returned to the metaphor of the city as a body in their inspiration. To provide for what they considered to be healthy circulation and flow, projects like the sventramento of Rome and the clearing of the Pontine Marshes aimed to free blockages to the city’s nervous system. In addition to that, new train tracks, highways, and a postal network were built in order to connect the countryside to the city. Urban sventramenti demolished the slapdash homes of the poor to clear space for triumphal throughways and piazzas in Rome, Turin, Milan, Genova, Bari and Padua. The regime also worked on “interior colonization” of the land. It drained the malarial swamps and scrubland of the Agro Pontino, something Mussolini liked to note that even Caesar himself had not managed. What remained of the urban structure was its Romanità: the classical features of an idealized national past, a capital and a set of Fascist New Towns riveted with Corinthian columns and wide forums. Such sites, however, provided the space to build new types of structural features, such as the surveillance towers that watched over the populations of Sabaudia and Aprilia. For the regime, Rationalist architecture provided a means to social control.

Holiday Complexes and Schedules for Mass Life The colonie extended the regime’s control of children’s private lives into afternoons and weekends. It already controlled the school day. In both public and private schools, Mussolini’s portrait hung next to that of King Umberto I. The Duce’s motto, “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere,” was posted on classroom walls. Through these changes, the regime was making a bid to unify the future national body through the production of common experiences in childhood—ones that encouraged positive associations with the Fascist party. Local changes became national ones when Ente Opera Assistenziali, including ONMI and ONB, coordinated to contribute staff and funds to

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Figure 7.2. Photograph of child in colonial garb standing guard at tent display of City of Childhood, “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia, p.4. Rome, June-September 1937.

Figure 7.3. Photograph of children arrayed in the words, “Duce ti amiamo,” “Leader We Love You,” “Le Scuole all’aperto in Italia,” Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale. Milan: Fieri and Lacroix, 1940, p. 38.

expand the total number of sites, and children served. These efforts were largely successful. In 1926, there were 100 colonie. By 1931, the number of sites had risen to over 3000, with 350 beach camps, 330 river camps, and 280

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mountain camps, in addition to more than 2000 temporary heliotherapy day camps in the exurbs of large cities. 1935 ISTAT data pointed to 568,680 children assisted in that year alone. By the mid-1930s, about 10 percent of qualified Italian children had spent at least one month in a colonia in the mountains or by the beach. GIL not only aimed to expand the total number of colonie, but also to intensify the political experience provided by the camps through the fascistizzazione of pre-existing colonie. By the mid-1930s, these formerly health and education-based sites took on a decisively political flavor. At the colonie, summer days followed precise patterns that were established by GIL at the national level. Daily life in the colonies was managed by the Fasci femminili, who received specialized puericulture education courses on how to run the camps. Common schedules aimed to produce comradeship, as the Balilla youth woke, ate, played, studied, and marched together. Daily flag-raising ceremonies were followed by autarchic breakfasts (fig. 7.2). Then, children walked to their open-air classrooms, patios set with rows of desks, to write patriotic essays pledging their allegiance to the dictatorship. At recess, guided mass movements provided paramilitary training. Student bodies were also assembled to celebrate Mussolini with slogans like “Duce ti amiamo” (“We love you Leader”) (fig. 7.3). But although it was the Fascist state which promoted this unified program of summer camps for children, it was actually private companies that realized this vision.

The Corporate Connection Corporations played a major role in organizing life in the colonie. All sectors participated in GIL’s daily planning, from Fiat automobiles to the Perugina chocolate industry. As the SniaViscosa fabric company put it in their worker’s assistance pamphlet (fig. 7.4), “Going to the people” (“Andare verso il popolo”), was the incisive motto expressed by the head of government whose goal was to grant the citizenry “higher social justice” (“una più alta giustizia sociale”).6 Another worker’s assistance pamphlet (fig. 7.5) from the Montecatini chemical company describes daily life at the Montecatini colonia alongside parallel workers’ benefits accorded by the state.7 To factory workers’ children coming from one end of Italy to the other, Montecatini dedicated its “most loving 6 “SNIA Viscosa: le Opere Assistenziali.” Turin, 1938. 7 Most were child-centric, and included factory nurseries, elementary schools, and technical schools. Montecatini, Assistenza igienico-sanitaria negli impianti industriali (Milan: Esperia, 1937).

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Figure 7.4. Montecatini. Assistenza igienico-sanitaria negli impianti industriali. Milan: Esperia, 1937.

Figure 7.5. Photocollage by Erberto Carboni depicting scenes from SNIA Viscosa Colonia, in “SNIA Viscosa: le Opere Assistenziali.” Turin, 1938.

cures” (“cure più amorevoli”) at the Marina di Cervia, a colonia modello covering 50,000 square meters; Montecatini Chemicals was capable of housing 1500 children each season at the lido at Crotone offering schools, gyms and clinics.

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Their promotional pamphlet devoted the majority of its text to describing the colonie alpine e marine promising a summer dream. Groups of happy children were depicted en masse while enjoying themselves on a sunny beach or on the move: “they laugh together, run together, gather together, disperse from one another” (“si ridono, si rincorrono, si raggruppano, si disperdono”). Then: silence. Montecatini emphasizes that the rest hour provides more prophylactic exposure to light, with sun-bathing on the sand. Then a flash of naked bodies, bronzed and glossy and a dive into the sea (“poi, un baluginare di corpi nudi, abbronzati, lucenti”). At a sharp command from the Fasci femminili, the children rise as one. Harmoniously, they return to shore for gymnastic exercises, or else obediently adjourn to chapel for prayer, to watch a regime-approved film, or to sing the songs of the fatherland. Private companies like Montecatini Chemicals, hand in hand with the Fascist state, used their colonie to train young children in the dutiful activities of mass culture that characterized the Fascist lifestyle expected of adults. So-called “delinquent” teenagers were singled out for technical school training, like industrial and agricultural labor, while everybody was required to take part in the para-military practice. Broadly speaking, the sites attempted to replace capillary networks of local loyalties to family, church, and township with a monolith: the love of the national state. Mass education at this scale was new, and it was not without problems. Sites that hosted 20 children at a time in the mid-1920s housed 100 or more by the mid-1930s. In Mussolini’s native Romagna, the town of Rimini was one of the most popular sites for oceanside colonie. The small seaside city hosted 6000 children in the 1920s, then 16,000 in 1932, and finally 18,000 in 1934. La Colonia della Cassa Mutua Fiat, known as the Vittorio Emanuele III offered 300 beds. Le Torri Balilla at Marina di Massa boasted 850 beds for Lingotto factory workers’ children. Faced with this surge of young visitors, many refurbished colonie began to experience the same overcrowding and sanitation issues that they had originally been built to remedy. In response, architects and planners designed expansive structures for new colonie sites—miniature stadiums for sports, expansive pitches for war games. Because these new sites were so large, they came with high commissions for the architects who built them, attracting leading architects who ultimately produced complexes that were visually stunning in their modernity. In many ways, these sites were most emblematic of the Fascist party’s vision.8 8 “Everything in [the colonies], from their abstract lines and volumes to their ground plans, which trace the itineraries of life in common […] everything combines – canteen and washrooms,

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Nautical Motifs in the Colonie Marine motifs marked the colonies in Chiavari and Novara, with boat decks and porthole windows. The central building of a Novarese colony built in 1934 looks like a warship crossed with a lion, ready to pounce. At Chiavari, a submarine tower-scope pops from the roof of the central building. Like a Cubist arengario tower or lighthouse keep, it provided easy surveillance or the opportunity to take Futurist aerial photographs of the impressive mass gymnastic displays in the open fields below (fig. 7.6). The overall structure of this holiday camp, designed by Camillo Nardi Greco in 1935, cites the life aquatic across both land and sea, with structures that resemble crow’s nests, gunports, water tanks, and lighthouses. They integrated both the primary and shadow functions of the state into their physical structures, providing an advertisement for the vigor and discipline provided by seaside living as well as normalization of Fascism’s cult of physical strength and its disciplined sociability. One of the most interesting examples of oceanic Futurism was the Colonia XXVIII Ottobre in Cattolica, nicknamed “Le Navi” (fig. 7.7). Imagination and tom foolery took material forms in this colonia designed by Clemente Busiri Vici in 1932. Here, a Futurist flotilla emerges from a centralized office block, a cafeteria, and four dormitory wings. The nautical playscape docks at the edge of the sandy shore. Set directly onto the sand, buildings appear as steamships at harbor. They evoked a doubled association of the regime’s grand transportation projects (the steamships that carried Italian settlers to the North and East African colonies) plus its problems (the steamships that had historically carried Italian emigrants to Brazil and Argentina, as well as Canada and the United States). And indeed, that was the point. Le Navi catered to a specific audience: the children of Italians who lived abroad. It was the Fascist regime’s most impressive colonia, with whimsical modern architecture designed to spread a message of Italian hyper-modernity abroad. At Le Navi, dynamic elements were activated as children ricocheted across the complexes. Architectural features lofted children into the air. Flying bridges and ramps turned the daily movements of children into dormitory and gymnasium – to make up the plastic form and visual image with which, for ever, these children will identify the memories of periods spent in school colonies […]. They will be stimulated for the first time to appreciate architectural form seen not just from the outside, but adopted for living within.” Mark Sanderson, “Derelict Utopias: The Fascists Go on Holiday,” Cabinet 20 (Winter 2005–2006), citing Mario Labò, “L’architettura delle colonie marine italiane,” in Mario Labò & Attilio Podesta, Colonie (Milan: Editoriale Domus, 1942), quoted in Fulvio Irace, “Building for a New Era: Health Services in the ’30s,” Domus 659 (March 1985), 3.

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Figure 7.6. Photograph of teenage colonie residents during pre-military exercizes, “Le Scuole all’aperto in Italia,” Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale. Milan: Fieri and Lacroix, 1940, p. 38.

Figure 7.7. Postcard of Cattolica Colonia Figli Italiani all’Estero.

photographic spectacles of successful mass life. Semi-helix staircases took note from Futurist architecture’s cult of machines. Ramps became turbines that filtered flows of children, suctioning them up from the dormitory floors and then flushing them out in front of the double-doored departure hall by the end of the day. Such buildings would have stood in stark contrast to the humdrum structures of working-class children’s everyday lives, providing a memorable experience. They were meant to impress, in both senses of the word: they provoked marvel in their impressionable young visitors, and then changed their ways of interacting with buildings and open space, forming Fascist ways of moving that would last a lifetime.

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Figure 7.8. Photograph of Le Navi photographed by Alessandro Piredda, 1985, Riccione, Italy. Appears in “Coastal Icons: Italian Holiday Camps, from Mussolini to Valtur,” by Alessandro Benetti, Domus, August 13, 2019.

What made the holiday camps of Italy’s Fascist era so iconic was this architectural merging of state and corporate interests through architecture. Private companies and the Fascist regime shared a common desire to mold an energetic and obedient generation to serve as the workers, mothers, and soldiers of the future. They turned to architecture to promote these new functions; at the same moment a young generation of designers was looking for new aesthetic forms. In line with their credo, the Rationalists approached the colonie as instruments of modernity. It was a fusion of Rationalism, Futurism, whimsy, and surveillance without architectural precedent. Children would have had the feeling that these modern fantasies had been built just for them. Adults, by contrast, received a different dose of propaganda. They encountered the colonie indirectly, through media representations and colonie expositions.

Youth City: Representing Colonie at the City of Childhood At 8:30am on June 20, 1937, the band struck up the martial tune of “Giovinezza” and eighteen pennants unfurled the national tricolore of red, white, and green. Fifteen hundred doves were released, flying over Benito Mussolini, Achille Starace, and the 80,000 donne fasciste who crowded the Viale Aventino in Rome to hear the Duce’s speech, inaugurating the Mostra Nazionale delle Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia at the Ancient Roman ruins of the Circo Massimo.9 Regime-affiliated newspapers recorded 9 The event was covered nationally in newspapers, including Il popolo d’Italia and Il Corriere della Sera in Milan, La Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin, Il Telegrafo in Livorno, Il Mattino in Naples, La

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the ecstatic call-and-response cries of “Sì!” from the female crowd, as the Duce implored them to give birth to many children, the soldiers and pioneers necessary to defend the empire. To give these children a Roman and Fascist education, he would count on women’s tenacity (“Sì!”), their discipline (“Sì!”), and their faith (“Sìììì!”). When the speech concluded, they would be free to visit the Mostra, the Fascist regime’s most carefully conceived representation of the colonie. In a promotional pamphlet for the event, the regime argued for the ethical value of the exhibition, claiming that it would “demonstrate to Italy and the world how much the regime has accomplished for the very young generations” (“dimostrare all’italia ed al mondo quanto il regime ha compiuto in favore delle generazioni giovanissimi”). Rationalism, it argued, could be used not only to increase the population, but also to better the race. How fitting, that the site was chosen for its reference to Roman origins, but was designed with an architectural style that would evoke the modern new age. In other words, while the audience for colonie architecture was children, the audience of representations of that architecture were women—mothers and potential mothers, the gatekeepers of Fascism’s dreams for the next generation of the Italian race. To them, Mussolini dedicated this adult-facing national exhibit of Fascist childhood. Circo Massimo set the tone for the event, in that the ruins visually connected Fascist childhood with Romanità (fig. 5.8). An essay “Dal Palatino all’Aventino” described the committee’s process, and its conclusion that this site best evoked Fascist childhood as a legacy of Ancient Roman youth culture. The center of the site stood directly in front of the Piazza Romolo e Remo, evoking the foundation myth of Rome. Romulus and Remus, the two young twins, were suckled by the She-Wolf of Rome. The site thus evoked the name of the most popular Fascist youth group, the Figli della Lupa. The Roman newspaper Il Lavoro Fascista further observed that the coloration of the site evoked the flag, with the red of the ruins and the green of the floriculture exhibit at the site center. While promotional materials heralded the exhibition site for its distillation of the ancient Roman past, they applauded the pavilion construction for its conjuring of a modern Italian future. Modernity was evoked not only by the architecture of the wood and glass pavilions, but also by the speed of their construction. Descriptions of Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno in Bari, and L’Ora in Palermo. In Rome, no fewer than ten newspapers covered the event, including Messaggero, Il Giornale d’Italia, Tevere, Critica Fascista, Gente Nostra, Economia Italiana, Il Corriere dei construttori, La Donna Fascista, Meridano di Roma, and Il Lavoro Fascista.

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Figure 7.9. Photograph of City of Childhood exhibition at Circus Maximus, “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia, interior cover image. Rome, June-September 1937.

the site preparation evoke the sventramento process taking place in the major industrial cities, as well as high speed links between the city and the countryside via train tracks and highways. First, the exposition was massive, with the boundary measuring 50,000 square meters. Site plans emphasized the need “to level, to reorder, to render, ultimately, presentable all the terrain scarred with holes, unstable, covered with weeds” (“livellare, riordinare, rendere, infine presentabile tutto il terreno solcato da buche, franoso, ricoperto da erbacce”). Making the Mostra was as much a clearing project as it was a construction project. Special trains organized by the local fascist federations carried over half a million visitors from provinces all over Italy to the site. Many foreigners too, papers claimed, came to marvel and admire the pavilions and the “potent mechanism that moves the new Italy’’ (“potente meccanismo che muove l’Italia nuova”). Modernity meant going fast, “The motto was this: hurry up,” (“Il motto d’ordine fu questo: far presto”). Dynamic energy surged through the event’s official poster (fig. 7.9). Text escapes the confines of line, recalling the Futurists’ “words in freedom” poetry, where words leapt across the page. This poster emphasizes the key themes of the colonie, the summer camps set up by the Fascist regime as a prophylactic measure to promote the health of children, the future mothers and soldiers who would uphold the regime. A child’s disembodied head floats at the center, with a stylized collar drawn on it in white. He is set over the outline of a Fascio, filled with photocollages of bodies on mass—young adults march across the top, school-age children crowd close to the camera against a background of tents in the middle, and at the bottom, toddlers dance in a circle. Below, text

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Figure 7.10 Map of City of Childhood, “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia. Rome, June – September 1937, p. 3.

escapes the confines of line, slightly recalling the energy and modernity of the Futurists’ “words in freedom” poetry, with words that leapt across the page. That text reads “National exposition of the summer colonies and childhood assistance.” Posters, like the event itself, brought together multiple Fascist concerns: increasing the national birth rate, using trains to connect the country and city, and improving children’s health through architecture built for mass exercise all come together in the promotion of the Mostra. Architect Cipriano Efisio Oppo was a man of few words, but his maxim for speed profoundly shaped the Mostra site and construction.10 It was a complex built to be experienced dynamically, like the colonie themselves. The Mostra rushed visitors along a race track, with pit stops at twelve pavilions.11 Proceeding from east to west along the Via del Circo Massimo to the via dei 10 Under the guidance of PNF secretary Giovanni Marinelli, architects Mancini and Morini, with engineers Luisi, Niccoli, Forestieri, and assistants Vincenzo Nigro and Tommasi built the site. Also contributing was the Impresa Garbatino-Ciaccaluga-Mazzacane, who provided the ONB, Tourism, and Merceology pavilions. 11 The Turinese newspaper La Gazzetta del Popolo noted that the omnipresent photography set across the pavilions and the extensive use of panorama to create a sightline worked together to give the sense of rapid and able construction, all set along a course.

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Cerchi, exhibit-goers would have hurried from the Introduction room to rooms dedicated to ONMI, Childhood Assistance, School, Reeducation for minors, Summer Camps, Italians Abroad, Opera Balilla, GUF, Merceology, Meeting Room, Types of Heliotheraphy Colonies. With size as an index of importance, the Colonie Estive was the largest pavilion at four times the size of the spaces accorded to schools, reeducation, Italians Abroad and the Balilla. The exhibit abruptly ends in sunlight, with the parking lot, ticket booth, bathrooms, and offices. It was important to the designers that the Mostra achieve this effect of venturesome arrival, that the site did not make them feel “like Gulliver in the Lilliput country,” but rather like visitors to “a small city of high pavilions.” Maps to the site (fig. 7.10) read like mechanical manual for operating a steamship, and indeed, there was a nautical theme to many of the buildings: “In front of the balcony of the pavilion offices, which seems like the deck of a luxury transatlantic ocean liner, is the panorama of a new city. It is as if I had reached after long navigation the port of a new city” (“Dinanzi alla balconata del padiglione degli uffici, che sembra il ponte di un transatlantico di lusso, è il panorama di una città nuova. È come se io fossi giunto dopo lunga navigazione al porto d’una città sconosciuta”). Sailing over the Roman plane, the twelve pavilions of this urban complex were built to be temporary—they could be assembled and disassembled in a matter of weeks. Opaque ceilings and walls were made of wood, but each building contained a fourth, glass wall set along the corridor side. A visitor, walking down the central street, could see the smallest details of construction.12 Surveillance was structurally constitutive of the “new architecture for children.” Newspaper coverage of the event in Milan’s vanguard paper Il Corriere della Sera noted that under Oppo’s direction, architects Libera, De Renzi, and Guerrini had in under three months created “clear, simple, and light architecture,” that was the “very image of summer and childhood to which the exhibit was dedicated.” Surveillance meant glass for looking into the interior of buildings, and electric light to make the Mostra accessible at all hours, including at night. The cover photograph of “La città dell’Infanzia” shows the nocturnal side of the Mostra, lit to surgical brightness by three lamps that beam blooming pools of light over the fountain below (fig. 7.11). Electric wires and hydraulic pipes rendered the power grids and water mains of the site visible. Everything about the site evokes the square lattices of rationalism—covered 12 As the Livorno newspaper Il Telegrafo noted, glasswork focused on the architecture created as expression of taste and ideals that were “not just aesthetic, but social” (“non soltanto estetitco, ma sociale”).

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Figure 7.11 Photograph of City of Childhood exhibition entrance in “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia, cover image. Rome, June – September 1937.

Figure 7.12 Photograph of cradle expo in City of Childhood, “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia, p. 7. Rome, June – September 1937.

outdoor area with regular poles, with isolated chairs to take in the air while remaining protected from the elements. Two dark paths cut sharply through the grass showed patrons exactly where to walk. The lone tree in the picture seems to have got lost on the way to the forest. Plucked and repotted here, it appeared domesticated: an office plant displayed on a rectangular desk. Representing the colonie through the Mostra, and its photography, underscores the foundational goals of these spaces. Modernity meant access to electric and hydraulic infrastructure for health. Complete order and regularity of life could be realized through Rationalist architecture. Architect Giuseppe Pagano wrote in Casabella, “[t]he characteristics of this Roman exhibition can be summarized in three points: unity of style, great clarity of urbanism, promotional vivacity” (“I caratteri di questa esposizione di Roma possono essere riassunti in tre punti: unità di stile, grande

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chiarezza urbanistica, vivacità espositiva”). Pagano clarified that this last element, vivacity, was the most important. It was gained through dynamic movement, just like the colonie were. Noisy and bustling, the Mostra was animated by children’s concerts and theatrical plays, and a popular Merry Go Round set in front of the model Casa della Madre e del Bambino. Balilla children slept in camp sites and performed their gymnastic games directly before the adult public. As one pamphlet put it, they were the “protagonists and actors” of the Mostra. Through these living dioramas, children performed the ideals of Fascist childhood. Actors included thirty infants, some still breastfeeding and some weaned, who lived in the Mostra’s promotional nursery along with their twelve mothers. In other words, the model Casa della Madre e del Bambino was truly a working site. Perhaps more than any other pavilion, this site directly addressed mothers, the Mostra’s primary audience. It aimed to promulgate regime promises for the provision of childcare assistance to the mothers of famiglie numerose. Women and their infants provided the living architecture of these intimate exhibits. Just as the colonie were financed by private companies like Montecatini chemicals and SNIA Viscosa fabrics, so too were their colonie represented at the Mostra. Indeed, the regime considered Montecatini to be an ally who had offered “a tireless collaboration with the politics of the regime in the area of the tutelage of children” (“una infaticabile collaborazione alla politica del Regime nel campo della tutela dell’infanzia”). Montecatini, with its 170 productive units, financed the Merceology extensive wing. Merceology is the branch of science that studies the identification and function of materials, as well as their impurities. The wing provided Montecatini with an opportunity to pitch company contributions to daily life in the colonie—they were responsible for the aluminum that made its desks and chairs, the rayon that composed the children’s uniforms. Aluminum, the Montecatini exhibit exclaimed, is “a very modern synthetic material obtained chemically” (“un modernissimo materiale sintetico ottenuto chimicamente”). Similarly, its new synthetic fabric, Albene rayon, “provides clothing that is ideal for our children” (“fornisce biancheria e maglieria ideale per i nostri ragazzi”). New materials not only supported and clothed the outside of the body but healed the insides as well. Medicines and other synthetic comforts devised by Montecatini provided valuable coefficients of childhood health. Alimentary gelatins served in the holiday camps contributed to rational childrearing. Herbicides and pesticides provided “the most ideal instruments for the floral and ornamental cultivation of the Garden of Childhood,” a site at the center of

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Figure 7.13 Photograph of cradle expo in City of Childhood, “La città della infanzia,” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia, p. 7. Rome, June – September 1937.

the exhibit (“gli strumenti più idonei per le coltivazioni floreali ed ornamentali dei Giardini d’infanzia”). Exhibits like Merceology advocated for autarkic living to increase the comforts of childhood through the national chemical industry. Put in concrete terms, Montecatini used this exhibit to promote Italian industrial products like aluminum, plastic, rayon, and medicine directly to mothers. Corporate means were set towards Fascist ends. Participating companies were integrating industrial action with State initiatives, as one promotional pamphlet noted.13 Similarly, SNIA viscosa wanted to show the different applications of their new synthetic fabrics, like Lanital, Snia Amba, and Sniafiocco fabrics, so that mothers would dress their newborns in Sniafiocco, their children in Snia Amba, and themselves in Lanital. To advertise, they provided a subtle but omnipresent contribution to the Mostra. Every fabric used in the exhibition had its source in the SNIA Viscosa factory: every hope chest, every uniform for every Figlio della Lupa, and every black fascio that each child wore (fig. 7.12).

Ruin Tourism in Fascist Dystopias On the eve of World War II, the Fascist regime prescribed architecture as a cure for a range of societal ills, ranging from medical ones, like tuberculosis, to social ones, like delinquency, to be administered to the nation’s 13 In “La partecipazione del Gruppo Montecatini,” the pamphlet states: “L’azione dell’industria integra le iniziative dello Stato.”

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Figure 7.14 Photograph of La Cattolica dormitory designed by Clemente Busiri Vici, 1932. Photographed by Mark Sanderson, in “Derelict Utopias: The Fascists Go On Holiday,” Cabinet Issue 20: Ruins. Winter 2005-2006.

youth through summer camps. Futurist marine and alpine hospices were refurbished, or else built entirely anew in Rationalist-Futurist style. At once whimsical and authoritarian, these dormitories, refectories, and fields were built to support and enhance the outdoor schooling and paramilitary exercises that constituted the new ideals of physical rigor and moral discipline that the Fascist party hoped would typify mass life. These were spaces that aimed to militarize the young national body, preparing it for war. War did come, to Italy and to the summer camps. In 1942 and 1943, many were converted into hospitals and hospices. What had been conceived of as prophylactic care quickly was instead used as convalescent centers for injured soldiers, or orphanages for the children left parentless by the war. In this context, the ENEL summer camp in Riccione, designed by Genoese architect Giancarlo De Carlo, embodies the common legacy of these Fascist control structures for children, and their architectural remnants along the Italian coast. The ENEL building post-dates Fascism, making it part of an Economic Boom period trend that took the Rationalist-Futurist focus on controlling the child with architecture, and then reversed it. Paradoxically, company summer camps did not disappear along with the discredited Fascist party in the 1950s and 1960s—rather, they boomed. Architecturally, these new structures sought to represent children’s participation in the life of the summer camp by designing structures around them. Children, not politics, served as the primary movers and the genius of the space. Some colonie still function as summer camps today, like Le Navi which currently serves as a multi-use space for an art school, a summer youth center, and a windsurfing school. But the majority of these spaces, like the ENEL summer camp, are no longer suitable for children. Many structures stand vacant, which is not

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Figure 7.15 Photograph of Colonia Marina Enel, photographed by Alessandro Piredda, 1985, Riccione, Italy. Appears in “Coastal Icons: Italian Holiday Camps, from Mussolini to Valtur,” by Alessandro Benetti, Domus, August 13, 2019.

the same as being uninhabited. As early as 1987, architectural magazine Domus noted that the former colonie were now the site of ruin tourism. Today, ENEL and other Fascist summer camps are popular sites for urban exploration (also called urbex). Urbex typically involves the exploration of manmade environments, including infrastructural elements of cities, like train stations, and individual buildings, like rooftops, and storm drains. Former colonie, as small cities, provide both. Rather than obedient children, adventurous young adults now frequent these spaces, trespassing onto derelict property to visit the historical ruins of the Fascist period, and to document its strange architecture with photographs. Yesterday’s utopia is today’s dystopia. The colonie were imagined as Fascist summer camps, as baby cities that would nurture the next generation in Fascist forms of mass life. Architects aimed to realize structures that could both delight their inhabitants and control them. These holiday camps, with their marine themes, lofted bridges, and panoramic vistas, were conceived by the Fascist party as children’s utopias. Ruin tourism has reopened these once-defunct spaces, connecting the architectural history of the Fascist period to the political concerns of the present day.

Bibliography Ambasz, Emilio. Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1972. Arvidsson, Adam. Marketing Modernity: Italian Advertising from Fascism to Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 2003.

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Bartetzky, Arnold, and Marc Schalenberg. Urban Planning and the Pursuit of Happiness: European Variations on a Universal Theme (18th–21st Centuries). Berlin: Jovis Diskurs, 2009. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Berezin, Mabel. Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Celli, Carlo. Economic Fascism: Primary Sources on Mussolini’s Crony Capitalism. New York: Axios Press, 2013. De Grazia, Victoria. “Growing Up.” How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. De Martino, Stefano., Wall, Alex. Cities of Childhood: Italian Colonie of the 1930s. London: Architectural Association, 1988. De Seta, Cesare. La cultura architettonica italiana tra le due guerre. Bari: Laterza, 1972. Doordan, Dennis P. “In the Shadow of the Fasces: Political Design in Fascist Italy.” Design Issues13, no. 1 (1997): 39–52. Duggan, Christopher. Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy. London: Oxford University Press, 2013. Education 45. 2. 1992. Forgacs, David. Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980: Cultural Industries, Politics, and the Public. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press. 1990. Forgacs, David, and Stephen Gundle. Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007 Gentile, Emilio. “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 2 (1980): 109–130. Gentile, Emilio. Fascismo di Pietra. Rome: Laterza, 2007. Horn, David G. Social Bodies, Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Ipsen, Carl. Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kaplan, Wendy. Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945: Selections from the Wolfsonian. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. “La città della infanzia.” Mostra Nazionale di Colonie Estive e dell’Assistenza all’Infanzia. Rome, June-September 1937. “La gioiosa partenza dei nostril ragazzi per le colonie fasciste al mare e ai monti.” La Cucina Italiana, August 1, 1935. Lasansky, D. Medina. The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy. University Park, PE: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

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Lazzaro, Claudia, and Roger J. Crum. Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Montecatini. Assistenza igienico-sanitaria negli impianti industriali. Milan: Esperia, 1937. Nicoloso, Paolo. Architetture per un’identità italiana: Progetti e opere per fare gli italiani fascisti. Udine: Gaspari, 2012. Paluello, L. Minio. Education in Fascist Italy. New York: Routledge, 2007. Pende, Nicola. “Eugenica e politica demographica.” In L’Economia Italiana. Rome: Casa di Oriani, 1933. Rifkind, David. The Battle for Modernism: Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy. Venice: Marsilio, 2012. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. “Fascism’s Museum in Motion.” Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 87–97. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. Staging Fascism: 18 BL and The Theater of Masses for Masses. Preface by Hal Foster. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1996. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. Anno X. La Mostra della Rivoluzione fascista del 1932: genesi – sviluppo – contesto culturale-storico – ricezione. Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2003. Sparke, Penny. Italian Design: 1870 to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Spirito, Ugo. “Fascist Corporativism as the Key to a New International Order.” Capitalismo e corporativismo. Florence: Sansoni, 1934. Reprinted in Fascism, edited by Roger Griffin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Stone, Marla. “Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.” Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 2 (1993): 215–243. Villani, Luciano. Le borgate del fascismo: Storia urbana, politica, e sociale della periferia urbana. Milan: Ledizioni, 2012. Vinaccia, Gaetano. Per le Città di Domani: Come il clima plasma la forma urbana e l’architettura, La sanità e l’igiene cittadina. Rome: Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1937. Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. Weber, Cynthia. “Introduction: Design and Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies. 14, no. 1 (2010): 1–16. Weber, Cynthia, and Mark Lacy. “Securing by Design.” Review of International Studies 37, no. 3 (2011): 1021–1043.

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About the Author Diana Garvin is an Assistant Professor of Italian with a specialty in Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research examines the history of everyday life across Fascist Italy and Italian East Africa. In her book, Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, she uses food as a lens to examine daily negotiations of power between women and the Fascist state. Garvin often writes articles on everyday life under Italian Fascism for journals like Critical Inquiry, Journal of Modern European History, Journal of Modern Italian History, Modern Italy, Annali d’italianistica, Design Issues, Food and Foodways, gender/sexuality/italy and Signs.

8. Fare la vita grigia: The Industrial City of Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi Samantha Gillen

Abstract The economic boom of the 1950s resulted in mass migration into the industrial cities of northern Italy. For intellectuals, this decade was a period of disillusionment and resignation. Italo Calvino and Luciano Bianciardi, in their respective fictions La nuvola di smog (1958) and La vita agra (1962), emphasize the grayness of their protagonists’ environment, which takes the form of smog, fog, dust, and smoke. This grayness or grigiore also alludes to the murky political situation that surrounds them and their desire to break free from it. The industrial city itself becomes a locus in which individual voices are squandered, ethics blurred, and men forced to renounce their ideals to ensure their survival. Keywords: Calvino, Bianciardi, economic boom, industrialization, grayness

Conformity, mediocrity, boredom, sadness, loneliness, elderliness, and pensiveness: these are the characteristics evoked by the color gray according to contemporary studies by Eva Heller and Michel Pastoureau.1 In the Italian twentieth century, the color was closely associated with the atrocities of the Fascist regime and the slow, postwar reconstruction. This period of moral and political rebuilding was complicated by the transformative, societal phenomenon known as the economic miracle. From the 1950s to 1 See Eva Heller, Wie Farben Wirken (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1989), 215–241; Michel Pastoureau, Le petit livre des couleurs (Paris: Diffusion, Interforum, 2005), 91.

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch08

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the mid-1960s, exports skyrocketed, families moved across the peninsula, and the Northern landscape changed rapidly from industrial and suburban expansion. Millions flocked to the cities, leaving behind their roots—both the land they had nurtured for generations and the social connections to their families and towns. The industrialist Adriano Olivetti, famed for his human-centered factories and their utopic balance between work and community life, encapsulated the velocity of this transformation at the inauguration of his newest Olivetti establishment in 1955: “In little more than a generation, we have abandoned a thousand-year tradition of farmers and fishermen.”2 During this economic boom, the color gray was immediately present on the urban visual plane: building materials such as metal, steel, and concrete were used to erect spaces of exchange and production like factories and warehouses. Gray was found in the dusty lodgings of workers, which should have provided relief from the doldrums of the workday. Grayness also extended to meteorological description, as Southern immigrants traded the sunny skies of the Mezzogiorno for capricious weather patterns typical of northern Italy, including frequent rain, clouds, fog, and smog. For intellectuals like Italo Calvino (1923–1985) and Luciano Bianciardi (1922–1971), grayness was a much more complicated issue, a moral or emotional characteristic dating back to the Fascist era and the political disillusionment that followed for Italian Leftists. Prominent characteristics of the twentieth-century subgenre letteratura industriale (industrial literature) included the alienation and solitude that many new arrivals felt upon settling into foreign cities, the monotonous routine of factory work, and the long commutes to industrialized spaces. Two landmark Italian literary works that explore grayness to describe the adjustments necessary to city-living as well as the emotional state of the protagonist are Calvino’s La nuvola di smog / Smog (1958) and Bianciardi’s La vita agra / It’s a Hard Life (1962).3 Both were published during the height of Italy’s economic boom and provide a satirical or pessimistic critique of Italian postwar society, which quickly moved towards one of neo-capitalism and conformity. As intellectuals became increasingly frustrated with material society, they used il grigio or

2 See Adriano Olivetti’s 1955 inaugural speech of the Pozzuoli factory in Giancarlo Cosenza’s Luigi Cosenza: La Fabbrica Olivetti a Pozzuoli / The Olivetti Factory in Pozzuoli (Naples: Clean Edizioni, 2006), 124. It is notable that Adriano gave this speech in 1955, at the onset of the mass migration and economic development that the boom created. 3 The novelette La nuvola di smog was first published in issue 34 of Nuovi Argomenti (September–October 1958). I will use English translations by William Weaver (Smog, 1971) and Eric Mosbacher (It’s a Hard Life, 1965).

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il grigiore to represent political resignation, mental and emotional anguish, and stagnancy. I argue that, in their stories of moral disintegration disguised as industrial malaise, Calvino and Bianciardi foster the advent of a new intellectual that reckons with this boom of mass culture and conformity through a critique of his new, urban environment. Despite his academic prowess, he must bend to the will of the “gray” society he claims to resent because he is financially dependent on a regular paycheck, compromising his ethics to make ends meet. I examine the grigiore in Calvino’s and Bianciardi’s works to see how this individual also confronted the political delusion and ethical resignation during these years of relative inactivity, exacerbated by the corruption of the city. As time passes at work, on on the commuter tram, or in navigating the maze-like layout of the metropolis, the narrator finds himself more entangled in grayness and uncertain as to how to escape it. I also illustrate how Calvino and Bianciardi use il grigio to depict the working class when Leftist movements like workerism and the New Left were emerging in 1960s Marxist journals. Throughout the centuries, the color gray has accrued a variety of characteristics. It is often described as a non-color or half-color that produces fewer stimuli than fuller and brighter tones, rendering it less visually appealing. Furthermore, where only one absolute black and absolute white exists, there lies in between an infinite range of grays, which can convey more nuances. Aside from some quaint, seaside towns, gray is not a prominent color characteristic of Italy. The novelist Mary McCarthy recalled “the deep shades of melon and of tangerine that you see in Rome, the pinks of Venice, the rose of Siena, the red of Bologna.”4 One could add to her assessment the reds and yellows of Tuscany, the scintillating, turquoise Mediterranean Sea that offsets eggshell-colored, coastal villages, the bright and vibrant buildings of Venice’s Burano Island or the Cinque Terre villages in Liguria. The bright hues of particular cities and regions enable visitors to form attachments. Cities like Milan, however, present a more somber portrait. Historian John Foot wrote that the Fashion Capital was “best remembered as grey, as black and white, and its peripheries can only be imagined in that colorless color.”5 Foot, who studied the microhistories of Milanese suburbs, likely referred to the gray aspect of working-class housing in new neighborhoods that lacked the vibrancy and charm of the city center, albeit also predominantly gray. 4 5

Mary McCarthy, The Stones of Florence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 3. John Foot, “Milan, City of Fragments,” in Milan Since the Miracle (New York: Berg, 2001), 3–4.

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La nuvola di smog and La vita agra were not the first works to use the noun il grigio or il grigiore to present a range of depressing conditions or moral ambiguities. Calvino used the dull color in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947) and Ultimo viene il corvo (1949) to communicate the dreariness of the post-Fascist era that was marked by a “still confused and unsure adolescence.”6 Monica Seger observes that Calvino’s gray protagonists from the 1950s are “disaffected, intellectual, middle-aged men” who “hover on the brink between a desire to abstain from involvement in the world and a rather festering sense of impegno, political or social commitment.”7 Apart from his own writing, Calvino cited Alberto Moravia’s use of “grayness and squalor” paired with a “down-beat tone” to categorize the Italian literature of the late 1950s and early 1960s.8 In Calvino’s novelette La nuvola di smog, an anonymous writer moves to an unnamed city to work for an ironically titled periodical about environmental issues, The Purification.9 In Bianciardi’s novel, La vita agra, an equally unnamed writer transfers to Milan to plot his revenge against a corporation responsible for the deaths of forty-three miners in the Tuscan village of Ribolla. Bianciardi’s anarchist protagonist vows to avenge the miners’ deaths by blowing up a Milanese skyscraper in which the mining headquarters is located, deeming this action his “mission.”10 While musing on different ways to execute his plan, he takes up a series of odd jobs including editing and translation, succumbs to the crushing omnipotence of the city and eventually renounces his mission to stay afloat in Italy’s financial capital. In both stories, the protagonist is an ordinary man, but one who does not partake in the grudging, physical work required to support the needs of a consumeristic society: he supports himself by taking editing, writing, or 6 Marco Belpoliti, “Calvino’s Colors,” in Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility, ed. Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin, and Lene Waage Petersen (Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2007), 18. 7 Monica Seger, “Economic Expansion, Environmental Awareness in the Early Works of Italo Calvino,” in Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 25. Seger refers to Calvino’s short stories under the title Gli amori difficili (first published as a collection in 1970) which includes La nuvola di smog. 8 Italo Calvino to Boselli in Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985, ed. Michael Wood and trans. M.L. McLaughlin (Princeton University Press, 2013), 266–267. 9 Although Calvino does not name the city in which his industrial novelettes take place, scholars believe it to be Turin. 10 The Ribolla mine explosion took place in May of 1954 and was responsible for the deaths of 43 miners. Bianciardi and Carlo Cassola had first documented this tragedy as an article series appearing in Nuovi Argomenti from 1952–1954, then in the volume I minatori della Maremma (Bari: Laterza, 1956).

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translating jobs that compromise his pursuit of justice. Before he can begin his new job, this protagonist must first arrive at the address of his rented room. He establishes the details of his first experience with the city: A new job, an unfamiliar city—had I been younger or had I expected more from life, these would have pleased and stimulated me; but not now, now I could only see the grayness, the poverty that surrounded me, and I could only plunge into it as if I actually liked it, because it confirmed my belief that life could be nothing else.11

Having arrived at his new lodging, Calvino’s narrator struggles to adapt to the dryness and dust, voicing his helplessness: “I could only see the grayness.” The use of the definite article indicates that this melancholy had already been established as an intrinsic feature of the metropolis. We can speculate that the narrator is in his mid-thirties, having had prior experiences that taught him to feel a sense of resignation when confronting his environment, his work, or his interactions.12 The promise of financial stability lures him to the city, as it does for those who fall victim to the “poverty” around him. It is clear that “poverty” here is not only monetary or material, but a deficiency of the intellectual’s environment as all creative urges or perceptiveness are stifled by the pressure to conform. In an interview with literary critic Maria Corti, Calvino claimed that his novelettes of the 1950s were explorations of “the intellectual’s reaction to the negativity of reality.”13 Tainted by its support for Soviet authoritarianism, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) failed to win the postwar general elections of 1946, 1948, and 1953, which contributed to growing political apathy. Scholar Alessandro Iandolo argues that the crisis of communism in 1956 had more to do with Italy’s lack of preparedness to confront domestic issues exacerbated by the economic boom, higher standards of living, as well as 11 Italo Calvino, Smog in The Watcher and Other Stories, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 77. “Lavoro nuovo, città diversa, fossi stato più giovane o mi fossi aspettato di più dalla vita, m’avrebbero dato slancio e contentezza; adesso no, non sapevo vedere che il grigio, il misero mi circondava, e cacciarmi dentro, non tanto come se vi fossi rassegnato, ma addirittura come si mi piacesse, perché ne traevo la conferma che la vita non poteva essere diversa.” Calvino, La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 11, my emphasis. 12 La nuvola di smog parallels Calvino’s own life during the 1950s (he was 35 years old in 1958). 13 “la reazione dell’intellettuale alla negatività della realtà.” Calvino interviewed by Maria Corti, “Intervista di Maria Corti,” in Italo Calvino Saggi, vol. 2, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 2920–2929. These novelettes include La formica argentina (1952), La speculazione edilizia (1957), La nuvola di smog (1958), and La giornata d’uno scrutatore (1963).

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tensions between intellectuals and the working class, but there was also a significant, external factor: Calvino’s outlook, like that of other western intellectuals, was shaped by his disillusionment with the PCI after 1956, when the USSR suppressed democratic aspirations and invaded Hungary. Over 200,000 Italians left the PCI in protest.14 Calvino did so in an open letter addressed to various secretariats of political organizations in Turin, which stated that catering to “basic conservatism” instead of free elections in the East was “the waste of a huge opportunity.”15 Calvino’s correspondence revealed a lack of political and social engagement he found in the literature of the time. In a letter to Mario Cerroni on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s collection Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957), for example, Calvino praised the author for having created “a poetry we can discuss, that touches on the contradictions of the world we move in, that gives us new worries to think about, that gets on our nerves!”16 The agitation Calvino looked for was also expressed to Elsa Morante about her novel L’isola di Arturo, released in the same year. By praising Morante’s ability to “narrate and find real feelings,” Calvino implicitly criticized the absence of the human connection in a rapid age of societal transformation.17 Like Calvino in Turin, Bianciardi documented aspects of his own experience from the time he arrived in Milan in 1954 to work as an editor for the publisher Feltrinelli. Unable to conform to the clockwork rhythms of the city, he was fired three years later. Bianciardi continued translating as a freelancer, a gig where he “worked like a beast and was exploited, little recognized, paid terribly.”18 In a particularly prolific period between 1955 and 1961, he translated over sixty works.19 Resigned to a solitary life as an editor and translator, Bianciardi’s indicated in his correspondence that he found it difficult to make social connections in Milan. In 1962, after having lived there for eight years, Bianciardi lamented: “I don’t have friends in Milan. I’ve been alone since the beginning. When I needed help, nobody gave me a 14 Alessandro Iandolo records that most of the members who fell away from the PCI between 1956 and 1957 were working-class. See Iandolo, “Unforgettable 1956? The PCI and the Crisis of Communism in Italy,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 259–282. DOI: http://doi. org/10.1017/S0960777314000046 15 Calvino to various secretariats. Wood, Calvino Letters, 135. 16 Calvino to Cerroni. Wood, Calvino Letters, 113. 17 Calvino to Morante. Wood, Calvino Letters, 120. 18 Bianciardi, interview with Valerio Riva in Pino Corrias, Vita di un anarchico: Bianicardi a Milano (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1993), 103. 19 Irene Gambaroti has compiled a list of Bianciardi’s translations, among other works in Luciano Bianciardi Bibliografia 1948–1998 (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2001).

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hand, and I believe all has this has changed me for the worse.”20 In the novel, Bianciardi’s protagonist sustains the same health problems as Bianciardi himself: the twenty Nazionali cigarettes he smoked daily paired with his alcohol dependency would contribute to Bianciardi’s chronic bronchitis and, ultimately, his premature death in 1971 at 48 years old.21 For Bianciardi, Milan represented the misery and guilt that he carried from the Ribolla explosion and the loneliness he felt away from his native town, regardless of the intellectual opportunities that the city presented him. Where Calvino’s description of the city is tinged with pessimism, Bianciardi’s La vita agra communicates the oddities of urban life through a satirical lens. The idea for this story of what Mark Pietralunga calls “the emotional deterioration of an ordinary man” stemmed from Bianciardi’s personal experience in Milan and two earlier novels: Il lavoro culturale (1957) and L’integrazione (1960).22 In the former, young intellectuals struggle to articulate their own social commitments in postwar Italy. They come to realize that conformity and routine are inevitable in their new lives. In the latter, the protagonist moves to Milan and is forced to confront the rampant consumerism that has gripped the city. La vita agra also drew from several stories and texts Bianciardi published in literary periodicals. In Presenza, “Punte di spillo” (1958) and “Le strade” (1959) reiterated an increasingly pessimistic tone: “Punte di spillo” recounts fleeting moments of life in paragraph form, with many of the microtexts focusing on death and violence; “Le strade” details the changing of a small city into a larger one and how this expansion spurred social and cultural transformations.23 In Il Caffè, “Vacanza alla foce” (1960) and “Il complotto” (1961) also contributed to the novel for which Bianciardi became famous: “Il complotto,” in which a group of men plans to kill off Italian celebrities and public figures, previews the Bianciardi-protagonist’s conspiratorial mission of blowing up the Pirelli tower in La vita agra.24 “Vacanza alla foce” continues Bianciardi’s critique 20 Bianciardi to Terrosi in L’intellettuale disintegrato, ed. Mario Terrosi and Alberto Gessani (Rome: Editrice Ianua, 1985), 94–95. 21 See Corrias, Vita di un anarchico, 73. 22 See M.F. Pietralunga, “Luciano Bianciardi and the Blasphemy of Miracles,” in Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema, ed. Norma Bouchard (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 81; Luciano Bianciardi, Il lavoro culturale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) and L’integrazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1960). 23 Bianciardi, “Punte di spillo,” Presenza 1, no. 1 (June–July 1958): 84-87; Bianciardi, “Le strade,” Presenza 2, no. 4 (March 1959): 41–47. 24 Bianciardi, “Vacanza alla foce,” Il Caffè 9 (September 1960): 45-47; Bianciardi, “Il complotto,” Il Caffè 2 (April 1961): 44–48.

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of capitalistic society through the building of a bridge over a river’s mouth in a pristine vacation spot, which allowed the likes of “editori, industrialotti e altri” to penetrate the hidden word of the civilized and nostalgic intellectuals.25 By expanding these literary precedents into the novel La vita agra, Bianciardi exposed the evils of the economic “miracle” by showing how it exploited workers. The late fifties and early sixties saw their own boom of literary journals, a way for intellectuals to correspond with each other about newly emerging cultural and technological issues. In 1959, Calvino began co-editing the periodical Il menabò di letteratura alongside Elio Vittorini. Issues 4 and 5 were dedicated to letteratura industriale, focusing on how literature was to represent the new reality created by the economic boom.26 Contemporaneously, Marxist journals Quaderni Rossi (1961–1965) and Classe operaia (1963–1966), which were inspired by the philosophical inquiries of Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti in their socialist newspaper L’ordine nuovo (1919–1925) contributed to the emerging figure of the operaio di massa (mass worker). A young, male, assembly line worker often from the South, the mass worker was seen as the “central subject of Italian capitalism” during the economic boom.27 Explorations of grayness in the 1950s show the influence of Gramsci’s Marxism in the Quaderni del carcere and in L’ordine nuovo. Gramsci predicted the hegemonic influence of American culture and the use of a Fordist production model that would come to dominate Italian industrial circuits during and after Fascism. From industrial models and the Marshall Plan to the beat generation, American culture began to seep into the tightly woven fabric of a relatively homogenous Italian population. Alberto Gessani confirms that Leftists in this period embraced a “sui generis Marxism, ready to open itself to methods and themes coming from bourgeois thought and, above all, from American culture.”28 Although monetary aid 25 Bianciardi, “Vacanza alla foca,” 46. The Bianciardi-protagonist reveals that, “da bambino mi mandavano sempre a estatare in un paesetto delle Metallifere, abitato da minatori di pirite.” The proximity to Tuscany’s “metal-bearing hills” (Colline Metallifere) could have sparked an interest in miners in general for Bianciardi, who would document their work—and lives—throughout the 1950s. 26 For Calvino’s exploration of the intellectual figure during the economic boom, see in particular “Il mare dell’oggettività” (Il menabò 2, 1959) and “La sfida al labirinto” (Il menabò 5, 1961). 27 The figure of the mass worker was conceptualized by the Workerists (operaisti) which will be explored later with Calvino’s and Bianciardi’s depictions of the working class. See Nicola Pizzolato, “The IWW in Turin: ‘Militant History,’ Workers’ Struggle, and the Crisis of Fordism in 1970s Italy,” in International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 91: Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question (Spring 2017): 113. Accessed 26 February 2022. DOI: http://doi. org/10.1017/S0147547916000314 28 Gessani, L’intellettuale disintegrato, 24.

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from the Marshall Plan provided a stimulus for the new Italian economy, historian Paul Ginsborg estimated that the funds only represented 2% of Italian GNP between 1948 and 1952. While an important spur for reconstruction, they were “not a decisive element in Italy’s economic development in these years.”29 The Americanization of industrial Italy resulted less from financial windfall than from structural change, such as the Fordist factory model whose mass workers are depicted in both texts. In La vita agra, the protagonist cynically observes the robotic behavior of factory workers during their morning and evening commutes. In the industrial city especially, the commute is an important part of the workday, a time in which “the entire city seems to move compact in one direction […] an immense flow of people that descend and ascend the current twice a day nonstop.”30 Commutes are an unpaid part of workers’ time, often spent on public transit and traversing multiple neighborhoods to arrive at the workspace. Bianciardi zooms in on the clockwork journeys of these proletarians at the beginning and end of their day: The first trains start coming in at five o’clock, and disgorge battalions of grey, swollen-eyed people, who march shoulder to shoulder towards the trams that take them and dump them at the other end of the city where the factories are […] Even if it is clear from the clock that they have no hope of catching the train, the grey men, wrapped up in their coats and with woolen scarves round their necks or balaclavas drawn over their eyes, never slacken their pace in their march towards the platform.31

In this excerpt, the men who move mechanically between work, the train station, and their lodgings are described twice as “gray.” This could be in part a reference to their dull-colored, working-class attire (consisting of the typical 29 Italy received $1.4 billion in aid from the Marshall Plan (about 11% of the total funds send to western Europe), with $176 million arriving in the first three months of 1948 alone. See Paul Ginsborg, A Contemporary History of Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 158. 30 “La città intera sembra muoversi compatta in una direzione […] un immenso fiume di gente che discende e risale la corrente due volte al giorno, senza tregua.” Alvaro Bertani, Da Grosseto a Milano: la vita breve di Luciano Bianciardi (Milan: ExCogita Editore, 2007), 69. 31 Bianicardi, It’s a Hard Life, 52. “Alle cinque cominciano a entrare i primi treni in stazione, e a buttar giù battaglioni di gente grigia, con gli occhi gonfi, in marcia spalla a spalla verso il tram, che li scarica all’altro capo della città dove sono le fabbriche […] Anche se dall’orologio è chiaro che non ce la faranno, gli uomini grigi e intabarrati, con una sciarpa di lana al collo, o il passamontagna calato sugli occhi, non rallentano la marcia verso la banchina dei treni.” Bianciardi, La vita agra, 59–60. My emphasis.

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gray coveralls, tuta), their ashen faces drawn forlorn by the long workday, or their grease-stained hands. There is evidently a gloomy characteristic in their automized behavior and relentless march to and from the factory via the commuter train. Their grayness also hints at their replaceability. The men that Bianciardi describes are academically unskilled or “semi-skilled” mass-workers, have been hired to perform mechanical actions to ensure the smooth operation of the factory machines.32 Gessani pinpoints why Bianciardi’s description is “streaked with deep grooves of bitterness:” the proletariat here becomes “increasingly an abstraction, a bleak and gray mass that does not speak, does not respond, and is not seen.”33 Although Bianciardi creates a visual divide between the defeated, mass laborer and the intellectual, these two seemingly different groups of people have more in common than first meets the eye. Bianciardi’s description of the factory commuters embodies how the narrator feels. Both he and the workers seek to survive in the industrial city and in doing so, they find themselves in constant discomfort. While Bianciardi’s protagonist does not perform grueling factory work, he too shares in the grayness of his environment in the form of meager wages, little recognition, monotony, and helplessness. Bianciardi’s character throughout La vita agra self-identifies as an “intellettuale di provincia” (small-town intellectual). Whereas a traditional intellectual saw himself as autonomous from the ruling social group, an organic one operated within a given social strata.34 Calvino’s and Bianciardi’s protagonists would have been considered organic intellectuals in Gramscian terms because of their status as writers with a sense of civic duty, defined not by their occupations but “by the scope and compass of the change they seek to initiate.”35 The protagonists become a momentary mouthpiece for 32 Gail Day, “Looking the Negative in the Face: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture,” in Dialectical Passions: Negotiation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 111. It is debatable whether mass workers were unskilled, as operating machinery or working on assembly lines (regardless of how monotonous it was) required some degree of training. 33 The full quote: “Bianciardi ha compreso con acutezza il carettere mesto e plumbo degli anni Cinquanta: il tramonto di tante illusioni e di tanti sogni, il silenzio sempre più lontano della classe operaia. E già negli anni Cinquanta il suo sguardo s’incupisce, la sua prosa si vena di solchi profondi d’amarezza: perché il proletariato, quel proletariato che in provincia aveva dovuto abbandonare, è sempre più un’astrazione, una massa grigia e tetra che non parla, non risponde e non si fa vedere.” Gessani, L’intellettuale disintegrato, 36. 34 On intellectuals, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 5–23. 35 Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne, “On Intellectuals,” in Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 172. For further investigation of the role of intellectuals in the second postwar period, see Eugenio Bolongaro, “The Figure of the Intellectual

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the proletariat, despite not being working-class themselves: in a tentative engagement with the city’s lack of response to pollution, Calvino’s narrator seeks to expose and defeat the smog levels that choke the city’s inhabitants. Bianciardi’s protagonist vows to avenge the deaths of forty-three miners whose identities are long forgotten in Milan. Although Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals still existed in the second postwar period, technological development between the 1920s and the 1950s challenged those categories.36 More specifically, the protagonist in the works of Calvino and Bianciardi aligns more closely with the subcategory of counter-hegemonic organic intellectual. This person’s main task was to question the dominant policies (or lack thereof) that favored capitalism. Ultimately, both men fail in their missions. The anonymity and powerlessness of the working class is similarly depicted in La nuvola di smog. Calvino’s protagonist meets Omar Basaluzzi, an ex-laborer at one of the city’s factories, who introduces him to the modest union meetings for workers. Faces like Omar’s are “already prepared for sleep” similar to Bianciardi’s “gray, swollen-eyed people” in desperate need of rest.37 This description of factory workers echoes Bianciardi’s narrator in that these workers, too, move as a crowd towards the tram, their bicycles, or the café at the end of their shift. Calvino’s protagonist also comments upon their conformity and anonymity: “I could find no mark that distinguished them: the same aged or prematurely old faces, product of the same life.”38 Regardless of age, experience, or physical difference, these men have been rendered the same by the demands of their work. Both groups of workers—anonymous, powerless, and exploitable—had little option for unionization and thus failed to mobilize their labor. On the pages of 1960s Marxist journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe operaia, Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, and Antonio Negri began to develop Italian operaismo (workerism), which played a massive role in the social revolutions at the close of the decade. The operaisti asserted the importance of mass workers when they stated that the working class was not a victim of capitalist in Calvino’s Early Fiction,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino, ed. Franco Ricci (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2013), 24–25; David Forgacs, “The Italian Communist Party and Culture,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, eds. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 97–114. 36 O’Neill and Wayne elucidate the emergence of a “technocratic” intellectual, who worked “within the economic-corporative horizons.” This would include scientists, engineers, managers, negotiators, union leaders, etc. O’Neill and Wayne, Considering Class, 172. 37 Calvino, Smog, 128; Bianciardi, It’s a Hard Life, 52. 38 Calvino, Smog, 129.

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development, but that capitalism relied on working class labor.39 They continued the theories of Marx and Gramsci that promoted the autonomy of the working class, inspired by the example of the Factory Councils that had aided in transforming the lives of the workers during the Biennio Rosso (1919–1920). 40 It was thanks to these social inquiries, taking place inside the factory, that workers participated in strikes and seized the flow of production. The mass workers depicted in Calvino and Bianciardi’s fictions have not yet benefited from the collective call to action that operaismo promoted. They have not yet learned class consciousness to challenge unjust, capitalistic conditions via participation in unions and strikes. In the second postwar period, the def ining structure against which workerists fought was the late-stage capitalism that redef ined models of industrial organization. 41 Nine million Italians moved to northern industrial cities from rural regions, a mass migration that culminated between 1958–1963. Although the profits extracted by their labor grew exponentially, these mass workers would not win higher wages until after 1968. This massive influx of laborers generated tensions in cities that lacked the proper services to support them, such as housing, public health, and social security. 42 Dissatisfied with the sluggish responses of the PCI and PSI (Italian Socialist Party) to instill social benefits for laborers within a capitalist system of production, workerists broke from these rigid political groups to forge their own path: Like the movement known as the Nuova Sinistra (New Left), they distanced themselves from the mainstream Left to bring class struggle to the forefront of political discussion. 43 Bianciardi and Calvino describe the factory workers of this era as “gray” because their undervalued labor grudgingly stokes the flames of an industrial society that offers them little in return. Social justice is ultimately out of 39 See Roberto Nigro, “Workerism,” Krisis, Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins. Accessed 19 September 2020. 40 The Factory Councils were to be “the agents of this transformation, the catalysts for an upsurge of social energy that would define a new society on the basis of improved production and equal redistribution, in short, a society run by and for its own producers.” Andrea Righi, “Factory Councils, Fordism, and Gramsci: A Worker’s Biopolitics and its Demise”, in Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 16. 41 On late-stage capitalism and its massification of culture, see Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 42 See Valdo Spini, “The New Left in Italy,” Journal of Contemporary History 1/2 (January– April 1972): 55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/259757; for migration statistics, see Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 219. 43 Day writes that the PCI and PSI “too readily accepted the framework laid out within capitalism, failing to challenge categories such as work and production.” See Day, Dialectical Passions, 111.

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reach for the narrators of La nuvola di smog and La vita agra, who discover that to partake in the life of industrialized cities, one must plunge into—that is, accept at all levels—the surrounding misery, the same “poverty” that Calvino’s narrator immediately noticed. As an intellectual, the plunge into grayness is ultimately a choice. He can critique il grigio because he has the formal education to interrogate its place in political, historical, and societal contexts. As part of his job, he is bombarded by textual stimuli that (sub)consciously pass through his mind as he translates, edits, or writes. While both types of workers—the intellectual worker and the factory worker—could be described as gray, the grayness of the manual laborer is a result of his strenuous environment while the intellectual’s grayness derives from an overexposure to the impoverished communities around him. The intellectual can choose employment in a factory, while the factory worker cannot choose to be an intellectual, at least not in the Gramscian context of a “traditional” one. To become an organic intellectual of the proletariat in Gramscian terms, a factory worker would have to dedicate his time to further his education and to advocate for and mobilize his colleagues through meetings, strikes, and negotiations. As we see in the literary depictions, factory workers were too preoccupied by the physical demands of their job and the toll it has on their bodies to step into this role. Mass workers thus had limited options during the economic boom for advancement. Operaismo and the New Left sought to give more power and recognition to the working class, with the goal of creating better conditions and education for workers, calling out their exploitation, and insisting on the value of their labor in late Fordist Italy. At several points in La vita agra, the Bianciardi-narrator states that society depends on the discreet labor of not just the working class, but those who lead ordinary and unquestioning lives. He recalls his wife Mara, who takes care of their young son and manages the household in his hometown of Grosseto with the money that the narrator sends her. He muses: Whenever I thought of her, I imagined her grey, and, in its way, heroic life, made up of a thousand similar and humble gestures, loyal year in and year out to her duty, her home, and the way of life of her choice. Does not the whole civilization depend on such as her? Is it not the continual labor of these ants that keeps the life of nations going and provides its connective tissue?44 44 Bianciardi, It’s a Hard Life, 83. “Me la figuravo, appena ci pensassi, questa sua vita grigia e a suo modo eroica, fatta di mille gesti eguali e dimessi, fedele giorno per giorno alla scelta, al

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Here grayness is equated with heroism and assigns power to often faceless and unknown workers. The Bianciardi-protagonist also projects his idea of grayness onto his wife, who does not live in the city, but who nevertheless partakes in a dreary lifestyle deemed “gray” like those of the factory workers. Although unpaid, her domestic labor contributes to societal operations like those of wage workers; in this case, Mara enables Bianciardi’s narrator to continue his intellectual pursuits in a city where there are more opportunities while she cares for their child. Although Calvino did not participate directly in the workerist movement, his industrial novel(ette)s demonstrate some of their critiques of a capitalist society. 45 In La nuvola di smog, the villainous figure of Commendatore Cordà represents the opposition to intellectuals and to Leftist initiatives. Editor-in-chief of the periodical The Purification, Cordà also serves as director of the Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Cities. When Calvino’s first-person narrator denounces the problem of smog in their industrial city, Cordà dismisses his concerns by countering that their urban environment has no more smog than others. Cordà plays a further and more sinister role: he serves as chairman of the board of the city’s polluting factories as “the smog’s master, it was he who blew it out constantly over the city.”46 The narrator realizes the irony in this double act, and that his concerns about smog will not be taken seriously. The smog cloud that Cordà produces becomes a projection of the protagonist’s neurosis, a physical entity of the grigio “that I inhabited and that inhabited me.”47 Cordà himself, down to the gray suit that he dons, is an embodiment of the smog. During a union meeting attended by the narrator, Cordà’s ominious presence is felt in the cigarette smoke and the sudden fog that rolls in from the open windows, a reminder that the factory workers’ aspirations are futile. The workers are being choked out of the room; their voices squandered. This scene of the failed union meeting can be read as a reflection of the political situation in which Italian intellectuals found themselves emerging from dovere, ai luoghi. Non va avanti così la civiltà? Non è forse il continuo lavorio di queste formiche che tiene in piedi la vita dei popoli, e ne ordisce il tessuto connettivo?” Bianciardi, La vita agra, 73. 45 The eponymous narrator of Marcovaldo illustrates a warehouse worker’s resistance to capitalism in his disinterest in his job and his apathy towards the new face of industrialized centers and their flashiness that is “carefully devised to catch the attention,” 1; Malcolm Harris analyzes Calvino’s La giornata d’uno scrutatore / The Watcher (1963) as an allegory of workerism in “‘That Secret Fire’: Calvino and the Primacy of Labor,” Jacobin Magazine, August 29, 2011. Accessed September 23, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2011/08/that-secret-fire-italo-calvino-the-primacy-of-labor 46 Calvino, Smog, 117. 47 Calvino, Smog, 111.

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Fascism: realizing that the potential success of the PCI was itself polluted by the Soviet dictatorship, the Italian communists—and here, the intellectual protagonist—accept that change is impossible and resign themselves to their gloomy situation. The demands of the proletariat that were obscured by the smoggy clouds of the metropolis would only materialize in the growing social unrest that caused the revolts of 1968. Furthermore, this scene could be read as a reflection of the pressures faced by labor movements during the early years of the Cold War: US Secretary of State George Marshall, for instance, had cautioned that US funds to aid Italy in its postwar recovery “would immediately cease in the event of a Communist victory.”48 Between the figure of Cordà and the sighting of the smog cloud, Calvino acknowledged these visual representations of grayness in a response letter to the editor Mario Boselli, who reviewed La nuvola di smog in his journal Nuova Corrente in 1964. Calvino contemplated Boselli’s statement about the language used in the novelette and stated that the theme was not the grayness itself, but “one’s relationship to the ‘grayness’.”49 While Calvino does use the words “gray” and “squalor,” he supports them with visual examples: the dust that collects on every surface, the sooty paw prints from the landlady’s cat on his white work clothes, even the dirtiness on his hands just after washing them. This attention to the image strengthens throughout the piece, culminating with the sight of the titular cloud, which serves to give the protagonist a new task. Instead of searching to explain himself or to justify his preoccupation with the smog, now he searches for “a new image of the world that would give meaning to our grayness, which would compensate for all the beauty that we were losing, or would save it.”50 This search pushes him to write a perspective piece on pollution for The Purification that illustrates one’s relationship with the grayness: I wrote that, true, there were still people who lived outside the cloud of smog, and perhaps there would always be, people who could pass through the cloud and then stop right in its midst and then come out, without the tiniest puff of smoke or bit of soot touching their bodies, disturbing their different pace, their otherworldly beauty, but what mattered was everything that was inside that smog, not what lay outside of it: only by immersing oneself in the heart of the cloud, breathing the foggy air of 48 Cited in Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 159. 49 Calvino to Boselli. Wood, Calvino Letters, 271. 50 Calvino, Smog, 127.

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these mornings […] could one reach the bottom of the truth and perhaps be free of it.51

Calvino’s protagonist considers the individual’s responsibility to engage with the surrounding grayness. Those who maintain a kind of invulnerability to the smog, unpolluted by its sooty reach, are either those who remove themselves from politics entirely or those who have enough power to abstain from it, like Commendatore Cordà who controls the city’s pollution. Smog becomes both a representation of muddied political decisions and a symbol of abdication on the part of intellectuals of the 1950s, who see no way to cleanse themselves of it, but must find a way to engage. Like the narrators of Calvino and Bianciardi who were initially drawn to the city to advance their own goals, the intellectuals enter a figuratively “gray” period of renunciation and inauthenticity, while the industrial city projected images of prosperity. As Calvino’s narrator indicates, the only way towards authenticity is to return to those moments of grayness: to face the smog cloud, to seek to understand it, to extricate themselves from it by using their skills as writers. It is problematic, then, that the narrator decides to abandon this piece of writing, ensuring that it never lands on the desk of editor-in-chief Cordà. Bianciardi’s narrator arrives at a similar resolution that involves delving inside the heart of the grayness to explore its depths by sympathizing with his fellow city-goers. Considering that blowing up the tower to avenge the miners is a pipe dream, he instead turns to the solidarity of the working class to share the experience of grayness with them: “to get to know the city, to penetrate beneath its gloomy exterior and reach its ancient heart of which so many spoke, it was necessary—I understood now—to participate in this gray life with its gray inhabitants, to be like them, to suffer like them.”52 Bianciardi is projecting his own longing to identify with the working class onto his nameless narrator, who perhaps seeks among the workers the companionship and solidarity that is missing from his own life. However, Alberto Gessani confirms the obstacle to the Bianciardi-protagonist’s desire: “The workers suffer, take risks, die: how can an intellectual […] who limits 51 Calvino, Smog, 114. “Scrissi che sì, ancora c’era chi viveva fuori della nuvola di smog, e forse ci sarebbe sempre stato, che poteva attraversare la nuvola e soffermarcisi proprio nel nel mezzo e uscirne, senza che il minimo soffio di fumo o granello di carbone toccasse la sua persona, turbasse il suo ritmo diverso, la sua bellezza d’altro mondo, ma quel che importava era tutto ciò che entra dentro lo smog, non ciò che ne era fuori: solo immergendosi nel cuore della nuvola, respirando l’aria nebbiosa di questa mattina […] si poteva toccare il fondo della verità e forse liberarsi.” Calvino, La nuvola di smog, 53–54. 52 Bianciardi, It’s a Hard Life, 91.

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himself to writing articles and modernize library services […] identify with them?”53 Bianciardi’s narrator is an intellectual di provincia, but his experience cannot be the same as theirs. He does not suffer in the same way. For an intellectual like Bianciardi, grayness means renouncing his mission because he is too weary of his literary work and too preoccupied with his next source of income. It is the inability to execute his murderous plan that renders him “gray.” This abdication of moral conduct to maintain a miserable existence resonates with Marco Belpoliti’s statement that “grey is the color of the refusal to become emotionally involved.”54 These narrators intended to challenge their situations by exposing the perils of the city: the article envisioned by Bianciardi’s protagonist would avenge the deaths of the Ribolla minors who lost their lives due to corporate greed; Calvino’s narrator sought to reveal dangerous levels of industrial pollution via his job at The Purification. Both were discouraged by their editors, who played a role in maintaining the qualities of the industrial space that these narrators detested. As a result, they fall prey to the lull of the city to the conformity and resignation it forces onto its inhabitants. Bianciardi’s protagonist bemoans the decline of his own fervent spirit, stating “here they’ve reduced me to a state in which I can barely keep my head above water, if you fall here nobody helps you to your feet […] believe me, life in this city is hard.”55 Even if life is bitter and the smog clouds suppress individuality, do Bianciardi’s and Calvino’s narrators succeed in reaching the core of that nebulous mass to “be free of it”? Calvino’s novelette shows that while one cannot escape grayness, one can be less burdened. La nuvola di smog ends in the new suburb of Barca Bertulla, a refuge from the dust and grime of the city, where launderers wash and hang the city workers’ linens to dry in the fields. The skeptical and beaten-down narrator has followed the laundry carts to discover this neighborhood, where he finds temporary relief at the sight of the fields and the white linens. This short journey recalls many plots of Calvino’s Marcovaldo stories, where the intellectual is substituted for a working-class man who spends his miserable, city life searching for traces of the natural world. The most notable characteristic of this escapade away from the city is the change of color: freshly laundered clothing envelopes the countryside with white. Whiteness symbolizes purity and cleanliness, but 53 “Gli operai soffrono, rischiano, muoiono: come può identificarsi con loro un intellettuale? Come può affermare d’essere proletario chi si limita a scrivere articoli su quotidiani ed a rimodernare i servizi della biblioteca?” Gessani, L’intellettuale disintegrato, 28–29. 54 Belpoliti, “Calvino’s Colors,” 20. 55 Bianciardi, It’s a Hard Life, 153.

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this utopic image is a mirage—an unattainable solution to the narrator’s grayness. However, the color white leaves a lingering impression that alleviates his own grayness for a while. “It wasn’t much,” muses the narrator, “but for me, seeking only images to retain in my eyes, perhaps it was enough.”56 La vita agra does not end with a shift in reality for Bianciardi’s narrator either. Yet, he manages to find minimal relief in the comfort of his illicit relationship with his girlfriend, Anna, with whom he shares a rented room. Sleep ebbs its way into his consciousness and he surrenders to it: “Then sleep comes and for six hours, I’m not there anymore.”57 The independent clause of this final sentence refers to sleep and consciousness and the adverb of place “there” (ci, from the verb esserci, “to be there”) indicates the dreary world of disappointment and resignation. Only sleep temporarily pulls him from melancholy. The narrator’s evening routine—dining, going to the bar, observing a sad girl who walks her dog, and taking syrup to suppress his cough—suggests monotony and perhaps boredom, but Anna’s presence offers a welcome disruption. Still, sleep is the only respite from the omnipresent gray. From their own urban misadventures and reflections on the industrial city, the protagonists of Calvino and Bianciardi strive to understand their existence by yearning for something unreachable, like the fresh, laundry-lined fields of Barca Bertulla. The industrial city of the 1950s becomes a locus of grayness, a space in which individual voices fall onto deaf ears, ethics are blurred, and men forced to renounce their ideals to ensure their survival.

Bibliography Belpoliti, Marco, “Calvino’s Colors”. In Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility, edited by Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin, and Lene Waage Petersen, 12–25. Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2007. Bertani, Alvaro. Da Grosseto a Milano: la vita breve di Luciano Bianciardi. Milan: ExCogita Editore, 2007. Bianciardi, Luciano. “Nascita di uomini democratici,” Belfagor 7, no. 4 (July 1952): 466–471. Accessed October 3, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26068752?seq=1 Bianciardi, Luciano. Il lavoro culturale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Bianciardi, Luciano. “Punte di spillo,” Presenza 1, no. 1 (June-July 1958): 84–87. Bianciardi, Luciano. “Le strade,” Presenza 2, no. 4 (March 1959): 41–47. 56 Calvino, Smog, 137. 57 Bianciardi, It’s a Hard Life, 191.

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Bianciardi, Luciano. L’integrazione. Milan: Bompiani, 1960. Bianciardi, Luciano. “Vacanza alla foce,” Il Caffè 9 (September 1960): 45–47. Bianciardi, Luciano. “Il complotto,” Il Caffè 2 (April 1961): 44–48 Bianciardi, Luciano. La vita agra. Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Bianciardi, Luciano. It’s a Hard Life. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Viking Press, 1965. Bianciardi, Luciano and Carlo Cassola. I minatori della Maremma. Bari: Laterzi, 1956. Birren, Faber. Color Psychology and Color Therapy: A Factual Study of the Influence of Color on Human Life. Hauraki Publishing, 2016. Bolongaro, Eugenio. “The Figure of the Intellectual in Calvino’s Early Fiction.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino, edited by Franco Ricci, 23–30. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2013. Calvino, Italo. “Il mare dell’oggettività”, Il Menabò 2 (1960): 9–14. Calvino, Italo. “La sfida al labirinto”, Il Menabò 5 (1962): 85–99. Calvino, Italo. Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città. Milan: Mondadori, 1963. Calvino, Italo. La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina. Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Calvino, Italo. “Smog”. In The Watcher and Other Stories. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Calvino, Italo. Difficult Loves, Smog, A Plunge into Real Estate. William Weaver, trans. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1983. Calvino, Italo. “Intervista di Maria Corti.” In Italo Calvino Saggi, vol. 2, edited by Mario Barenghi, 2920-2929. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Calvino, Italo. “Lettera a un critico sulla ‘La nuvola di smog’.” In La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina VII-XVI. Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Calvino, Italo. Gli amori difficili. Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Calvino, Italo. Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985. Edited by Michael Wood. Translated by M.L. McLaughlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Corrias, Pino. Vita agra di un anarchico: Bianciardi a Milano. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1993. Day, Gail. “Looking the Negative in the Face: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School of Architecture.” In Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, 70-131. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Foot, John. Milan Since the Miracle. New York: Berg, 2001. Forgacs, David. “The Italian Communist Party and Culture.” Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley, 97–114. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Gambacorti, Irene. Luciano Bianciardi Bibliografia 1948–1998. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2001. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. New York: Penguin Books, 1990

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Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Harris, Malcolm. “‘That Secret Fire’: Italo Calvino and the Primacy of Labor.” Jacobin Magazine, August 29, 2011. Accessed September 23, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2011/08/that-secret-fire-italo-calvino-the-primacyof-labor Heller, Eva. Wie Farben Wirken: Farbpsychologie, Farbsymbolik, kreative Farbgestaltung. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989. Iandolo, Alessandro. “Unforgettable 1956? The PCI and the Crisis of Communism in Italy.” Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 259-282. Accessed May 14, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/43299431 Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. McCarthy, Mary. The Stones of Florence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Nigro, Roberto. “Workerism.” Krisis 2: Marx from the Margins (2018). Accessed September 19, 2020. http://www. https://krisis.eu/workerism/ O’Neill, Deirdre, and Mike Wayne. “On Intellectuals.” In Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century, 166–184. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pastoureau, Michel. Le petit livre des couleurs. Paris: Diffusion, Interforum, 2005. Pietralunga, Mark. “Luciano Bianciardi and the Blasphemy of Miracles.” In Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema. Edited by Norma Bouchard, 73–95. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Pizzolato, Nicola. “The IWW in Turin: ‘Militant History,’ Workers’ Struggle, and the Crisis of Fordism in 1970s Italy.” International Labor and Working-Class History, vol. 91: Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question (Spring 2017): 109–126. Accessed February 26, 2022. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547916000314 Righi, Andrea. “Factory Councils, Fordism, and Gramsci: A Worker’s Biopolitics and its Demise.” In Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri, 11–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Seger, Monica. “Economic Expansion, Environmental Awareness in the Early Works of Italo Calvino.” In Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, 24–49. University of Toronto Press, 2015. Spini, Valdo. “The New Left in Italy.” Journal of Contemporary History 7, no. 1/2 (Jan. – Apr. 1972): 51–71. Accessed September 21, 2020. .https://www.jstor.org/ stable/259757. Terrosi, Mario and Alberto Gessani, eds. L’intellettuale disintegrato: Luciano Bianciardi. Rome: Editrice Ianua, 1985.

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About the Author Samantha Gillen is a Lecturer at the University of Georgia where she teaches Italian language and culture. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. Her research is on twentieth-century culture and society, from Futurism to the postwar economic boom. Her dissertation, “Narrating the Industrial Space: Intellectuals and the Italian Economic boom,” explores literary representations of industrialization during the 1950s and 1960s through the texts of Calvino, Bianciardi, Volponi, and Ottieri. Samantha is a co-collaborator of the pedagogical collection PRIMA, which introduces Italian students to authentic, digital materials to diversify the classroom, and edits for the annual, online journal gender/ sexuality/italy.

Part III The City as a Space of Conflict: Landscapes of Late Capitalism

9. Il mondo è meglio non vederlo che vederlo: Naples as Urban Dystopia in Un paio di occhiali Brian Tholl

Abstract Grounded by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’ elaborations on the city of Naples, this essay proposes Naples as an urban dystopia in Anna Maria Ortese’s short story, “Un paio di occhiali” and Carlo Damasco’s eponymous short film adaptation (2001). By situating “Un paio di occhiali” firmly within the dystopian genre, I argue for a reading of the city of Naples as a theater of dystopia, a term I use to delineate how the theatrical proclivities of everyday life underscore the incongruities between Naples’ various social classes and the role that Naples’ residents play as both actors and spectators in society. Keywords: Anna Maria Ortese, Dystopia, Theater, Naples, Porosity

“Un paio di occhiali,” is the introductory short story of Ortese’s collection Il mare non bagna Napoli (literally “The Sea Does Not Bathe Naples”), published in 1953. The collection, as a whole, resists any sort of strict generical categorization, as the stories included range from fiction—as is the case with “Un paio di occhiali”—to reportage. In Il mare non bagna Napoli, then, we may say that Ortese adopts a “porous” (a term I borrow from Benjamin and Lacis and one that I will discuss below) approach to writing. The text on the pages is at once the site for imagination and creativity, as well as a documentary space through which Ortese elaborates on the horrors of post-war Naples.1 As Luca Clerici writes, “nel Mare non bagna Napoli 1 See Lucia Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes: Ortese’s Poetics of the Gaze in ‘Un paio di occhiali’ and Il mare non bagna Napoli,” in Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies, eds. Gian Maria Annovi and Flora Ghezzo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 36.

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch09

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narrazione e resoconto giornalistico si confondono continuamente” (“In Il mare non bagna Napoli narration and journalistic reportage continually blend into each other”).2 Thus, Ortese’s stories go beyond the imaginative, proposing an investigation into, as Lucia Re suggests, “the poorest and most marginal to the petty bourgeois and the middle class, the nobility,’ the clergy, and the intellectuals.”3 “Un paio di occhiali” takes place in a “quartiere di poveri” (“neighborhood of the poor”)4 in post-war Naples, where the young protagonist Eugenia lives with her mother and father—Peppino and Rosa Quaglia—as well as with her two younger siblings (Pasqualino and Teresella) and her aunt Nunzia. Eugenia’s two older sisters—Carmela and Luisella—have left home to join a convent. The family not only lives in a poor neighborhood, but specifically in a basement apartment on the fictional “vicolo della Cupa” (literally “dark or gloomy alley”), a name that underlines the grim marginality of the Quaglia family.5 The fragile and innocent child Eugenia, who possesses a “viso di piccola vecchia” (“a child with the face of an old lady”),6 suffers from extreme near-sightedness, and the story’s plot revolves around the young protagonist’s anticipation for a pair of glasses that will finally allow her to see with clarity the world around her, which has been wrapped in a fog: “Fino allora, era stata avvolta in una nebbia: la stanza dove viveva, il cortile sempre pieno di panni stesi, il vicolo traboccante di colori e di grida, tutto era coperto per lei da un velo sottile” (“Until then, she had been wrapped in a fog: the room where she lived, the courtyard always full of hanging laundry, the alley overflowing with colors and yelling, everything for her was covered by a thin veil”).7 Various episodes and narrative detours in Ortese’s short story underscore Eugenia’s myopia and inability to see and truly understand the conditions in which she and her family live, culminating in the joyous moment in which Eugenia finally receives her eyeglasses, only to subsequently devolve into a tragedy. When the young protagonist finally receives her glasses and tries them on in front of the small crowd of family and neighbors that have gathered in the courtyard to witness this seminal moment, she is repulsed and alienated 2 Luca Clerici, Apparizione e visione: Vita e opera di Anna Maria Ortese (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 250. 3 Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 36. 4 Anna Maria Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” in Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milan: Adelphi, 1994), 24. 5 As Re notes, “vicolo della Cupa” is based on Via Palasciano, where Ortese previously lived with her family in Naples. See Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 54. 6 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 19. 7 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 18–19.

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by the actuality of her wretched existence. Shocked and horrified by her newly acquired knowledge of the environment in which she lives, Eugenia suffers from a fit of dizziness and nausea, vomiting in the courtyard. Eugenia, trembling and leaning on her mother, cannot come to terms with the truth of her reality, asking her mother where she is. The story ends here, with Zi’ Nunzia lamenting the “Ottomila lire, vive vive!” (“Eight thousand lire, hard cash!”) she seemingly wasted on Eugenia’s glasses. Before delving into the texts themselves, I would like to consider Benjamin and Lacis’ reflections on the city of Naples, specifically their assertion that Naples is a “porous” city. The concept of “porosity” is a central component of their essay, and one which will allow us to more closely examine the theatricality of Ortese’s Naples. Benjamin and Lacis write: As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyard, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its ‘thus and not otherwise.’ This is how architecture, the most binding part of the communal rhythm, comes into being here: civilized, private, and ordered only in the great hotel and warehouse buildings on the quays; anarchical, embroiled, villagelike in the center, into which large networks of streets were hacked only forty years ago.8

Porosity—the resistance to the definitive in the city with regard to its constructed and lived spatial practices—shapes the conditions for an everlasting urban improvisation that, through the intermingling of a city’s disparate elements and spaces, dictates the interrelation between internal and external, public and private. The city becomes, then, a conglomerate of liminal spaces that oppose any sort of categorization—a singular, morphing zone that deconstructs and obscures our concept of boundaries. In defining the city through the liminality of its architecture and its abounding functions, we are furthermore encouraged to consider the ways in which space is simultaneously lived and staged. As Benjamin and Lacis write: Porosity results not only from the indolence of the Southern artisan, but also, above all, from the passion for improvisation, which demands that 8 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 165–166. Italics mine.

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space and opportunity be at any price preserved. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theaters. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes. Even the most wretched pauper is sovereign in the dim, dual awareness of participating, in all his destitution, in one of the pictures of Neapolitan street life that will never return, and of enjoying in all his poverty the leisure to follow the great panorama. What is enacted on the staircases is a high school of stage management.9

For Benjamin and Lacis, the distinction between life and acting is obfuscated and performance becomes an essential characteristic in the life of Naples’ inhabitants.10 What is pertinent in their description of the city and the utilization of space is that various spaces can be “at the same time stage and boxes,” thereby suggesting that those who occupy these same spaces can be both spectator and actor. In other words, one may play an active or a passive role in society and the city, a notion that underlines questions of agency and problematizes the idea of social mobility. The metaphor of the theatrum mundi—the world as a theater—enjoys a longstanding tradition in Western literature and philosophy, and it is the theatricality of Ortese and Damasco’s post-war Naples and its inhabitants that unveils the dystopian qualities of the city. Although “Un paio di occhiali” is a far cry from the futuristic dystopian societies pervading science fiction tales, Ortese’s poetic and visual writing nevertheless emphasizes the dehumanizing effects of an anti-collectivist social order that participates in the subjugation of one group over another. The suppression of Naples’ lower classes is most apparent through the story’s mise-en-scène and the ways in which its characters both interact with and are subject to the built environment around them. The inner courtyard of the Quaglia family’s apartment building and the balconies overlooking the space combine to create a theater of misery; the courtyard is the focal point of the narrative’s action, and, as Lucia Re observes, “Ortese organizes our vision of the spectacle of 9 Benjamin and Lacis, “Naples,” 166–167. 10 For more on the parallels between Benjamin’s writing and that of Ortese, see Andrea Baldi, “Anna Maria Ortese: Breaking the Spell of Naples?” in Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, eds. Pellegrino D”Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 283–300. Commenting on the porosity and theatricality of Benjamin’s Naples, Baldi writes that “Benjamin reveals a patronizing attitude in front of these interactions, which unfold in the open, in a constant state of flux. In these practices he sees primitive customs marked by ‘rich barbarism’: his is an aesthetic response to their picturesque qualities” (292).

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her characters’ world in and around this courtyard, as if it were a stage.”11 In this way, Ortese is not concerned with giving us a tour of the entirety of Naples, but rather an insight into that unseen part of the city and the lives of downtrodden who she places center stage. Indeed, commenting on Ortese’s writing, Flora Ghezzo notes, “the writer realistically explores with an incisive and penetrating gaze that which remains invisible or goes unnoticed in society and in history: namely, the human and urban degradation brought about by industrial and capitalistic modernity in post-war Italy.”12 On Ortese’s stage then, the young protagonist and her family are constrained to act out the roles prescribed to them by their hopeless lot and the continual exploitation at the hands of the middle and upper classes. The story opens up with Don Peppino Quaglia’s overjoyed reaction to the presence of the sun: “Ce sta ‘o sole […] ‘o sole!” (“The sun is out […] the sun!”).13 Ortese’s use of lighting in the otherwise dark and dank courtyard thus mimics a sort of spotlight, immediately drawing attention to the importance of this space and cementing its theatrical qualities. Don Peppino’s exclamation furthermore suggests that the sun rarely shines in the courtyard; like the purifying entity of the sea—so close, and yet so far away for Naples’ lower classes—so too, then, are the sun’s warmth and its nurturing properties largely non-existent for the residents of Santa Maria in Portico. The sun’s absence is presumably due to the position of the surrounding buildings, thus stressing the role of Naples’ built environment within the story’s dystopian framework. As Andrea Baldi notes in an essay on Ortese’s Naples, “The city—that is, the site of the economic and social hierarchy ruling over the proletarians’ life—constantly reminds them of their marginality and submission.”14 Indeed, the physical location of the Quaglia apartment—located in the basement of their building—corresponds to their socioeconomic position in Neapolitan society. Instead, Marchesa D’Avanzo—who owns the building—lives in the top-floor apartment, and Cavaliere Amodio and his wife, as well as the Greborio sisters, live on the second floor, both of whom employ servants. With its numerous flowerpots and splendid view of the sea, the Marchesa’s 11 Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 54. 12 Flora Ghezzo, “Introduction: Anna Maria Ortese and the Red-Footed Angel,” in Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies, eds. Gian Maria Annovi and Flora Ghezzo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 6. 13 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 15. 14 Andrea Baldi, “Ortese’s Naples: Urban Malaise Through a Visionary Gaze,” in Italian Women and the City, eds. Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 222.

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apartment is bolstered by nature and life, standing in stark contrast to the Quaglia’s dim and damp basement apartment and the courtyard, filled with dust, garbage, and fish bones—the dystopian counterpoint to the Marchesa’s small paradise. The theatrum mundi is an apt metaphor for the residents of Naples’ bassi in Ortese’s story, as their lives are governed by a “ferreo determinismo” (“iron determinism”),15 to borrow from Andrea Baldi, simply acting out the role written for them as in a script. As Elizabeth Burns writes in her study on theatricality and social life: The theatrical quality of life, taken for granted by nearly everyone, seems to be experienced most concretely by those who feel themselves on the margin of events either because they have adopted the role of spectator or because, though present, they have not yet been offered a part or have not learnt it sufficiently well to enable them to join the actors.16

It is the poor and the wretched Quaglia family of “Un paio di occhiali” who live this theatrical existence; they are spectators on the margins of the city who are restricted to observing the main “actors” of society: an exclusive group of which they can never be a part. The Quaglia family is indebted to Marchesa D’Avanzo, who owns the apartment building and exploits the family through the exorbitant amount she charges for rent (3,000 lire a month) and through the favors she asks of the family in exchange for little compensation. Marchesa D’Avanzo is depicted as one of the true actors of society, if not one of the writers of the theatrum mundi, as she permits herself to exercise agency in the lives of others, as well. It is because of her, for example, that Eugenia’s older sisters, Carmela and Luisella, were able to join the convent: “e così aveva salvato due anime dai pericoli di questo mondo” (“and so had saved two souls from the perils of this world”).17 The narrator’s affirmation that Marchesa D’Avanzo “saved two souls” underlines the extent to which Naples’ poor are unable to save themselves, doomed to carry on their wretched existence without hope or ambition. Just as each actor is assigned a fixed role, so, too, are the residents of Santa Maria in Portico rendered immobile in their own social classes, an idea that is 15 Andrea Baldi, “Infelicità senza desideria: Il mare non bagna Napoli di Anna Maria Ortese,” Italica 77, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 85. 16 Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theater and in Social Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 11. 17 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 20.

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exemplified in Marchesa D’Avanzo’s utterance “ognuno nel suo rango” (“each to his own place”).18 While the morose conditions of Ortese’s characters and their place on the lowest rung of the social ladder are evident to the reader from the beginning of “Un paio di occhiali,” the story’s protagonist has yet to learn her role in Neapolitan society. The story may be read, then, as a traditional coming-of-age tale, in that by the end of the narrative we have witnessed the protagonist’s transition from childhood to adulthood, albeit in a forced manner. If in the beginning of “Un paio di occhiali” Ortese underlines the innocence of the story’s young protagonist—Eugenia—by the end of the story all claims to innocence about the world surrounding her have been wiped away, as she is forced to come to terms with the ugliness of the conditions that plague the residents of her neighborhood (something the adults in the story understand very well). As Monica Farnetti succinctly and aptly puts it, “l’iniziazione è avvenuta, la formazione è al suo culmine, e la bambina infine ‘sa’” (“the initiation has taken place, the formation has reached its peak, and at last the child ‘knows’”).19 The narrative arc of Ortese’s coming-of-age short story, then, is one that dovetails well with the dystopian counter-narrative identified by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan in the introduction to Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination: “Since the text opens in media res within the nightmarish society, cognitive estrangement is at first forestalled by the immediacy and normality of the location […] However, a counter-narrative develops as the dystopian citizen moves from apparent contentment into an experience of alienation and resistance.”20 Although it is clear to the reader from the beginning of the story that Eugenia’s small world is, in reality, sordid and unpleasant, for the young protagonist nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Indeed, she is oblivious to the poverty and squalor in which she lives, her thoughts occupied only by the glasses that she will soon possess. After her visit to the optometrist, Eugenia thanks her aunt, who is paying for the pair of glasses. When her aunt responds that “il mondo è meglio non vederlo che vederlo” (“it’s better not to see the world than to see it”),21 Eugenia ignores her. While for the reader, the statement underlines the wretched existence of the family, for Eugenia there is nothing abnormal about the utterance, since “Zi’ Nunzia era 18 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 29. 19 Monica Farnetti, Anna Maria Ortese (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 142. 20 Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 5. 21 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 18.

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spesso così strana, piangeva e gridava per niente, diceva tante brutte parole” (“Aunt Nunzia was always so strange, she cried and yelled over nothing, she said many bad words”).22 Little by little, however, Eugenia’s happiness and anticipation devolve into estrangement, as she, even unconsciously, comes to terms with her place in the world. As Eugenia excitedly observes the vibrant and colorful world around her outside of the optometrist’s shop on via Roma (an upscale street in the city center, and one that stands in opposition to Eugenia’s neighborhood), she notices the optometrist’s assistant is staring at her: “Eugenia era diventata tutta rossa, non tanto per il rimprovero, quanto perché la signorina della cassa la guardava, mentre la zia le faceva quell’osservazione che denunziava la miseria della famiglia. Si tolse gli occhiali” (“Eugenia had turned all red, not so much for the scolding but because the young woman at the cash register was looking at her, while her aunt was commenting on the poverty of the family. She removed the glasses”).23 I must part with Re’s assertion that Ortese’s young protagonist is devoid of any class consciousness,24 as Eugenia’s gesture in this scene articulates a certain sense of knowing. It is only fitting, then, that the tragic climax of the narrative be a dystopian mirror reflecting the story’s inciting incident that takes place when Eugenia first tries on her glasses, thus reinforcing the distance between upper-class and lower-class Naples. At the end of “Un paio di occhiali,” when Eugenia finally receives her glasses, she is overcome by the reality of the environment and the poverty in which she lives: “Le gambe le tremavano, la girava la testa, e non provava più nessuna gioia” (“Her legs were trembling, her head was spinning, and she no longer felt any joy”).25 The description in this moment parallels the initial description of her reaction to seeing through her glasses at the optometrist’s shop on via Roma: “Eugenia si era alzata in piedi, con le gambe che le tremavano per l’emozione, e non aveva potuto reprimere un piccolo grido di gioia” (“Eugenia stood up, her legs trembling with excitement, and she couldn’t help but to let out a small cry of joy”).26 Eventually, Eugenia succumbs to these visceral perturbations, vomiting in the middle of the courtyard. She can only muster a few words, “Mammà, dove stiamo?” (“Mom, where are we?”),27 which articulate a shift “from ignorance to a knowledge of reality, and in so doing she enters the world of adults, devoid of hope and 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 18. Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 18. Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 65. Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 33. Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 16. Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 34.

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illusions.”28 But her words also point to the theatrical quality of the story; clearly seeing her own world for what it is for the first time prompts a sense of disorientation, both with regard to her own identity and in spatial terms. Eugenia has been thrust onto an unfamiliar stage where she must act out a new role, one that she is incapable of performing, unlike the adults in Ortese’s writing who, as Baldi reminds us, “have already learned at their own expense that there is no safeguard against the cruel aggression of existence.”29As the dystopian counternarrative continues, Eugenia’s alienation quickly shifts to resistance, albeit in a much different manner from the triumphant resistance of the hero’s narrative. Hers is, instead, a corporal rejection of the dirt and poverty to which society has confined her and the recognition that her “desire for a better way of being,”30 to borrow from Ruth Levitas, is an absolute impossibility. Thus, it is only after acquiring knowledge about the truth of the world around her, furnished by the corrective power of her lenses, that Eugenia is capable of implementing utopian thinking. However, Eugenia is only able to implement utopian thinking in the strictest sense of the term, one that reflects its linguistic origins; that is, she realizes that the other Naples is a utopia—a non-place—an inaccessible and unwelcoming space for the young protagonist and her family. Utopian thinking thus quickly devolves into dystopian thinking and the inevitable sense of dread and alienation that accompanies it. Eugenia’s dystopia thereby reflects Gary Saul Morson’s conclusion that “utopias invite their readers to contemplate a world in which they would at last be at home, [whereas] dystopias invite their readers to contemplate one in which they would have ‘no place’ at all.”31 The theatricality of life in Ortese’s dystopian Naples, and specifically the way in which the courtyard itself represents a stage, is perhaps more evident in Carlo Damasco’s short film adaptation of “Un paio di occhiali” and the way in which the protagonist Annarella (named Eugenia in Ortese’s story) experiences her world. Indeed, the dystopian nature of Naples is exacerbated by mostly limiting the space of the narrative to one place—the courtyard. Following a sort of prologue at the beginning of the film—in which the viewer observes a preview of Annarella’s world as seen through her eyes—we are transported to the courtyard. After Don Peppino’s wife, Rosa, leaves to retrieve Annarella’s glasses, a fragment of sunlight creeps 28 Vilma De Gasperin, Loss and the Other in the Visionary Work of Anna Maria Ortese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143. 29 Baldi, “Ortese’s Naples,” 222. 30 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 7. 31 Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 141–142.

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into the courtyard, gradually increasing in size as if to mimic the parting curtains of a theater, signifying the true beginning of the narrative. Here, too, the sun represents the theater’s spotlight, and Don Peppino exclaims “‘O sole, ‘o sole, è uscito ‘o sole!” (“The sun, the sun, the sun has come out!”) as he moves toward the light, occupying the small space where the sun is shining within the otherwise dark and dirty courtyard. When the neighbor Don Luigi hears Don Peppino, he informs him that the sun has been out all day, to which Don Peppino replies that if he does not see it, he does not believe it. His words underline the marginality of the residents of the neighborhood, who literally live in the shadows of the city. As Don Luigi leaves the courtyard, remarking to Don Peppino that “this place is full of shit,” he climbs numerous sets of stairs before disappearing into the sunlight, further cementing the courtyard’s status as a sort of cave-like hellscape. Damasco’s adaptation thus shares commonalities with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (itself a theatrical and dystopian representation of life), included in his most famous dialogue, the Republic, in that both deal with questions of seeing and reality. For both Plato and Damasco, to see is to possess a certain type of knowledge. Like the bound prisoners in Plato’s cave, the young protagonist of “Un paio di occhiali” only sees fragments—shadows—of reality. Her understanding of the world is mediated by the “velo sottile” that characterizes her blurred and distorted vision, which prevents her from witnessing the poverty in which she and her family live. As Don Peppino steps out of the spotlight, Annarella takes his place, becoming the focal point of the courtyard stage and the narrative of the short film. The camera eye then adopts Annarella’s viewpoint, transitioning from the objective, black and white perspective into Annarella’s subjective perspective, demarcated by a blue filter. As she observes a neighbor shaking out a rug above her, the dust falling to the ground transforms into glimmering stars. For Cristina Della Colletta, “the young girl’s disability opens up an alternate way of seeing and being in the world, one that activates a utopian vision uncharacteristic of the pragmatic, hardened gaze of the adults,”32 although I argue that Annarella’s perspective signifies a dystopian vision, precisely because—at this point in the film—she is not aware of the 32 Cristina Della Colletta, “What Did Annarella See? “Il bisogno di conoscere con ogni medium” and the Hermeneutics of the Gaze in Carlo Damasco’s ‘Un paio di occhiali’,” California Italian Studies 8, no. 2 (2018): 9–10. Italics mine. For more on utopianism in Ortese’s writing, see Della Coletta, “Scrittura come utopia: La lente scura di Anna Maria Ortese,” Italica 76, no. 3 (1999): 371–388, as well as Della Colletta, “Biographies of Displacement and the Utopian Imagination: Anna Maria Ortese, Hanna Arendt, and the Artist as ‘Conscious Pariah’,” Italica 94, no. 4 (2014): 714–734.

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conditions in which she is living and thus does not exhibit any evidence of “social dreaming,” or what Lyman Tower Sargent describes as “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live.”33 In other words, to quote Crane Brinton, “[t]he utopian thinker starts with the proposition, by no means limited to the utopian thinker, that things (no more exact word is useful here) are bad; next, things must become better.”34 The experience of the young protagonist of “Un paio di occhiali” is undergirded, instead, by a dystopian mode of thinking; whereas utopian thinking requires a sense of conscious social awareness, dystopian thinking is an unconscious mode of being in the world that tricks the protagonist into thinking that the environment in which she lives is a welcoming paradise. If in Il mare non bagna Napoli Ortese’s poetic writing “emphasizes the auditory dimension in implicit opposition to the visual,”35 as Re suggests, which is “more intimately revealing than visual perception,”36 in Damasco’s adaptation the auditory dimension is connected to the visual dimension. At times, it is as if Annarella—hardly able to see—is equally unable to hear what is going on around her. When we are first introduced to the young protagonist, she stumbles out of her basement apartment, running into Zi’ Nunzia and knocking her over as she enters the courtyard. Zi’ Nunzia yells and curses the child, who seems to be oblivious to anything that her aunt is saying. Instead, as the camera eye adopts Annarella’s perspective, the aural space of the film is filled only with the sound of a beating heart—presumably Annarella’s own heart—thus connecting vision with hearing and demonstrating Annarella’s inability to correctly sense the world around her. The beating heart furthermore reveals how Annarella, who literally cannot see the city in which she lives, closes off the external world and withdraws into herself, only to be brought back into the miserable courtyard when her aunt subsequently beats her. Damasco relies less on conventional cinematic strategies such as panning or tracking, privileging, instead, fixed shots. In doing so, the director reproduces a theatrical atmosphere, positioning us as spectators in front of a stage. Moreover, Damasco accentuates the theatrical qualities of Neapolitan 33 Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 3. 34 Quoted in Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism,” 4. 35 Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 56. 36 Re, “Clouds in Front of My Eyes,” 44.

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life, specifically through the positioning and the roles of the other actors in the short. The Naples that emerges in Damasco’s adaptation is reflective of Benjamin and Lacis’ Naples, in that the entire courtyard and the apartment building become a stage where actor and spectator intermingle. Indeed, the Quaglia family’s neighbors present in the courtyard and the apartment building initially function as the theater’s chorus, a typical component of Greek dramas, commenting on the action they witness on the courtyard stage. However, the chorus’ function is not solely limited to commentary here, but rather adopts Aristotle’s affirmation in the Poetics that “[t]he Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action.”37 Damasco’s chorus, then, not only underscores important elements and themes in the story, but also functions to underline how theatricality pervades even the most minute aspects of Neapolitan architecture and its role in shaping, as well as blurring, the boundaries between internal and external. The short-film adaptation reduces the spaces of Ortese’s narrative to two: the dark and gloomy courtyard stage and, diametrically opposed to this, the bright and pristine optometrist’s office where Annarella first tries on her pair of glasses. In limiting the spaces of the film to these two, Damasco accentuates the contrasts between upper and lower Naples and encourages the viewer to adopt a binary mode of thinking about the city and its inhabitants. As Damasco himself states, “tra le tante possibili Location, ne ho individuate due: un Esterno (il cortile in cui vive la bambina) e un Interno (il negozio di occhiali), dove però il Fuori rappresentato dal cortile è in effetti un mondo ‘Chiuso,’ claustrofobico” (“among the many possible locations, I chose two: one external (the courtyard where the young girl lives) and one internal (the glasses shop), where, however, the outside space represented by the courtyard is, in effect, a ‘closed’ world, claustrophobic”).38 Indeed, Damasco’s theater of dystopia is, in reality, a closed theater—the space of the optometrist’s office only exists, at this point, in the memory of Annarella, highlighting the unattainability of that other world and reinforcing the restricted mobility (in both social and spatial terms) of the Quaglia family. Damasco’s camerawork offers no respite from the claustrophobic world of the courtyard, utilizing, as Cristina Della Colletta notes, “[h]igh angle shots [that] capture the characters from above, making them seem trapped and powerless.”39 Even when Damasco makes use of low-angle shots, he 37 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S.H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 92. 38 Carlo Damasco, quoted in Cristina Della Colletta, “What Did Annarella See?” 7. 39 Della Colletta, “What did Annarella See?” 7.

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mostly remains strictly within the conf ines of the courtyard and the surrounding buildings, thus denying the audience any glimpse of the sky or the outside world, save for one shot at the beginning and a few dizzying shots from Annarella’s perspective as she finally tries on her glasses in the courtyard. The only respite we are offered from the oppressive confines of the infernal courtyard comes in the form of a flashback to when Annarella and her Aunt visit the optometrist’s off ice, although here we still f ind ourselves in a closed space. The discrepancy between the optometrist and his assistant and Annarella and her family is immediately visible: Annarella and Zi’ Nunzia are dressed in black, reflecting the gloomy environment of Naples’ bassi, while the optometrist and his assistant are dressed in pristine, white lab coats. The Quaglia family’s desperate economic situation is reinforced through the presence of Gilberto Mazzi’s song “Mille lire al mese” (“A Thousand Lire a Month”), which plays in the background throughout the entire visit. As Annarella sits in front of a chin rest waiting to try on lenses, we hear the opening lines of Mazzi’s song: “Che disperazione, che delusione dover campar, sempre in disdetta, sempre in bolletta!” (“What desperation, what disappointment to have to scrape by, always unfortunate, always penniless!”) The music plays softly in the background, and the words are easy to miss if one is not listening carefully, but they call attention to the oppressive poverty under which the Quaglia family is forced to live. When the optometrist puts the lenses on Annarella, the music’s volume increases just as the f irst verse ends with the words “di gemme d’oro, ti coprirò” (“I’ll cover you in gold gems”), recalling Eugenia’s insistence that her glasses are “tutto dorato […] lucenti lucenti!” (“all gold […] shiny and bright!”)40 We would do well to recall that, for Ortese’s young protagonist, wearing glasses is evidence of wealth and sophistication. When Eugenia meets another young boy on the street, he tells her that “Le vecchie portano gli occhiali” (“Old women wear glasses”), to which Eugenia responds “Anche le signore, le ho viste a via Roma” (“Also proper ladies, I saw them on via Roma”). 41 For Damasco’s Annarella, the glasses carry a similar meaning, as they furnish her a glimpse into the world of Naples’ bourgeoisie—a world that she mistakes for her own. As Mazzi’s song continues and Annarella looks around the shop, she f ixes her gaze on a number of items in concordance with the lyrics of the song, appropriating for herself, too, 40 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 26. 41 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 26.

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the comforts and luxuries of bourgeois society. For example, we see a shot of the office’s lavish crystal chandelier while Mazzi sings “comprerei fra tante cose le più belle che vuoi tu!” (“I would buy, among many things, the most beautiful things you want!”). Instead, as we hear “sarei certo di trovare tutta la felicità!” (“I would be certain to find all the happiness!”). Annarella gazes longingly at the optometrist’s young, smiling assistant. The camera also lingers on the assistant as Mazzi sings “una mogliettina giovane e carina, tale e quale come te” (“a young and beautiful wife, just like you”), words that situate the assistant in diametric opposition to the protagonist’s family and the protagonist herself. Indeed, in Ortese’s short story Luigino comments on Eugenia’s dishevelled appearance—“tutta spettinata” (“what a mess”)—to which she gives the excuse, “Io non ci vedo buono” (“I can’t see well”), 42 thus suggesting that the eyeglasses will not only bring her clear vision, but the opportunity to render herself beautiful, as well. As in Ortese’s short story, the scene in the optometrist’s shop on via Roma highlights the distance between Naples’ lower classes and its middle and upper classes, as the optometrist and his assistant are visually situated above Annarella and her family. Della Colletta notes that “[a] camera that favors low angle shots, defining a verticality of subjection rather than control, also marks Annarella’s subject position, in an apt rendition of the socio-biological perspective of the protagonist.”43 In medium shots, too, we are made to witness the subjugation of Annarella and her family to Naples’ more wealthy inhabitants. The final glimpse of the optometrist’s shop on via Roma positions the optometrist and his assistant on left side of the screen, towering over Annarella and her aunt in a shot that demonstrates that even Annarella’s luxurious material acquisition will never permit her to reach the grandeur of that other, utopian Naples. “Un paio di occhiali” is thus an illustration of opposites: light and darkness, upper class and lower class, childhood and adulthood. Annarella’s world—confined strictly to the courtyard—is the world of play and improvisation. The muddy pit in the center of the courtyard becomes a makeshift canvas—without paint and a brush, Annarella’s relies on her own saliva and index finger to create designs in an attempt to stave off boredom. Unlike in Ortese’s short story, where Eugenia travels unaccompanied outside of the courtyard to run errands, in the short film she only travels outside of the courtyard once—when she visits the optometrist’s office—and is 42 Ortese, “Un paio di occhiali,” 26. 43 Della Colletta, “What did Annarella See?” 6–7.

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accompanied by her aunt. Thus, the world outside the courtyard represents the adult world, where those who have not yet come of age may not venture without the accompaniment of another adult. Indeed, the outside world is a place that is not to be trusted; as Don Peppino remarks to his wife, Rosa, as she leaves to retrieve Annarella’s glasses, “Where are you going? Outside there are bad people!” When Annarella finally receives her glasses, her family and neighbors gather around her, applauding her as the spectators do in a theatrical production. 44 The subsequent shots alternate between Annarella’s terrified expression, dizzying shots of the towering and threatening architecture of the apartment building, and Annarella’s family and neighbors, who continue to applaud, getting closer and closer to Annarella before she—as if suffering from a bout of stage fright brought on by the new role she is forced to perform now that she sees the world around her—vomits next to and into the muddy pit in which she was previously playing. Whereas Ortese’s short story ends here, Damasco’s adaptation takes the narrative a step further in a sort of epilogue that mirrors the opening, blurry shots of the short f ilm. These shots, however, now depict the world through Annarella’s clear and corrected vision. Observing the true nature of her reality and her surroundings, she is again subject to a state of alienation, which subsequently leads her to disgard her newly acquired glasses in the muddy puddle in the courtyard. Annarella’s action is—f irst and foremost—a signal that her childhood has ended. It is, at the same time, an elaboration on the porosity of the stage in the Neapolitan theatrum mundi. If at the beginning of the short film the puddle in the courtyard was a site of entertainment and play for the young protagonist, at the end it is a dirty pit in which to cast the false hope brought about by the acquisition of her glasses. Both Ortese and Damasco’s texts ask us to consider how the theatrical qualities of the city function as socio-political commentaries on the inaccessibility and the impossibility of that “other” Naples as it pertains to the city’s lower classes—portrayed as the face of destitution and extreme inequality. If Ortese wished to paint the lingering suffering of Naples in the destructive aftermath of World War II, Damasco reveals that the dystopian narrative need not be tied to the dehumanizing effects of a violent conflict or a catastrophic event. Indeed, dystopia is often simply a mirror held up to a society that divides its participants into center and margin—the haves and have nots—actors and spectators. 44 Della Colletta, “What did Annarella See?” 11.

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Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics, translated by S.H. Butcher. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories.” In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, 1–12. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Baldi, Andrea. “Infelicità senza desideri: “Il mare non bagna Napoli’ di Anna Maria Ortese”. Italica 77, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 81–104. Baldi, Andrea. “Ortese’s Naples: Urban Malaise Through a Visionary Gaze.” In Italian Women and the City, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, 215–238. London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Baldi, Andrea. “Anna Maria Ortese: Breaking the Spell of Naples?” In Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, edited by Pellegrino D’Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 283–300. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Benjamin, Walter and Asja Lacis. “Naples.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Peter Demetz, 163–173. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Burns, Elizabeth. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theater and in Social Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Clerici, Luca. Apparizione e visione: Vita e opera di Anna Maria Ortese. Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Damasco, Carlo, dir. Un paio di occhiali. Thule, 2001. De Gasperin, Vilma. Loss and the Other in the Visionary Work of Anna Maria Ortese. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Della Colletta, Cristina “Scrittura come utopia: La lente scura di Anna Maria Ortese.” Italica 76 , no. 3 (1999): 371–388. Della Colletta, Cristina. “Biographies of Displacement and the Utopian Imagination: Anna Maria Ortese, Hanna Arendt, and the Artist as ‘Conscious Pariah.’” Italica 94, no. 4 (2014): 714–734. Della Colletta, Cristina “What Did Annarella See? ‘Il bisogno di conoscere con ogni medium’ and the Hermeneutics of the Gaze in Carlo Damasco’s “Un paio di occhiali”.” California Italian Studies 8, no. 2 (2018): 1–13. Farnetti, Monica. Anna Maria Ortese. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Ghezzo, Flora. “Introduction: Anna Maria Ortese and the Red-Footed Angel.” In Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies, edited by Gian Maria Annovi and Flora Ghezzo, 3–31. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Mazzi, Gilberto. “Mille lire al mese.” 1938. Parlophon. Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

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Ortese, Anna Maria. “Un paio di occhiali.” In Il mare non bagna Napoli, 15–34. Milan: Adelphi, 1994. Re, Lucia. “Clouds in Front of My Eyes: Ortese’s Poetics of the Gaze in ‘Un paio di occhiali’ and Il mare non bagna Napoli.” In Anna Maria Ortese: Celestial Geographies, edited by Gian Maria Annovi and Flora Ghezzo, 35–77. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Sargent, Lyman T. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37. Wood, Sharon. Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994. London: Athlone, 1995.

About the Author Brian Tholl is an independent scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Italian from Rutgers University, where he focused on the confino di polizia in fascist Italy and the politics of exile.

10. Narratives of a ‘City Under Siege’: Bodies and Discourses of the 1977 Movement in Bologna Danila Cannamela and Achille Castaldo

Abstract: Bologna is one of the most iconic locations of the 1977 Movement. In 1977, the city became a creative laboratory where a number of collective agents emerged: students, artists, feminists, and (proto-) LGBT activists. “Red Bologna” was also an arena of violence and tragic events. This essay examines a wide range of documents that have mediated—and “re-mediated”—the Movement, including narrative fiction, documentaries, comics, and memoirs. Ultimately, our goal is to discuss these materials as testimonies of an experimental form of sociality that has been generally assimilated with 1970s terrorism or dismissed as a generational rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Keywords: Bologna, 1977 Movement, Mario Mieli, Andrea Pazienza, Pier Vittorio Tondelli

In her memoir Antologaia (2007), human rights and LGBTQIA+ activist Porpora Marcasciano returns to her time in Bologna in the late 1970s, when she visited the city with a few friends for a brief period: A Bologna parte di noi fu ospitata da Valerie e parte da Cocò, la compagna di Marco Sanna, una femminista che lavorava e abitava in un consultorio dell’Aied [Associazione italiana per l’educazione demografica], situato in un grazioso villino di via Massarenti. Valerie invece abitava in una casa occupata in via Clavature, conosciuta come la “Traumfabrik”, la stessa in cui abitavano Andrea Pazienza e molti dell’entourage della Bologna alternativa. Bologna la rossa, la gaia, l’anticonformista; Bologna

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch10

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l’alternativa, la punk, la libertina; per alcuni Sodoma, per altri Stalingrado, per noi tutte un’oasi in cui rilassarsi e delirare.1

In this passage, Marcasciano gathers together the people, places, and dynamics that made Bologna the epicenter of a political laboratory, the so-called 1977 Movement, which experimented with practices of sociality, community, and creativity foreign to traditional notions of power. The emergence of this leftist extra-parliamentary movement is directly connected to socioeconomic changes that occurred in Italy after the fast economic growth of the 1950s–1960s and the subsequent civil unrest of 1968: many workers’ groups detached themselves from trade unions, while young people, “in both the manual and intellectual sectors of the labor market were struggling with unemployment and felt that the overall organization of labor, politics, and society was deeply unfulfilling.” As historian Paul Ginsborg continues: “it is possible to discern two strands in the movement of 1977, even if they often intertwined. The one was ‘spontaneous’ and ‘creative,’ sympathetic to feminist discourse, ironic and irreverent, seeking to create alternative structures rather than challenge the powers-that-be. […] The other was ‘autonomist’ and militarist. It aimed to build on the culture of violence […] and to organize the ‘new social subjects’ for a battle against the state.”2 Although Bologna hosted both tendencies of the 1977 Movement, the “red city” is usually regarded as the Italian center of the creative strand.3 This was also the place where the repression of new forms of life and sociality generated unprecedented violence. During this brief yet transformative 1 Porpora Marcasciano, Antologaia: Vivere sognando e non sognare di vivere: i miei anni Settanta (Rome: Alegre, 2016), 303. Ebook. “In Bologna, some of us were hosted by Valerie and some by Marco Sanna’s partner, Cocò, a feminist who worked and lived in a women’s clinic of Aied [Italian Association for Demographic Education], located in a pretty little villa in via Massarenti. Whereas Valerie lived in an occupied house in via Clavature, known as ‘Traumfabrik,’ the same in which Andrea Pazienza and many other people of the entourage of the alternative Bologna lived. Bologna, the red, the gay, the nonconformist; Bologna the alternative, the punk, the libertine; Sodom, for some, Stalingrad, for others; and for all of us an oasis to relax and rave.” Unless otherwise noted, translations are our own. We would like to clarify that Andrea Pazienza never lived permanently in the Traumfabrik. 2 Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990). On 1977 and Autonomia in Italy, see Sergio Bianchi and Lanfranco Caminiti, eds. Gli Autonomi: Le storie, le lotte, le teorie, volumes I-VI (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2007–2020), Bianchi and Caminiti, eds. Settantasette: La rivoluzione che viene (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2004), Marcello Tarì, Il ghiaccio era sottile: per una storia dell’Autonomia (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2012), and Luca Falciola, Il movimento del 1977 in Italia (Rome: Carocci, 2015). 3 What Ginsborg calls two intertwined strands, should rather be considered as two “souls” in one single body, and both took part in the complex phenomenon represented by the “Autonomia.”

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experience, young people, artists, feminists, (proto-)LGBT activists, and leftist collectives crowded the city—they occupied squares, streets, the university, and countless buildings. Yet, in March 1977, the growing tensions eventually escalated into violent clashes between protesters and police: barricades, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, gun shots, and the tanks sent by Francesco Cossiga, the Minister of Interior, to tame the riots turned Bologna into a city “under siege” that continues to evoke traumatic memories. In this space, an alternative community displayed its unfulfilled possibilities and inner contradictions. This essay explores 1977 Bologna through places and narratives that have mediated, and “re-mediated,” the Movement. Ultimately, our goal is to discuss these documents as testimonies of the rich complexity of an experimental form of sociality that is still too hastily assimilated with 1970s terrorism or dismissed as a generational rebellion for the sake of rebellion.

Café Goliardo: “Let’s Make, Women, The Revolution!” “Il Goliardo,” in via Zamboni, was a key place for Bolognese feminism both materially and symbolically. In the 1970s, women activists occupied this former café and repurposed this space into a vibrant political and cultural center until 14 March 1977, when the police shut it down in the aftermath of the violent repression of the women’s march (8 March)—to which we shall return. This space of self-discovery and revolution is revived in the memories of fourteen women featured in Teresa Rossano’s documentary Io sono femminista! (I Am a Feminist! 2019). 4 These testimonies bring back to life a peculiar red Bologna, in which the bright nuances of political passion, creativity, anger, and blood blended together, unified in the chant: “Noi siamo stufe di fare bambini, lavare i piatti, stirare i pannolini […] Per la nostra liberazione / facciamo donne la rivoluzione!” (“We are tired of making babies, washing dishes, ironing diapers […] For our liberation / let’s make, women, the revolution!”).5 In the stories that Rossano’s film interweaves, Café Goliardo serves as the hub of a multifaceted feminist geography of collectives—e.g. “Lotta femminista” 4 [The film was self-produced in collaboration with the archive “Centro di documentazione Francesco Lorusso” and the cultural center “Vag61.” Noi siamo femministe! can be freely accessed at the link: https://www.openddb.it/film/io-sono-femminista/ 5 These lyrics are from Antonietta Laterza’s song, “Noi siamo stufe” (“We are Fed Up”), included in the 1975 album Alle sorelle ritrovate.

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(“Feminist fight”) in via Nosadella, the workerist “Gruppo per il salario e il lavoro domestico” (“Group for wages and household work”) in via del Borgo, the “Collettivo comunista femminista” (“Communist Feminist Collective”) in via Garavaglia, or the feminist groups of via Avesella and via Massarenti. In the mid-1970s, women collectives were meeting almost everywhere across Bologna: not only in their headquarters, but also at the university, in squares, private houses, and pubs. In the documentary, singer Antonietta Laterza recalls that two key gathering places were her own house, which became the official seat of the Bolognese feminist collective, and “La Tregenda,” a separatist pub in via San Vitale 13, for “donne peccatrici e streghe” (“sinful women and witches”), a pub in which men were allowed only once a week. The emergence of so many feminist groups and spaces in Bologna, which generally shared a leftist agenda, is indicative of the end of the so-called doppia militanza (“dual militancy”), namely, women’s parallel participation in the Movement and in feminist collectives. In the 1970s, women activists came to the bitter realization that post-1968 leftist groups and even the Movement itself had a deeply patriarchal structure; thus, while women were still supporting the core ideas that were fueling those political laboratories, they did not feel represented by the dominant male-chauvinist practices. As Sandra Schiassi clarifies in her interview, the issue was not so much that groups like “Potere operaio” (“Workers’ Power”), of which she was originally a member, only had male leaders, but rather that such leadership was deemed to be all-encompassing and universal.6 From their privileged perspective, male leaders were unable to see how sexualized bodies and gender differences played an integral role in the political struggle. “Potere operaio,” she forcefully concludes, was the neuter per antonomasia. Other testimonies illustrate Schiassi’s claim: as Manuela Ghesini (former member of “Lotta Continua”) recalls, women activists were in charge of the cyclostyle. This is why, they were nicknamed gli angeli del ciclostile (“the angels of cyclostyle”); but, as Piera Stefanini (former member of “Potere operaio”) stresses, when those women asked to use the machine once a week to make copies of feminist zines, the male leaders refused. Thus, Ghesini summarizes, the angels rebelled against a sexist politics, disguised as a form of collectivism, and joined women-only groups. Bolognese feminism is particularly interesting for its capacity to combine the personal and the political, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, by 6 “Potere Operaio” was a radical left-wing group, which dissolved in 1973; many of its members continued to be active in extra-parliamentary political groups and were involved in the 1977 Movement.

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exploring a rich variety of practices that never involved leaving or denying the public arena.7 As historian Anna Rossi-Doria maintains, the two main features of Italian feminism are its political commitment and its emphasis on difference rather than on equality.8 Yet, these two intertwined aspects generated a wide range of local experiences and approaches that, at times, were even at odds—spanning radical-libertarian and leftist groups, gruppi di autocoscienza (“consciousness raising groups”), and women who fought for civil rights, collectives that rejected the (male-centric) debate on abortion and groups of self-help that performed abortions. Discussing this variety of feminist perspectives, historian Beatrice Pisa has emphasized that antiinstitutional feminism eventually became dominant in Italy, especially as a theoretical discourse of sexual difference—we might think of the separatist practices of the women’s Bookstore in Milan and the community of Diotima, in Verona.9 However, Pisa contends, it is rather overlooked that many grassroots feminist groups worked to reconcile identity and emancipation, liberation and rights, and engaged in an open, albeit conflict-laden, dialogue with political institutions as well as with the Movement. This attempt at reconciliation is indeed an aspect that characterizes Bolognese feminism in the 1970s, or rather the many facets of the feminisms that livened up the city and that Rossano’s documentary grasps in their rich diversity and shared struggles. In Io sono femminista!, the core vision of Bolognese feminism particularly emerges, in comparison to other women’s collectives, as a laboratory of a non-hierarchical culture that found in the circle of the consciousness-raising groups its new unifying yet open shape. This approach turned embodied experiences into a territory that was simultaneously one of self-exploration and political liberation. However, liberation did not mean becoming “equal” within the patriarchal order, but rather—precisely like the Movement— crafting alternative discourses and spaces to what was conceived of as the only possible path to emancipation. Creating feminist culture is one of the paths that women’s collectives successfully explored through their creative sisterhood: they gathered to discuss literature and films, published feminist 7 On this point, see Raffaella Lamberti, “Introduzione,” in Il movimento delle donne in EmiliaRomagna: Alcune vicende tra storia e memoria (1970–1980), ed. Centro di documentazione delle donne (Bologna: Edizioni analisi, 1990), 11–21; see also Anna Rossi-Doria, Dare forma al silenzio: Scritti di storia politica delle donne (Rome: Viella, 2017). 8 Anna Rossi-Doria, “Ipotesi per una storia che verrà,” in Il femminismo degli anni settanta, eds. Teresa Bertilotti e Anna Scattigno (Rome: Viella, 2005), 5. 9 See Beatrice Pisa, Il Movimento di liberazione della donna nel femminismo italiano: la politica, i vissuti, le esperienze (1970–1983) (Rome: Aracne, 2017), 18.

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zines—Schiassi humorously mentions her contribution to Siamo istericheee (We are Hysteriiiiic!)—and made music (Laterza’s record Alle sorelle ritrovate [To the Rediscovered Sisters, 1975] is an example). Feminist groups also fostered an alternative culture of female bodies meant to empower women. They held workshops about health care and contraception, offered self-help groups, and practiced abortions for free or for a voluntary-donation using the Karman method (a less invasive and relatively safe method). Changing the (male-centered) approach to culture started to shift the way women perceived themselves and their community. However, if Goliardo marks a key site for the feminist reinvention of bodies and places in Bologna, it also signifies the end of this rich experience. More broadly, it signifies the gap between institutional parties and militant groups that the Movement brought forward. On 8 March 1977, an assembly of the Bolognese Feminist Movement took place in the occupied café and soon after a group of about 500 women marched towards Porta Saragozza. The goal was to occupy an empty building and repurpose it into a center for women. The group was stopped and attacked by the police, which violently repressed the demonstration. Many women reported being hit. That same night, a few of the women tried to read an announcement during a public event organized in Piazza Maggiore by UDI (the leftist organization Unione Donne Italiane (“Italian Women Union”, affiliated with the PCI/Italian Communist Party), but the PCI’s security service did not let them onstage and, eventually, the police intervened to clear the square. Only a few days later, on 11 March 1977, in very similar circumstances, student Francesco Lorusso was killed by the police, and, on 12 March, “Radio Alice,” the free radio symbol of the Movement and its creative message, was shut down. It was the beginning of a harsh repression involving both bodies and discourses, a repression practiced through physical and ideological violence.

Piazza VIII Agosto: “To Fight for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity” In a 1977 letter, Mario Mieli, main activist and theorist of the Italian Gay Liberation Front, wrote: “Cosa non era Bologna fra culi provocanti come non mai, donne che in capo a dieci minuti riuscivano a fare evacuare tutti i maschi dalla piazza, indiani coloratissimi, plotoni pitrentottisti, e bolognesi “normali” che circolavano stupiti nella loro città trasformata in sorpresa!”10 This private 10 Mario Mieli, “Care checcacce del Lambda,” in La gaia critica, eds. Paola Mieli and Massimo Prearo (Venice: Marsilio, 2019), 179: “You should have seen Bologna among faggots, provocative

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text, later published as an article in the journal Lambda, “Care checcacce del Lambda” (“Dear Bad and Ugly Fairies of Lambda”), retells Mieli’s experience in Bologna during three days of demonstration against the repression of the Movement (23–25 September). On that occasion, the city became a venue for burgeoning gay groups to finally gather as a broader movement, hold a series of assemblies at the university, and gain visibility.11 Visibility within the Movement was a problematic point for gay collectives. Mieli, with his usual bitter humor, touches on this sexist taboo, remarking that on 24 September, during the final parade, “i culi [erano] relegati in fondo, al posto che normalmente spetta loro […] Io non ho sfilato con i gay, visto che come sai detesto le retroguardie e sono troppo speedy per adattarmi al passo delle lumache.”12 Conversely, Mieli joined the avant-gardes and when the demonstration reached its destination, Piazza VIII Agosto, he took center stage. Dressed in a colorful yellow skirt, he sabotaged playwright Dario Fo’s speech, which would have concluded the proceedings. Bleating and showing his naked butt to the audience, Mieli unveiled the irony of a revolutionary site that was still obedient to traditional patriarchal rules and had even let the archbishop officiate a religious ceremony in Piazza Maggiore undisturbed. “Combattere per la pace è come scopare per la castità” (“To fight for peace is like fucking for chastity”), Mieli yelled at the crowd to further stress the nonsense that ruled over a site where traditional political figures and heteronormative expectations from the past still remained unchallenged.13 Booed and insulted, he eventually left the stage. Despite the inconsistencies that Mieli repeatedly addressed, the 1977 Movement was the “golden age” of the emerging gay movement. As Gianni Rossi Barilli maintains, Italian homosexuals brought their diverse perspective to the shared resistance against the established order.14 A number of autonomist gay collectives sprung up across the peninsula in the mid to late 1970s. As for Bologna, one of the most active gay groups was the “Collettivo Frocialista” (“Faggetist Collective”), which mockingly took its name from as never before, women who in a matter of ten minutes could force all males out of the square, very colorful ‘metropolitan Indians,’ platoons with p-38 pistols, and ‘normal’ Bolognese people in disbelief, who were going around their own city turned into a surprise!” 11 See Gianni Rossi Barilli, Il movimento gay in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999); in particular the chapter “Cento collettivi fioriranno (1977–1980),” 95–98. 12 Mieli, La gaia critica, 179: “[T]he faggots [were] relegated to the bottom, to the place that is normally their own […] I did not march with the gays, because, as you know, I hate the rearguards and I am too veloce to adapt to the pace of snails.” 13 See Mieli, La gaia critica, 180. 14 See Rossi Barilli, Il movimento gay in Italia, 90.

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the seat of Partito Socialista (the Socialist Party) where the meetings were held. In an issue of Lambda, “Collettivo Frocialista” summarizes its core mission as an unattainable fairy tale: “ci sono dei froci che, da ultimi romantici, credono ancora a quelle belle favole di papà Marx e, in questa ottica, lottano autonomamente dalle linee politiche dei partiti.”15 For the beautiful fable of communism to inform a free community, its message had to be dislodged from the grip of parties and institutional models. This unresolved point undermined the cohesion of 1970s gay groups, causing a rift between the eccentric anti-institutionalism of Mieli and Angelo Pezzana’s adhesion to “Partito Radicale” (Radical Party).16 The most disturbing aspect of the tension between the Movement and institutionalized politics is perhaps its enduring legacy. In the 1980s, masculine-looking gay leaders fully embraced the “fight for peace” that Mieli’s slogan foresaw. In other words, they “fought” for a process of peaceful normalization that implied the exclusion of those “bad and ugly fairies” who in 1977 had initiated the discourse of liberation by exhibiting their feminized bodies in the streets.17 This is a point that Porpora Marcasciano, president of the Italian MIT (Movimento Identità Trans/Trans Identity Movement), has stressed, recalling that 1977 was not solely an “annus memorabilis [of] celebration, frenzy, revolt, and rebellion” but a unique time of unity across non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities. As she continues, in the Movement, “coesistevano e si confondevano gay e trans; [e] il machismo palestrato non si era ancora sostituito agli ibridi o agli efebi.”18 Despite its sexist backlashes, the Movement briefly succeeded in experimenting with 15 Rossi Barilli, Il movimento gay in Italia, 93: “[T]here are still faggots who, like the last Romantic, still believe in those beautiful fables of daddy Marx and, from this perspective, fight autonomously from the political directions of parties.” 16 On the tension between Mieli and Pezzana, see Barilli, Il movimento gay in Italia, 98; and the section “Biografia critica” in Mieli, La gaia critica, 337–338. The latter includes a letter, published in the journal Fuori, in 1976, in which Mieli declares that “il Parlamento è la rappresentanza di quel gran carnevale o spettacolo mortifero che è la società borghese” (“Parliament is the representation of the big carnival or deadly performance of bourgeois society”); therefore, he did not want to see homosexuals in parliament, but rather involved in the lively spaces where people were making the revolution: “le fabbriche, i fabbriconi occupati, gli ambienti femministi […] e i supermercati, i tram, i cinema, i cessi pubblici, che da ambienti del nostro ghetto possono diventare ambienti in cui si fa l’amore” (“factories, occupied manufacturing plants, feminist spaces, and supermarkets, trams, cinemas, public restrooms, places that can turn from ghettos into spaces to make love”). 17 On this topic see Laurella Arietti et al, eds. Elementi di critica trans (Rome: Manifesto Libri, 2010), 44. 18 Porpora Marcasciano, “La vie anal demole le kapital! Dalla liberazione alle ‘cose serie’,” in We Will Survive!: Lesbiche, gay e trans in Italia, eds. Paolo Pedote and Nicoletta Poidimani (Milan:

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spaces, like 1977 Bologna, where people started to rethink and fight against the borders of gender and sexuality, roleplaying and crossdressing, creativity and politics.

Via Clavature 20: “It’s a Traumfabrik Production” Musician Giampiero Huber begins a 2003 interview about his memories of 1970s Bologna by sharing the “foundation story” of the Traumfabrik, the factory of dreams. He recounts: “Nel ’76 occupai un appartamento in via Clavature, insieme a Filippo Scozzari e Dadi Mariotti. Questa situazione diventò col passare del tempo una sorta di ‘factory,’ anche se questa definizione può sembrare leggermente impropria, considerando che non fu mai prodotto nulla che avesse una vera circolazione. Filippo decise di chiamare questo spazio ‘Traumfabrik’.”19 This peculiar factory, where young artists challenged the rules of capitalist productivity, later became the “trademark” of Andrea Pazienza’s comics—“It’s a Traumfabrik production,” we read in many episodes of Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal, his first graphic novel. In via Clavature 20, first-class cartoonists, including Pazienza, Scozzari, Stefano Tamburini, and Tanino Liberatore, found creative inspiration, while underground bands like Gaznevada were experimenting with punk rock. Yet, for a bitter ironic destiny, after devolving into a place where “un ‘casino’ di persone […] si facevano delle ‘pere’,”20 in the early 1990s, the occupied apartment was repurposed into the private residence of TV celebrity Alba Parietti and her partner Stefano Bonaga, a professor at the University of Bologna.21 From collective to private apartment, from underground subculture to niche for the cultural establishment, from chaotic experimentation to normalization, the Traumfabrik testifies to the many transitions that Bologna underwent in roughly a decade. Mimesis, 2007), 129: “[G]ays and trans coexisted and muddled; [and] the muscular machismo had not yet replaced hybrids and ephebes.” 19 Giampiero Huber, “Giampiero Huber. Gaznevada/Stupid Set,” in Non disperdetevi (1977–1982): San Francisco, New York, Bologna le zone libere del mondo, eds. Oderso Rubini and Andrea Tinti (Rome: Arcana, 2003), 168: “In 1976, I occupied an apartment in via Clavature, with Filippo Scozzari and Dadi Mariotti. After a while, this situation became a sort of ‘factory,’ even though this definition might seem slightly improper, considering that nothing that actually had circulation was ever produced there. Filippo decided to name this space ‘Traumfabrik’.” 20 Huber, Non disperdetevi, 168: “[T]ons of people […] were shooting up.” 21 Giorgio Lavagna, “Vita da Paz,” in Andrea Pazienza. Zanardi, vol. 1, ed. Francesco Meo (Rome: Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso, 2006), 8.

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The troubled factory at via Clavature is a visual motif that Pazienza frequently reused in his work, spanning throughout Pentothal (1977–1981), the stories of Zanardi published in the 1980s, and his last graphic novel, Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo (1984–1986). Retracing the underlying presence of the Traumfabrik in Pazienza’s comics offers a through-line to retell the story of 1977 Bologna as an idiosyncratic macro-factory of dreams and traumas. As Pazienza states in the epilogue of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo, a long chapter of his life as a cartoonist began with Pentothal, “del quale Pompeo è, forse, l’alter ego invecchiato” (“of whom Pompeo is, perhaps, the aged alter ego”). Indeed, in less than ten years, the picaresque adventures of Pentothal, set in the midst of the 1977 Movement, devolved into the last memories of Pompeo, a self-destructive heroin-addict artist. In 1977, the “Traumfabrik” that fueled the “production” of the first episode of Pentothal was a creative laboratory in which a desire to belong and a desire to take pride in being an outsider began to clash. In this graphic novel, Pazienza elaborates on the Bolognese Movement from a disturbing perspective, which we could call intra-estranged. An out-of-town student, Andrea-Pentothal, walks around a city under siege—streets overwhelmed with protesters, violent attacks, occupied universities, student assemblies filled with empty slogans, piles of out-and-out “bullshit”—and cannot help but feel tagliato fuori (“estranged”) from the events occurring around him, as he affirms in the last frame of the first episode. In the final drawing, which Pazienza added after the street clashes of March 1977, the protagonist emerges as an internal observer who filters the “truth”—“Pentothal” is the name of a truth serum administered during interrogations—with irony, sarcasm, and an uncomfortable sense of estrangement. Frozen in a sort of foreseeing past, Pentothal is still charged with the power to unveil Bologna as the “nucleo caotico di uno sfascio a venire presto o magari già in corso. Un intrico di tensioni e ingiustizie, di abusi e di attese e di vendette.”22 It is through this uncomfortable mix of participation and skepticism, inclusion and marginalization, commitment and mockery, that Pazienza succeeds in portraying the complexity of a Bolognese “macro-Traumfabrik” in which dreams and traumas intermingle. In the 1980s, Pazienza returned to elaborating on the physical and symbolic space of the Traumfabrik in the stories of Zanardi, a bully and rapist teenager, who brutally represents the years of the reflux. Punk singer Helena 22 Oreste del Buono, “PazPenthothal,” in Andrea Pazienza. Zanardi, 11: “[C]haotic nucleus of a destruction coming soon or perhaps already going on. A tangle of tensions and injustice, of abuses, expectations, and revenge.”

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Velena recalls that, in Zanardi, the cartoonist referenced a “No Heroin” graffiti that she had made on the door of the Traumfabrik—the encircled A of anarchy, with a broken syringe crossed off, signed RAF Punk.23 At the time, Velena was conveying a message of resistance against heavy drugs, which had become the main tool used by institutional power to numb the Movement. What is striking, though, is that, by entering the world of Zanardi, Velena’s symbol of resistance was being sarcastically deprived of its original meaning and turned into dull entertainment. In Zanardi, the reference to the Traumfabrik becomes a veiled allusion to the traumatic loss of a creative and critical “production,” concealed under an abundance of consumption. However, the trauma underlying the stories of Zanardi fully emerges in Pompeo. Here, what may still evoke Velena’s anarchist graffiti is the tragic realism of a crossed-out cigarette on the wall of Pompeo’s bedroom in the first episode, or a skull pierced with a syringe in one of the last stories.24 In the late 1980s, 1977 Bologna and its factory of creativity are nothing but a mirage for an older Pazienza, who was shown to be “un fesso qualsiasi” (“a dumbass like any other”) and moved “in campagna come un cretino” (“to the countryside like an idiot”), in an attempt to recover from heroin addiction.25 Compared to Andrea’s sudden awakening and panoramic walk across Bologna, which opens Pentothal, Pompeo’s opening—with the protagonist rushing outside to move his car in an awkward attempt to avoid a ticket—gives a realistic representation of a city that has physically and emotionally shrunk, a city that Pazienza actually sees from a distance. Pompeo’s apartment, the café outside his building, and a few nearby streets, are what is left of a 1970s collective world in motion that, in less than a decade, has been reduced to the few square feet of a private space. Suicide is the only escape Pompeo can envision to cope with this private and collective trauma. In the late 1980s, the Traumfabrik had definitively turned its unruled creativity into the self-destructive productivity of a fornace (“furnace”) where life-changing energies were burnt and abandoned;26 it had shifted into a factory that no longer produced anything but its own unfulfilled dreams. 23 Private interview, on 27 March, 2020. See also the article “Dal punk rock al gender la vita è terreno di battaglia,” LaRepubblica.it, 17 November 2017. 24 See in particular the last few episodes of this graphic novel, in which the motif of death becomes dominant. 25 See the appendix “Postilla dell’autore,” in Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo. 26 On the image of the furnace see the interview with Pino Cacucci collected in Non disperdetevi, 47.

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A Meeting at DAMS: Eco, Tondelli, and the Two Sides of Intoxication “E poi c’è il DAMS, che è una scuola di drogati!”27 This is the main caption in one of the panels of Penthotal’s first episode, in which Andrea and his friend Roberto visit the DAMS, the department of artistic disciplines of the University of Bologna. Needless to say, in the hectic first months of 1977 the building was occupied, and Pazienza sketches it in an oneiric fashion, as a cave where one advances by stepping over bodies of passed-out young people, with the walls completely covered in absurdist political slogans—for example, “Qualcuno entrerà nel cesso e vi troverà Walter Benjamin impiccato” (“Somebody will enter the toilet and find Walter Benjamin hanged”), or “Giaime Pintor chi legge.”28 In this chaos, the only poignant reference to academic order turns out to be a poster amusingly portraying Umberto Eco, at the time a Professor of Semiotics, who would become, three years later, a literary celebrity with the publication of his f irst novel Il nome della rosa in the spring of 1980. A second reference to Eco is presented in a scratch of paper abandoned on the floor among the bodies (well visible in the foreground), which reads “si è spenta ogni eco” (“all echoes faded out”), with the word “eco” marked in bold. Undoubtedly, Eco was a symbol of academic power at the time, yet he was well respected (or at least liked, even despite political enmity) by the creative fringe of the 1977 Movement. After all, did he not—literally—invent the DAMS, the propulsive center of the creative fraction of the Bolognese students? In 1988, eleven years after the publication of Pazienza’s comics, writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli, who like the cartoonist was a student at the DAMS in 1977, published a long story in the newspaper Corriere della sera. In this piece, he recalled a personal meeting with Eco, which took place in December 1977 in the professor’s office.29 At the time, Tondelli was still an unknown student, 27 Pazienza, Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (Rome: Fandango, 2010), 17: “And then there’s the DAMS, which is a school for drug addicts!” 28 “If you are reading this you are Giaime Pintor.” Giaime Pintor (1919–1943) was an Italian Germanist, translator, and antifascist who died trying to reach German-occupied Rome on a secret mission on behalf of the British army. It is not clear why he was mocked by students, as portrayed by Pazienza: this could be due to his having been a liberal (and not a communist) antifascist. It seems more likely, though, that Pazienza’s memory was here mistaken, and that the slogan was rather mocking Giaime’s brother, Luigi (1925–2003), at the time a journalist and a former member of the communist party, whose current political activism in the Manifesto group might have provoked some negative reactions in the youth of the Bolognese movement. 29 The off ice was located on via Guerrazzi, in a different building than the one drawn by Pazienza, located in via Zamboni.

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but three years later he would publish his first book, the collection of short stories Altri libertini, which established him as one of the most prominent authors of his generation. The occasion of the meeting was the discussion of the paper Tondelli had written for Eco’s Semiotics class. Discussing a paper with a professor was not the standard for such crowded classes as Eco’s Semiotics, where students would usually discuss papers with a teaching assistant. Yet, because Tondelli plainly went off-topic, writing a bold (or rather reckless) comparative essay about “wine culture” across the ages instead of the semiotic analysis of the sememe “wine,” the TA, unwilling to take responsibility for a failure, directed him to the professor. Thus, Tondelli recounts the way Eco amusingly destroyed his paper, yet expressed sympathy for the topic and the student’s enthusiasm (he passed, with 29/30, a very good grade, but Eco made him promise he would never work on semiotics anymore). The story of the eccentric paper exemplifies the mix of creativity and subversion typical of the Movement, where the idea became universally accepted that any form of meaningful creation could only spring from a struggle against dominant forces. However, the core of Tondelli’s narration is neither his “derailed” paper nor the meeting itself: rather, it is the clarification of why the “wine culture” topic had been so important to him, insomuch that it forced him to spend months of research to write a paper that clearly would bring him trouble. What haunted him about the topic was the polarization between a positive and a negative side of wine. Wine was the symbol of the enjoyment of life, communal existence, and the joyous rebellion against the sadness of the institutional “powers” of human societies across the ages; yet it was also a symbol of self-destruction, exclusion, and the loss of all human community. Wasn’t this double-edged reality precisely one of the central problems of the political Movement of the 1970s? This movement had mobilized the “energies of intoxication,”30 as Walter Benjamin had called them, following the surrealists, in support of the rebellion against capitalist society. Yet those energies had eventually revealed a dark, deadly side: the spread of heroin, which was about to extract an impressive death toll among young people in the subsequent years, making the ’77 youth based in Bologna one of its main targets. Tondelli represents this ambiguity in the polarity between wine and alcohol, where wine occupies the positive side of joy and community, while “alcohol” functions as the dark shadow of self-destruction and marginalization. As we have seen, a similar antinomy traverses the 30 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part I (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 215.

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whole body of Pazienza’s work, with the intoxication being the sparkling origin of creativity, but also the abyss that will eventually swallow it all (the route from Pentothal to Pompeo works as an exemplification of such an itinerary, which directly impacted the author’s life: he died of an overdose in 1988, the same year of Tondelli’s story). Yet while Pazienza puts this contradictory nature of intoxication before us, suspending any judgment, thus laying bare one of the main contradictions of the rebellious youth of the 1970s, Tondelli attempts to draw a clear separation between the two poles: C’è la cultura del vino […] e c’è quella che ricerca in esso solamente la componente alcolica, ponendosi così come risvolto negativo della precedente. […] La ricerca dell’alcol come valore assoluto—e non come apprezzamento di una fra le diverse componenti delle bevande alcoliche—porta […] unicamente verso l’annullamento dell’individuo, verso la sua separazione della società.31

The analysis goes so far as to contend that political powers, in some historical times, might favor the cult of alcohol over wine in order to “regnare anche sui territori della fantasia e dell’immaginazione.”32 Here, the current political outlook of Tondelli’s discourse becomes clear, as the suspicion was widespread that Italian intelligence allowed the diffusion of heroin at the end of the 1970s in order to undermine the political youth Movement.33 Yet, although Tondelli’s interpretation with reference to the 1970s may appear plausible, we cannot avoid seeing in it the shadow of one of the author’s main obsessions, which also reveals an essential difference between his first book, Altri libertini—which has always been regarded as a “youthful” work expressing the political intensity of 1977 (despite the author’s refusal of this definition)—and his later career, where he strived to deny any identification with the generation of the Movement, persistently posing as a “serious,” plainly bourgeois mature writer. Indeed, Altri libertini recounts in both amusing and brutal ways (no differently than Pentothal) the communal 31 Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Un racconto sul vino, in Opere: Romanzi, teatro, racconti, ed. Fulvio Panzeri (Milan: Bompiani, 2000) 782–783: “There is the culture of wine […] and there is the one which seeks only the alcoholic component in it, placing itself as a negative aspect of the aforementioned one. […] The search for alcohol as an absolute value, and not as an appreciation of one of the different components of alcoholic beverages, only leads […] to the cancellation of the individual, to his separation from society.” 32 Tondelli, Un racconto sul vino, 783: “[A]lso reign over the territories of fantasy and imagination.” 33 See for example Giancarlo De Cataldo’s recent novel L’agente del caos (Einaudi 2018).

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existence of the Movement, where the vital and the deadly side of intoxication were never actually separated (can they ever be?). But the magnitude of the issue here goes far beyond the problem of intoxication in itself (drugs and alcohol as they were commonly used by youth in the Movement). Indeed, the wine-alcohol antinomy works here as the foreshadowing of deeper contradictions the Movement had to face in those years: light and heavy drugs, struggles within the workplace and refusal of work, “self-reductions” and bank robberies, diffuse, rebellious violence, and terrorist action (to name only the most evident ones). What we need to ask, then, is whether the second element—despite its plainly sinister appearance, and, in the case of terrorist action, it’s obviously inacceptable nature—is not an essential component of the communitarian experience the Movement of 1977 had been. In other words, could the commonplace understating of the negative, its exclusion as a “corruption,” be the reason why it is so difficult for us, today, to grasp the nature of such existence-in-common? This is perhaps the difficulty of understanding community in itself, if we follow the reflection Jean-Luc Nancy developed, drawing on Georges Bataille.34 Community does not mean, according to this line of thought, the simple “sharing” of experiences, as human beings can “do things together” without establishing the slightest existential contact among themselves. Communal existence rather means being called to linger alongside others, when “extreme experiences” are able to undo one’s own ideological, protective discourse, so that one is abandoned to witness the others as if deprived of subjectivity, reduced to an impersonal instance of observation (this is one of the possible definitions of empathy). Is authentic community then possible only when a traumatic event destroys our ideological defenses? Yes, we would be tempted to say, but one should not forget that the abyss of everydayness can be in itself, in its brutal simplicity, the most traumatic of all experiences, and the one able to produce the ecstatic contemplation to which communal existence is exposed. This is the “extasy” on which Bataille had built his idea of community, the same extasy that allows Nancy to distinguish the “singular” being from the ideological illusion of individuality. In other words, the separation between a positive and a negative side of the antinomy governing the communal experience of the Movement, or, in Tondelli’s terms, between the conviviality of wine and the intoxication of alcohol, can be read as a rhetorical dispositive that dominant discourses produced in order to render unreadable the nature of a political Movement that managed, in a brief span of years, to challenge the classist society and 34 Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1986).

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its organization of everydayness. Revolution had not only been attempted, at the time, as some might see it today (the negative side of the antinomy must always embody this failure, let us not forget): it had actually succeeded,35 although in a temporary and precarious, even parasitic, way. Yet such a revolution had a tragic component: the extreme experience, the one that is able to annihilate the ideological discourse of subjectivity, thus producing the singular, ecstatic position of community, emerged in reaction to the forces of state repression that finally succeeded in crushing the Movement. This raises many questions, among which the most pressing is the following: what would have become of the Movement without such brutal pressure from the state?

Some Discos or Parlors in the 1980s: The Loss of Community The “pressure,” or the condition of being “under siege,” is part of the systemic dynamics of the elements at play in Bologna at the end of the 1970s. This is why the concept of the “desiring machine” (from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus), one of the most popular and widely used concepts by the creative side of the Movement at the end of the 1970s, might be understood as an allusion to the machinic connection of rebellion with its own annihilation (self-pursued or brutally imposed by the state), of communal existence with traumatic experiences, of dreams with traumas. Tondelli’s and Eco’s meeting in 1977 had some follow-ups, described in the same story: Solo qualche anno più tardi, a distanza di pochi mesi—io a gennaio, il professore in primavera—esordimmo con il nostro primo romanzo. […] Ancora oggi, rivedendo di tanto in tanto quel suo studente, in una discoteca o in un salotto, [il professore] non appena lo scorge gli si rivolge dicendogli: “Prima saluta il professore!” Allora quello che dieci anni fa era lo studente lo saluta, ridacchiando imbarazzato. “Ho fatto bene a non incoraggiarti nella ricerca accademica”, gli dice il professore.36

35 In October 1977 the Journal La Rivoluzione (linked to the Movement), titled its last issue “La rivoluzione è finita abbiamo vinto!” (“The Revolution is Over: We Won!”). 36 Tondelli, Un racconto sul vino, 778: “Only a few years later, a few months one after the other—mine in January, the professor’s in the spring—our first novels were published. Even today, seeing his student from time to time, in a disco or in a parlor, [the professor] as soon as he sees him, turns to him saying: ‘Greet the professor first!’ Then the one who ten years earlier was

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Their conversation goes on briefly, then Tondelli concludes: “E, a quel punto, io e lo studente non sappiamo più cosa dire.”37 Tondelli’s abrupt remark clears space for a few final considerations. First, it is worth noting the silence of embarrassment. Second, Tondelli draws a sort of split between himself as a writer in the 1980s and the “student” from the 1970s, who suddenly awakens in relation to Eco the “professor.” Overall, the feeling of embarrassment also emerges from the location of the conversation: a discotheque in the 1980s, or a salotto (“parlor”), are places radically different from the squares, streets, and occupied buildings where the political engagement and creativity of Bologna bursted in the 1970s. Finally, this uncomfortable sense of emptiness, which is widely associated with the political “reflux” of the 1980s in Italian collective memory, also seems to allude to a loss that both writers were probably experiencing in those years: the sparkling creativity that made their debut novels so meaningful and beloved, and that they were never able to find again (despite continuing to produce successful novels). Perhaps what was impossible to get back, for them and probably for an entire generation, was the “communal experience” that inscribed itself in their first works, and whose creative possibility sparked from those places of militant collective effort: places in which bodies and discourses simultaneously experienced the possibility of change and the trauma of repression.

Bibliography Arietti, Laurella et al. Elementi di critica trans. Rome: Manifestolibri, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” in Selected Writings, vol 2, part I, 207–221. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Biblioteca Salaborsa. Cronologia di Bologna dal 1796 a oggi. Accessed May 8, 2020. https://w w w.bibliotecasalaborsa.it/cronologia/bologna/1977/ corteo_di_femministe_caricato_dalla_polizia Bianchi, Sergio and Caminiti, Lanfranco eds. Settantasette: La rivoluzione che viene. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2004. Bianchi, Sergio and Caminiti, Lanfranco eds. Gli Autonomi: Le storie, le lotte, le teorie, volumes I-VI. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2007–20. the student greets him, giggling in embarrassment. ‘I did well not to encourage you in academic research,’ says the professor.” 37 Tondelli, Un racconto sul vino, 778: “And, at that point, the student and I no longer know what to say.”

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Cacucci, Pino. “Pino Cacucci.” In Non disperdetevi (1977–1982): San Francisco, New York, Bologna le zone libere del mondo, edited by Oderso Rubini and Andrea Tinti, 46–49. Rome: Arcana, 2003. “Dal punk rock al gender la vita è terreno di battaglia.” Repubblica, 17 November 2017. Accessed May 8, 2020. https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2017/11/19/dal-punk-rock-al-gender-la-vita-e-terreno-di-battagliaBologna13. html Del Buono, Oreste. “PazPenthothal.” In Andrea Pazienza. Zanardi, vol. 1, edited by Francesco Meo, 10–13. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso, 2006. Falciola, Luca. Il movimento del 1977 in Italia. Rome: Carocci, 2015. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin, 1990. Huber, Giampiero. “Giampiero Huber. Gaznevada/Stupid Set.” In Non disperdetevi (1977–1982): San Francisco, New York, Bologna le zone libere del mondo, edited by Oderso Rubini and Andrea Tinti, 168–174. Rome: Arcana, 2003. Lamberti, Raffaella. “Introduzione.” In Il movimento delle donne in Emilia-Romagna: Alcune vicende tra storia e memoria (1970–1980), edited by Centro di documentazione delle donne, 11–21. Bologna: Edizioni analisi, 1990. Laterza, Antonietta. “Noi siamo stufe.” Alle sorelle ritrovate. Cramps, 1975. Lavagna, Giorgio. “Vita da Paz.” In Andrea Pazienza. Zanardi, vol. 1, edited by Francesco Meo, 8–9. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso, 2006. Marcasciano, Porpora “La vie anal demole le kapital! Dalla liberazione alle ‘cose serie’.” In We will survive!: Lesbiche, gay e trans in Italia, edited by Paolo Pedote and Nicoletta Poidimani, 127–131. Milan: Mimesis, 2007. Marcasciano, Porpora. Antologaia: Vivere sognando e non sognare di vivere: i miei anni Settanta. Rome: Alegre, 2016. Ebook. Mieli, Mario. La gaia critica. Politica e liberazione sessuale negli anni settanta. Scritti (1972 –1983), edited by Paola Mieli and Massimo Prearo. Venice: Marsilio, 2019. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La communauté désœuvrée. Paris: C. Bourgois, 1986. Pazienza, Andrea. Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo. Montepulciano: Editori del Grifo, 1987. Pazienza, Andrea. Zanardi. Edizione critica, edited by Felice Cappa. Turin: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 1998. Pazienza, Andrea. Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal. Rome: Fandango, 2010. Pisa, Beatrice. Il Movimento liberazione della donna nel femminismo italiano: la politica, i vissuti, le esperienze (1970–1983). Rome: Aracne, 2017. Rossano, Teresa, dir. Io sono femminista! Bologna: Centro di documentazione Francesco Lorusso, Vag61, 2019. Rossi-Doria, Anna. Dare forma al silenzio: Scritti di storia politica delle donne. Rome: Viella, 2017.

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Rossi-Doria, Anna. “Ipotesi per una storia che verrà.” In Il femminismo degli anni settanta, edited by Teresa Bertilotti e Anna Scattigno, 1–23. Rome: Viella, 2005. Rossi Barilli, Gianni. Il movimento gay in Italia. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999. Tarì, Marcello. Il ghiaccio era sottile: per una storia dell’Autonomia. Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2012. Tondelli, Pier Vittorio. “Un racconto sul vino.” in Opere: Romanzi, teatro, racconti, edited by Fluvio Panzeri, 769–790. Milan: Bompiani, 2000.

About the Authors Danila Cannamela is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Colby College. She is the author of The Quiet Avant-Garde: Crepuscular Poetry and the Twilight of Modern Humanism (2019). Her current project is an edited collection, Italian Trans Geographies, which retraces narratives of trans people within the Italian peninsula and along diasporic routes. Achille Castaldo (PhD Duke University 2019) is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. His work investigates the relationships between violence, ideology, and political struggles in literature and cinema. His articles have recently appeared in Italian Studies, Italica, and Studies in French Cinema.

11. Exploring Urban Space: Terzani’s In Asia (1965–1997) Ellen Patat

Abstract This paper explores urban space as described in In Asia (1998), a collection of articles written between 1965 and 1997 by Tiziano Terzani, a famous Italian traveler and journalist. As a “reader” of the city, the author provides a heterogeneous visual picture of a large geographical area and portrays countries undergoing accelerated development or bound to past traditions. In these textual factual narrations, Terzani deconstructs urban space into fragments that convey his critical stance against modernity while actively studying history in the making. In his mainly horizontal reading, he reports on the continuous juxtapositions that characterize urban space and the humanity that ultimately shapes it. Keywords: Terzani, Asia, urban space, travel writing, Italian journalism

Introduction Italian literature abounds in the most disparate formal literary works that focus on the Asian continent, from the near Middle East to the stratovolcanic archipelago of Japan and crossing the whole Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia. Asia has always been a source of interest, wonder, attraction, and discovery for Italian travelers who extensively reported from or wrote about it.1 In the twentieth century, an age characterized by overwhelming 1 Arbasino, Bettinelli, Cassola, Crisafulli, Manganelli, Magni, Maraini, Moravia, Parise, Pasolini, Pellegatta, Puosi, Rampini, Romio, Rumiz, Ruggeri, Vitulli, just to cite a few authors ranging from the greatest names of literature to emerging writers. It must be also noted that the Italian public was able to appreciate all artistic forms from this vast geographic area in a fruitful cultural exchange thanks to the effort of expert translators.

Scapolo, A. and A. Porcarelli (eds.), Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463724661_ch11

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globalization, speediness, and the frenetic development of tourism, some leitmotivs emerged from travel accounts: on the one hand, progressive westernization, the dilution of traditions, and the struggle to preserve local cultures, on the other hand, the fear of homologation and standardization and a sense of disenchantment.2 In 1998, expert war correspondent, curious and meticulous observer and avid traveler Tiziano Terzani (1938–2004),3 who was popular for his extensive knowledge of twentieth-century East Asia,4 decided to collect the accounts of his travels and his first-hand experience across Asia in a single volume entitled In Asia.5 The author left a historical, geographical, political, social and cultural testimony that ultimately contributed to shaping the public’s reception and understanding of this wide geographical range: Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, North Korea and South Korea, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Siberia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, the last country where he lived, China, and Japan.6 The complexity of the collection lies in its miscellaneous nature: its topics range from history and culture to politics and economics, from large-scale to small-scale events, from ordinary to 2 Gaia De Pascale, Scrittori in viaggio. Narratori e poeti italiani del Novecento in giro per il mondo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), 201–236. 3 Terzani mainly worked for Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, and occasionally wrote for Italian newspapers (i.e. Il Giorno, Il Messaggero, La Repubblica, L’Espresso, Il Corriere della Sera). He was often criticized for his ideological stance (Alberto Malcangi, Tiziano Terzani [Roma: Coniglio Editore, 2007], 5); however, his charismatic personality, his somehow eccentric, imposing physical appearance combined with his substantial learning, enabled him to become one of the greatest Italian travel writers of the twentieth century and a chronicler of his time whose pen reflected the sharpness of a perceptive, scrutinizing mind. 4 Terzani was at the forefront of the main historical events in Asia: at the age of 27, he landed for the very first time at Haneda airport on 3 January 1965 (Àlen Loreti, Tiziano Terzani. La vita come avventura [Milano: Mondadori, 2014. Kindle], 2) much like he would have landed in Milan, as “modernity makes everything flat and civilization everything civilized” (Tiziano Terzani, In Asia [Milano: Tea, 1998], 11), a symptom of the obliteration of experiential difference between cities. He spent one day in Bangkok before arriving at his final destination, Tokyo, where the company he worked for, Olivetti, a historical Italian brand, had entrusted him to hold some courses (Terzani, In Asia, 11). He consciously decided to embark on this life-dictating journey because “f irst of all, [Asia] was far away, because it gave me the impression of a land where there was still something to be discovered;” adding “I went there to look for the “Other” for everything I did not know, in pursuit of ideas, of men, of stories I had only read about” (Terzani, 8, my translation). 5 All the passages from In Asia are from the source text in Italian (Milano: Tea, 1998) and translated by the author of the present chapter. 6 “[I]n Singapore from 1971 to 1975, in Hong Kong from 1975 to 1979, in China from 1979 to 1984, again in Hong Kong for a year, in Japan until 1990, in Thailand until 1994 and from then on in India” (Terzani, 8).

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extraordinary people and merge in intensively informative pages of highly intellectual depth. In the mid-1970s, Terzani was one of the very few Western reporters to witness both the fall of Saigon at the hand of the Viet Cong and the fall of Phnom Peng at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; and in 1984, he was expelled from China under accusation of counter-revolutionary activities. However, he was also a traveler who reported on traditions, food, cultural ceremonies and portrayed an Orient which, at an ontological and epistemological level, could be juxtaposed with the West. He contributed to the formation of a concept of Orientalism that was not to be intended as “an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.”7 This, by all means, personal reading of modern Asia—whereby modernity is intended, in Bauman’s terms, as a liquid condition of constant change in global society and identity8—has had an impact in stimulating cultural sensitivity and awareness. A specific line of study is required dealing with the intricate weaves of articles—some of which “[were] written on the spur of the moment, under pressure, running out of time; others are the result of days, sometimes weeks, of research and second thoughts. Some are bare news, others try to trace, using the news, the portrait of a country or a particular situation.”9 In particular, then, the present chapter is guided by a spatial approach to the discovery of daily urban space in Asia, as “the study of space, from the humanistic perspective, is thus the study of a people’s spatial feelings and ideas in the stream of experience.”10 It is movement in space, i.e. travel, that involves the encounter and exchange between the self and the other as explicitly or implicitly reflected in travel writing; the accounts, then, are revelatory of both the world, with its unfamiliar people or places, and the traveler’s personal story and background.11 The journalistic chronicle becomes an elaborated account of a personal experience that goes beyond a purely communicative function. By distancing itself from the mere objectivity of facts and things, the individual’s experience acquires a universal value 7 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006), 6. 8 This “liquid” condition is associated to the idea of change. Bauman claims that change occurs more often and more rapidly in a “modern” society; hence, he advocates the idea of a “liquid” modernity. See Zygmund Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 9 Terzani, In Asia, 8. 10 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” in Philosophy in Geography 20, eds. Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson (Dordrecht: Springer, 1979), 388. 11 Carl Thomson, Travel Writing (London-New York: Routledge, 2011), 12.

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for non-expert readers. In accordance with a purposive sampling method, the present study aims at analyzing the cities that Terzani explored, lived in, interpreted and reported on.

Theoretical Framework Terzani made Asia, with which he had a symbiotic tie, a matter of life and literature,12 cementing his personal, spiritual and professional growth to this territory and its people. The written rendering of his exciting journeys resulted in a variety of stylistic and formal publications, which consists of newspaper articles, essays, and letters, as well as several books,13 that he wrote in the course of his over thirty-year bond with Asia, and which greatly varies across its regions with regards to cultural, ethnic, economic, historical, political, environmental systems. As a modern traveler and flâneur, he perceived travel in the company of a book 14 as a way of living even when, in 1976 a Chinese fortune-teller in Hong Kong foretold his great risk of dying advising him to never board a plane if he were to travel in 1993.15 As a result, he avoided flying for that whole year, moving only by land and sea,16 and experiencing distances and the Other from a different perspective that was detached from the faster but homologating forms of mobility. 12 In Asia he searched far and wide for a cure to his cancer, which he defined as both a great blessing and a shield to daily routine. See Mario Zanot, ANAM, IL SENZANOME. L’ultima intervista a Tiziano Terzani Storyteller, 2004, 2:40–3:05. 13 Pelle di leopardo. Diario vietnamita di un corrispondente di guerra (1973) about the last phase of the Vietnam War; Giai Phong! La liberazione di Saigon (1976) about the takeover of the capital by the Vietcong; Buona notte Signor Lenin (1992), where he reports his sudden decision, while on an expedition on the river Amur, to undertake a long journey that, in two months, led him through Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus; Un indovino mi disse (1985) see footnote no. 15; Un altro giro di giostra (2004) summarizing his last travels in pursuit of a cure for cancer but above all about himself. 14 “Having a book that accompanies you is wonderful, it is the best travel companion: it remains silent when you do not want it to talk, it talks when you want to hear something, it gives to you without asking for anything in return.” “La via non-violenta del future dell’umanità. Intervista a Tiziano Terzani, bambino permanente,” Italialibri, 19 May 2002. Accessed 10 December 2017 http://www.italialibri.net/arretratis/novita0502.html. 15 Tiziano Terzani, Un indovino mi disse (Milano: Longanesi & C., 1995), 9. 16 The events of this year—later summarized in Un indovino mi disse (1995), translated into English as A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East (1998), which recounts Terzani’s travels by train and by sea—provide an overview on countries undergoing accelerated development, like China, Thailand, and Singapore, those that are still bound to past traditions, like Laos and Burma, and explores the Malay Islands, Mongolia, and Russia.

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It has been argued that narrative, which “at its fullest manifestation correlates with human experientiality,”17 implies an evaluative or empathetic emotional involvement. It should be distinguished from report-like narration, which could be considered closer to argumentative discourse.18 In between, the factual articles that are the subject of this study were published as news and share their ordering constituents with the journalistic myth.19 They could have an overall functional role in informing readers through storytelling because “narrative has such a grip on the mind that the popular success of a genre or medium involving language is crucially dependent on its ability to tell stories.”20 Factual narratives should be considered information systems whose “entities are inferentially linked to real-world existential proposition”21 advancing “claims of referential truthfulness” by the author/narrator.22 They have to go beyond an interest in merely chronicling events; they express messages and convey them theoretically as universal stories. This is the central point because the articles included in In Asia23 represent of the real qualities of space without, potentially, producing fictive spaces. Furthermore, by physically moving through the urban environment, the individual, i.e., the traveler/journalist in this case, gives form to “urban surroundings while at the same time projecting its subjective experiences back into the city.”24 Therefore, these texts are read not as objective or mainly individual, but rather potentialy universal accounts, intended as “a decoder, decipherer, interpreter of written (narrative) texts or, more generally, of any text in the broad sense of signifying matter”25 that can develop a “cognitive map or mental model of narrative space.”26 To the 17 Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 234. 18 Fludernik, 239. 19 Jake Lule, Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism (New York: The Guilford Press, 2002), 2. 20 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media,” Poetics Today 23, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 582. 21 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Fictional vs. Factual Narration,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 102. 22 Schaeffer, 98. 23 Most of the articles are translations from German and English, while others were written in Italian. 24 Catharina Löffler, Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London (Wiesbaden: J.B. Metzler, 2017), 21. 25 Gerald Prince, “Reader,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 399. 26 Ryan, “Beyond Myth,” 427.

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extent that the perception and creation of space are personally constructed processes that influence an individual’s behavior, the “mental maps differ from person to person, and from culture to culture.”27 Consequently, it could be inferred that, through the narration of the story, each account is based on personal grounds but has the potential to be fathomed by the members of a community who will resonate and ultimately relate to it by acquiring information and knowledge. Conceptualizing space is a highly dynamic, evolving practice as must be its reading. Space could be considered an adventure involving all five senses: it may be easily described or explained through sight, but it is actually a comprehensive translation of a larger sensory experience. Indeed, “visual perception, touch, movement, and thought combine to give us our characteristic sense of space.”28 Such a journey could later be transmitted through writing and imagined by the larger public. Space is impregnated with humanity in its being a by-product and transposition of humanity itself. Therefore, urban spaces are ideal settings for an analysis as cities could be considered “a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet,”29 where human interactions, or the lack thereof, can be better observed. When compared with small-scale communities, modern cities enable the development of an individual’s inner and outer traits.30 Until the 1970s, space was theorized as a neutral container outside of human existence31 but the works of Bachelard, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Lefebvre, among others, have changed the study of space. In particular, Lefebvre32 put forward a trialectics of spatiality “which explores the differential entwining of cultural practices, representations and imaginations.”33 By replacing the absolute with subjective, space is woven into social relations showing espace perçu, conçu, and vécu. By influencing one another, this triad constitutes social space. This aspect was extended by Augé, who suggested an explanation on the matter of space and alterity starting from two contrasting but complementary spatial realities: anthropological places and non-places that are specific to contemporaneity as “the spaces of circulation, 27 Tuan, “Space and Place,” 389. 28 Tuan, 390. 29 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 38. 30 John Urry, Consuming Places (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 8. 31 Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin, Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London: Sage, 2010), 4. 32 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 33 Hubbard and Kitchin, Key Thinkers, 6.

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distribution and communication, in which neither identity, nor relation, nor history are located.”34 Within this literary studies framework, cities are considered “blueprints of actual cities, described and imitated in the form of written words.”35 Real cities are indeed recreated on the page through written words and therefore undergo a process of transformation.36 As an urban explorer or connoisseur of the streets, Terzani became a “reader” of the city, as “he who moves about the city, e.g. the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obligations and his movement, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret.”37 While reporting from major Asian cities,38 in this physical motility, the author deconstructs urban space and makes necessary selections; the urban fragments that are re-constructed thus provide a composite picture. Overall, the aforementioned theoretical approaches and interpretations of space are fruitful guidelines in analyzing Terzani’s In Asia, where the reader is immersed in urban grids and cityscapes that become functional tools in revealing cultural, historical, political, and economic aspects.

Spatial Exploration: A Plunge into Asia Readers of In Asia are plummeted, in media res, into squares, streets, sidewalks but also trenches, rivers, borders to be crossed, urban, suburban and rural areas alike, in years of war, struggle, survival, and of a utopian search for peace, thus creating an empathic relationship with the Other that populates these places and spaces.39 The natural landscape undoubtedly 34 Marc Augé, Tra i confini. Città, luoghi, integrazioni (Milano: Mondadori, 2007), 42. 35 Löffler, Walking in the City, 26. 36 Following the threefold mimesis—prefiguration, configuration and refiguration—proposed by Ricoeur: “mimetic creative activity has a threefold relationship with praxis: it presupposes it, represents it and renews it, and in that sense it creates novel outcomes” (Susanne Dau, “The Use of the Three-Fold Mimesis: New Approaches, Old Realities,” Academic Quarter 9 (2014): 115) where description, in particular, grants “disclosure of spatial information” (Ryan, “Beyond Myth,” 426). 37 Neil Leach, ed. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 163. 38 Vientiane, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bangkok, Pyongyang, Manila, Zamboanga, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Macao, Seoul, Beijing, Osaka, Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, Sriperimbudur, Surat, Karachi, Peshawar, Srinagar, Colombo, Batticaloa, New Delhi, Dharamsala, Mirzapur, Calcutta. 39 Places could be considered a transformation of space through the interaction of man “related to his activities, emotions, needs and faculties and invested with form and meaning.”

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plays an important role in the textual framework but it is the city, with its dynamics in the urban network that accounts for a noxious modernity which has deleterious consequences on the anthropological subjects that compose it. Terzani’s reports are imbued with history and, with an encyclopedic stance, inform their readers about some the most influential people in Asia, 40 as well as ordinary individuals. At first glance, the cities described by Terzani seem to favor horizontality by concentrating on descriptions of streets, which are significant in the urbanization process: in truth, his reading develops on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. In Cambodia, the sidewalks are populated; hence, they become the core of human activity; their functionality is altered: they are transformed into temporary settlements for displaced people within the city borders. Therefore, from being places of flow and potential transitory sociability, they have acquired a new meaning which alters their very nature. Furthermore, in the capital Phnom Penh, “a gate to the afterworld rather than a city on Earth,”41 sidewalks become a means of connection but also an epitome of extreme fatigue and poverty in a country that “up to five years ago, for Asian standards, was rich;”42 to such an extent that Terzani wrote: “if you look up above, what you see is the old Cambodia of the past […] the dream Cambodia in which Western visitors used to roam. Down below, on the asphalt of the streets, today’s Cambodia can be seen, a place where groups of people eat poor handfuls of dirty rice from banana leaves.”43 The author’s view on spatial surroundings generates a twofold moment from a dynamic and horizontal viewpoint to a vertical relationship between the landscape and his reader, thus creating, in Lefebvrian terms, “lived space.” At the same time, the high-up / down-below dichotomy reflects the human conditions that are represented by the power / powerless dichotomy; in Foucauldian terms, the organization of space can indeed be used to investigate into power relationships. This conflicting dualism is synthetized in Pyongyang, where “[t]he construction of the capital, as Jane Wilkinson, “Serote’s Cities. (De)Constructing South African Urban Space”, Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 45, no. 3 (1990): 491. 40 For example, Mao Zedong, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, Kim II-sung, Ninoy and Cory Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos, Pol Pot, Sakuma, Den Xiaoping, Park Chung-hee, Hirohito, Ne Win, Rajiv Gandhi, along with two interviews with Mother Teresa and Giovanni Alberto Agnelli. 41 Terzani, In Asia, 21. 42 Terzani, 30. 43 Terzani, 23–24.

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a megalomaniac symbol of the Korean renaissance […] continues, as if it were to become the utopian civitas solis of future mankind. Day and night, without interruption, huge cranes and teams of workers pull up another floor of the already gigantic Cultural Center.”44 From a semantic point of view, language, similarly to architecture, satirically reproduces a sought-after yet fallacious grandeur. Pedestrians, who move “down,” can perceive the street as division, confrontation or creative exploration: “it is symbolic of the dynamism of modernity and the airing of ideas or philosophies, yet it is also material, a place where evidence of everyday culture can be found. Perhaps more than anything, the street reminds us of narrative.”45 The walls and the façades that embank the streets become billboards that reflect the manipulative strategy of the persuasive use of words and images. The walls subliminally or explicitly speak of changes: these can be political, as in the case of the word “royal” on the Cambodian walls in Phnom Penh, that “the republicans quickly erased with white paint after the 1970 coup that reversed the monarchy and Sihanouk;”46 or they can be culturally loaded, like in Delhi in 1997, where the city “was carpeted with large banners: HERE I AM AGAIN. […] It was Coca-Cola, which had been thrown out seventeen years ago.”47 In Terzani’s In Asia, besides the obvious sense of sight, the sense of smell is accentuated. In recounting his stay in Saigon in 1975, he claimed that, “even blindly, without looking around, I would recognize this city from the sweetish stench of garbage that assaults me at every step. A rotten, gangrenous city that always seems to be on the verge of dying but never dies. Everything here is temporary.”48 A durable sense of temporariness, similar to the lasting war that drains the country, is attached to this urban space. When reporting from Macao, on the other hand, the city’s smell is associated with history: If history had a smell it would be that of this city at dawn, when churches are deserted and gambling dens still crowded, when beggars rise from the benches of the waterfront and the chilly couples look at the hockshops’ 44 Terzani, 58. 45 Inga Brayden, “Crossing the Street: Literature and Urban Space,” in Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama 5.1: Crossing the Divides, eds. Jonathan Gibson, Matt Green, Nicole King and Brett Lucas, (2009): 24. 46 Terzani, In Asia, 24. 47 Terzani, 405. 48 Terzani, 25.

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windows at the watches, gold chains, and fountain pens that had been pawned and lost by other players. From the top of their pedestals, heroes and saints made of stone point their swords and their Western crosses against the brightening Asian sky. From the Chinese temples come whiffs of incense and the murmur of prayers. On the yellowish waters of the bay, where the Pearl River flows, wooden junks slide in full sail. 49

The lyricism of this description synthetizes the essence of this part of Asia and all its contradictions: the sacred and the profane, poverty and wealth, heaviness and lightness, West and East, Eastern and Western religiosity. It is about society and its members: mellow litanies are in sharp contrast with weapons and the symbol of Christianity par excellence. The passage continues: Dawn in Macao is not the beginning of a new day, but only a moment in the eternal alternation of darkness and light, like the alternation of red and black in the roulette wheels that never stop here. St. Paul’s Church stands over the labyrinth of miserable Chinese slums and crumbling Portuguese villas. Only its façade stands, but that exactly, with its windows like blind eyes staring at the void, is precisely the most expressive monument to all the great hopes of the past and the most fitting symbol of their failure.50

The symbol of the austere Western religion, with its long-foregone grandiosity, towers, physically and figuratively, over both the present, represented by the squalid and overcrowded urban district in its convoluted layout, and the local past, which is objectified in upper-class residences that narrate their history of colonialization by the Portuguese Empire until the late 1990s. The anthropomorphic depiction of the Western place of worship in decline symbolizes the country’s disenchanted ambitions. Likewise, his description of St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong proposes the concept of verticality from a slightly different perspectival angle, as the building is situated on the hillside next to the old courthouse. A symbol of colonial power, and a meeting point of a colonial society that is aware of the passing of time, the church is surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers, that “ate the last strip of lawn,”51 while some Chinese citizens 49 Terzani, 138. 50 Terzani, 138. 51 Terzani, 422.

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take pictures while “laughing in front of the headstones and crosses.” Terzani’s conclusion, dated 29 June 1997, is piercing: “Two different, divided worlds that have nothing more to give to one another: one celebrates its own funeral, the other its own victory;” a previously fruitful exchange with the Other seems to have reached the end of the line. Pretense and a contrived sense of what is appropriate dominate the landscape. This appears obvious while he was in Burma in January 1999, where “Rangoon,” presently known as Yangon, or literally the “End of Strife,” is depicted as the perfect example of a trompe d’oeil where “the colonial facades of public buildings, and the crumbling facades of private houses, have recently had a coat of paint that covered the mould of time and the holes made by the bullets.”52 Buildings, parks, and public infrastructure bearing traces of British expansionism deceive tourists with their misleadingly assembled and clean appearance. Renovation, and whitewashing in particular, seems to concur with the first stage of a process of renewal that occurs in the urban sphere following the political phase, and later, perhaps, is concerned with the citizens. In Burma it is the Parliament building, “silent and empty in the middle of a park teeming with uniforms and weapons;”53 in Phnom Penh, the Presidential Palace, where “recent restorations have raised the walls by five meters and replaced all the doors, once made of wood, with massive steel plates,”54 thus transforming it into a seemingly impregnable cage. In September 1994, at the outbreak of the plague, Terzani flew to Surat (India), symbol of the “black death,” and directed himself towards Ved, the specific district of the city which was the hotbed of the outbreak. Here the city is sectioned, and its inhabitants symbolically and geographically divided: Until fifteen years ago, Ved was simply a swamp. Then Surat became the hub of the textile and diamond industry, and Ved was suddenly transformed into a huge worker dormitory. […] Predatory developers built this multitude of concrete boxes without water and cesspools. Up to ten people could live in those tiny rooms. Two weeks ago the waters of the Tapti overflowed, the whole district of Ved was flooded, and the slums of cement went under a meter and a half of revolting mash.55 52 53 54 55

Terzani, 287. Terzani, 287. Terzani, 22. Terzani, 316–317.

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The artificial construction, that leaves men in a state of malaise, thus becomes the source of destruction and death. Nature dominates artificiality by regaining its territory. Using and observing public transportation within the urban grid is regarded as another exploratory means to discover a territory’s social space. In India, bicycles, busses, sedans, and trains with which it is possible “to embark in a journey in time and space”56 reflect local motility. India’s allure for Terzani was so profound that he decided to relocate with his family to a country where time is coagulated in its architecture and that “gives you a sense of being part of a great history towards which you can never feel indifferent.”57 Similarly, the author believes that by travelling by underground it is possible to acquire the first rudimentary notions on the concept of “giapponesità,” that is “being Japanese,” which could simply be summarized in one statement: “Japan is not only a very efficient production machine, but it is also a giant amusement park.”58 In presenting another side of Asia, that of gambling houses, nightclubs, shopping centers, discos—which are all non-places, according to Augé—the journalist delves into typical forms of local sociability. Western readers discover pachinkos, boys only or karaoke bars, pink salons, onsens, soaplandos, ryoteis and love hotels: Japan is packed with places of pleasure whose sole function is to sell dreams. Every city has entire neighborhoods, and every village, even the smallest, has at least one street where, after sunset, a Japanese can buy a dream: the dream of being a famous star or a brave samurai, the dream of being passionately loved by a woman, of being cradled by a mother or simply the dream of having a friend by whom to feel understood.59

The need for yoka, “time of leisure,” of these dualist identities (a polarization between uprightness and overindulgence) is mirrored in the fragmentary nature of the architectural space that is embedded in the modern landscape.60 The juxtaposition of construction materials is representative of the clash between present and past, between modern and ancient: in fact, 56 Terzani, 407. 57 Terzani, 407. 58 Terzani, 233. 59 Terzani, 219. 60 “Hidden among concrete cubes of modern architecture, behind old walls of straw and mud, in today’s Japan, here and there, small islands of old and exclusive luxury still remain: the ryotei.” Terzani, 227.

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the former is composed of concrete, steel, aluminum, and glass, the latter of mud, straw, wood or stone.61 In the mid-1980s, while exploring a shopping center or the State Guesthouse, passing through Tokyo’s train station, observing the Tokyo Tower, or the thousand little coffee shops adorning the streets, Terzani reflects on another typical trait: the tendency to replicate Western-like atmospheres which, to some extent, collides with the pervasive intolerance against the gai jin, the foreigner, that he recorded in 1986. Furthermore, while visiting Mount Fuji, he acknowledged what could be perceived as an intrinsic paradox in Japanese society: “Strange fate, that of the Japanese! Of all the peoples they are perhaps the only ones to have chosen a part of nature as a symbol of their civilization;”62 unsurprisingly, the mountain, with its exceptionally symmetrical cone and majesty, speaks of the proverbial Japanese foresight. Tokyo is a hi-tech city, based on the punctuality of its means of transport and the efficiency of its services. It is so technology-oriented that “to be able to understand the men of this country, the first thing is to learn to talk with its machines”63 and particularly its vending machines. A sort of visual order is reflected by default in Japanese architecture, where “[f]rom outside, the office buildings look elegant and luxurious. Inside, they are sober and modest.”64 This external glamour does not seem to match either the internal decorations or the Japanese lifestyle characterized by an “ancient and rigorous rigidity”65 dominated by what is known as jishuku, “self-control, moderation.” Once again, space reflects social dynamics, providing a sociocultural picture of, in this specific instance, Tokyo in the winter of 1988 at the death of the 124th Emperor of Japan Hirohito (1901–1989), where products made from red bean flour and red roses were removed from the shelves of 61 Juxtaposition is a distinguishing trait of Terzani’s life and writing. He claimed that his dream was to become immortal in that “very brief immortality—here is the irony—of a book of mine which will be stored in a library and which, in a hundred years, someone will pull out and say, ‘Who was he?’, and then that someone is going to travel with me again for a day or a week in one of the places I’ve traveled to. In that moment I will live in another small space of life.” Italialibri. In his search for a cure for mortality, by trying to abandon materiality, he realized his longed-for dream in materiality itself. Throughout his life, even in his 7-year fight against cancer, Terzani reiterates one of the main traits of his essence: juxtaposition. This feature could be synthetized in his experience in an ashram: after a life spent trying to make a name for himself, he ended up with no name, Anam—he who has no name. On a higher level, together with Terzani’s mimesis (Malcangi, Tiziano Terzani, 80), both dispositions emphasize the author’s capability for moulding his very identity. 62 Terzani, In Asia, 283. 63 Terzani, 82. 64 Terzani, 86. 65 Terzani, 86.

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department stores, and where words such as “new, birth, congratulations” were deleted from billboards.66 The political crisis is therefore reflected in space, language, and movement. Modernity is portrayed in Tokyo’s skyline as an overflowing city with liquid borders: [I]ts 12 million inhabitants orient themselves badly, especially because, like in a village, there are no streets with names here, but only land parcels with numbers; here there are no monuments […] so the normal point of reference is the co-ban, the police cabin. […] In front of each co-ban there are always small queues of people waiting for their turn to ask for information, usually on the address to which they must go.67

Odonyms, which are subjected to historical-ideological influence, are generally tools that allow an individual to read and interpret reality and society, so their absence fails to respond to the unavoidable need for identification and information that connect the individual to the territory. In anthropological terms, the processes of symbolization that are enacted by social groups are based on the understanding and domination of space in the intent to develop, understand, and organize themselves.68 Consequently, this structure may be perceived as the snapshot, in geographical, cultural, social, and economic terms, of a given period, of specific guidelines dictated by the authorities. Similarly, contrary to Western stereotypes, the author highlighted the heterogeneity of Japanese people by roaming the streets of Tokyo.69 This brings up a fundamental aspect of experiencing the city by foot. This type of mobility is in line with a literary tradition that associated walking with a rural landscape both in a Romantic past and in the post-touristic, eco- or slow-touristic modalities that advocate a more sustainable touristic experience. It ensures a more direct and personal approach to urban space, which is “recycled by development”70 and where shining materials and clear lines convey order but at the same time seem unable to arouse emotions, be they negative or positive; the city’s vivacity is suffocated by a modernity where satisfaction is measured through the senses of sight and taste. In postmodern terms, they could refer to the concept of consumption related 66 Terzani, 183. 67 Terzani, 83. 68 Augé, Tra i confini, 47. 69 Terzani, In Asia, 127. 70 Terzani, 78.

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to a non-place, “amnesiac, ephemeral and dependent on the consumer society space, losing its place as an anthropological category and so the identification of individuals.”71 Taking this approach further, it could be stated that in its being “a domain of feigned, simulated order, a kingdom of morphing,” it resembles Junkspace, the apotheosis of modernization, “the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”72 Moreover, this passage stimulates reflection, sending a strong message to the reader. After all, Terzani strongly believed in peace, asserting that “non-violence is the only chance for humankind to survive”73 and suggesting that humanity’s problems could only be solved by “a conspiracy of poets.”74 Cities become a mirror of the fears and anxieties of governments and people. The instances of this are countless: the increase of fear in Saigon in 1975 was directly proportional to the emptying of the city; reporting on Mao’s death from Hong Kong in 1976, Terzani describes a paralyzed city; he documented Cory Aquino’s victory from Manila in 1986: “Tonight Malacañan Palace was no longer a segregated oasis of silent and arrogant power, but a boisterous public park in which an extraordinary popular festival, attended by the largest crowd of Philippines that have ever gathered, was held.”75 In this specific equation, power is outlined as a confined space within an urban grid devoid of sound whereas the people are compared to an open space filled with seemingly joyful sounds. As previously mentioned, along the same line of reasoning, the entire city could mirror presidential prominence in Pyongyang in 1980, the reader is presented with a synoptic view of a symbiotic relationship: “the whole city is a monument dedicated to the greatness of the president, and each building is, in turn, proof of his love for the people.”76 The author adds: “railway stations and public buildings, which are out of proportion, and products of an obsessive megalomania, are the cathedrals of the true religion of this country.”77 Urban space loses its proportion, and therefore, its balance. Terzani cites a renowned health center, made of swimming pools, saunas, 71 Bárbara Barreiro León, “Urban Theory in Postmodern Cities: Amnesiac Spaces and Ephemeral Aesthetics,” Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales 7, no. 1 (2017): 60. 72 Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace.” October 100 (2002): 175–177. 73 Zanot, ANAM, 34:21–34:26. 74 In Un indovino mi disse, Terzani presented the idea that only a small group of people who could think differently by stripping their creativity and hearts of the everyday burdens, i.e., poets, could save humanity. 75 Terzani, In Asia, 106. 76 Terzani, 56. 77 Terzani, 56.

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gyms with marble floors and mosaics on the walls, and the “huge maternity ward” a 13-floor building made of concrete, granite and marble, and equipped with the most modern technological tools, as well as the Masudè Theater, made of stone, glass and mirrors, “with stairs that wind upwards and, lit by fluorescent chandeliers, rise over whispering fountains with shimmering colors.”78 A multi-colored liquidity overwhelms the traveler: water, which may be found in the city’s fountains, or is depicted in mosaics or carpets, and painted on walls, becomes the obsessive symbol of the government’s desire for purity. In 1988, the year of the Summer Olympics, Terzani reported directly from Seoul, which, “with its over 10 million inhabitants, is the fifth largest metropolis in the world, marked by modern glass and steel skyscrapers.”79 It is so “modern” that he observed: “those who travel today along the main roads of South Korea, which are almost all fringed with flowerbeds, forget that they are actually in an Asian country.”80 However, the most prominent aspect is certainly the industrialization and the consequent homologation of its people. In previous pages, Terzani had written about industrial development, especially in Japan, and in particular when writing about Fanuc, the most automated factory in the world.81 It is characterized by secrecy and a military-like structure, yet when the author directs his attention towards Pusan, the second city of South Korea, the “city of containers,”82 an increased claustrophobia is detected. The proverbial places of leisure disappear, and what is left is a factory whose secret lies not in technology but rather in the human capital, mainly “yellow and sickly”83 young women, and that was erected in the city center. In this country, steel, automobile and naval sectors take on tentacular qualities, filling physical distances and sweeping away past settlements: At the end of the ‘70s, POSCO […] wanted to build a new steel plant. A wonderful panoramic area by the sea, close to Kwangyang, east of Sunchon, was chosen. The construction began in 1982 and today neither the rice fields nor the islands of the past are to be seen. Replacing them, 78 Terzani, 57. 79 Terzani, 161. 80 Terzani, 165. 81 “Fanuc, built on the volcanic ash of Fuji, the symbol of the nation, symbolizes the rebirth of the country from the atomic ashes of the defeat of WWII, a war that simply carries on at the heart of the Japanese. […] Fanuc has the air of a military center.” Terzani, 94–95. 82 Terzani, 162. 83 Terzani, 163.

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“for the happiness of the next generations of Koreans, there is the most modern steel plant in the world” as written on a brochure.84

This replacement of landscapes, materials, functions, abiding by the discourse of verticality, characterizes the country and its people who, like the urban landscape, are worn out and disfigured by industrialization and its architectural needs.

Conclusion Reading In Asia is a discovery of the continent and its urban space. Terzani, as a reader of the city, created a heterogeneous visual picture of a wide geographical area in which urban space is functional in his reflections on history and societies at large. His journalistic accounts represent a literally elaborated narration, a synthesis of first-hand experience investigating reality and experiencing space that communicates much more than mere objective facts. In the collection of writings that were published from 1974 to 1997, he mingled everyday life and common people with large-scale events and important historical and political figures. He was relentless in his social investigation, digging with insatiable curiosity through a layer of superficiality to go beyond appearances and explore the multifarious facets of reality while endowing landscape, characters and stories with souls, and sketching history in the making. The Italian journalist and traveler witnessed the permutation of specific places while reporting on continuous juxtapositions or polarizations. Architectural elements are interpreted to give meaning to reality, often serving to critically evaluate modernity and its consequences. By explicitly or implicitly expressing an ideological stance against a system that is indifferent to the suffering of the poor, Terzani actively studied the surrounding reality, concentrating on the most privileged observational point, i.e., the streets, ranging from reconverted sidewalks and walls, to homologating factories or technology-oriented skyscrapers and from the traces of a West in decline to an Orient that is torn between opposing forces. The sense of a city described in In Asia emerges from its relations among urban elements as a manifestation of human interactivity and interconnections where space ultimately coagulates.

84 Terzani, 166.

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Bibliography Augé, Marc. Tra i confini. Città, luoghi, integrazioni. Milano: Mondadori, 2007. Barreiro León, Bárbara. “Urban Theory in Postmodern Cities: Amnesiac Spaces and Ephemeral Aesthetics.” Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales 7, no.1 (2017): 57–65. Bauman, Zygmund. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Brayden, Inga. “Crossing the Street: Literature and Urban Space.” In Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama 5.1: Crossing the Divides, edited by Jonathan Gibson, Matt Green, Nicole King and Brett Lucas (2009): 21–32. Dau, Susanne. “The Use of the Three-Fold Mimesis: New Approaches, Old Realities.” Academic Quarter 9 (2014): 112–125. De Pascale, Gaia. Scrittori in viaggio. Narratori e poeti italiani del Novecento in giro per il mondo. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Spazi Altri. I luoghi delle Eterotopie. Milano; Udine: Mimesis, 2011. Hubbard, Phil, and Rob Kitchin, Key Thinkers on Space and Place. London: Sage, 2010. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October 100 (Spring 2002): 175–190. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” In The People, Place, and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert. New York; London: Routledge, 2014. Leach, Neil, ed. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London; New York: Routledge, 2005. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Löffler, Catharina. Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London. Wiesbaden: J.B. Metzler, 2017. Loreti, Àlen. Tiziano Terzani. La vita come avventura. Milano: Mondadori, 2014. Kindle. Lule, Jack. Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism. New York: The Guilford Press, 2002. Malcangi, Alberto. Tiziano Terzani. Roma: Coniglio Editore, 2007. Prince, Gerald. “Reader.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 398–410. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media.” Poetics Today 23, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 581–609. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006.

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Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 98–114. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Terzani, Tiziano. Un indovino mi disse. Milano: Longanesi & C., 1995. Terzani, Tiziano. In Asia. Milano: Tea, 1998. Terzani, Tiziano. “La via non-violenta del future dell’umanità. Intervista a Tiziano Terzani, bambino permanente.” Italialibri, 19 May 2002. Accessed December 10, 2017. http://www.italialibri.net/arretratis/novita0502.html. Thomson, Carl. Travel Writing. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective.” In Philosophy in Geography 20, edited by Stephen Gale & Gunnar Olsson, 387–427. Dordrecht: Springer, 1979. Urry, John. Consuming Places. London; New York: Routledge, 2002. Wilkinson, Jane. “Serote’s Cities. (De-)Constructing South African Urban Space”. Africa: Rivista Trimestrale Di Studi e Documentazione Dell’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente 45, no. 3 (1990): 485–493.(documentary) Zanot, Mario. ANAM, IL SENZANOME. L’ultima intervista a Tiziano Terzani. Storyteller, 2004.

About the Author Ellen Patat, Ph.D., is adjunct instructor at the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy), where she teaches English Language and Linguistics, at Università degli Studi dell’Insubria (Italy), Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, and SSML “P.M. Loria,” where she teaches ESP, Advanced English and Phonology. Her main areas of interest are: Comparative Literatures, especially modern and contemporary travel literature, EAP, ESP, and Language Teaching. She also works as a freelance translator.



Index

References to illustrations are in italics Accademia di San Luca, Rome 114, 122 Agostini, Ilaria 140 Alberti, Leon Battista, restoration of Aqua Virgo aqueduct 54 alcohol, wine, polarity between 237, 239 Alexander VII, Pope 11, 39, 118 Allerston, Patricia 94 Anonymous, Partial perspective (1583) 82 Aqua Felice, restoration 54 Aqua Traiana, restoration 54 Aqua Virgo (Acqua Vergine) aqueduct, restoration 54 architects Futurist 162 training, in Early Modern period 115–16 architecture Fascist 162 cure for societal ills 177–8 and papal authority, Pope Nicholas V on 44–5 rational 162–3 as social control 161–3 Aretino, Pietro Cortigiana, ambiguous city location 76–7 Marescalco, audience involvement 77 Ariosto, Ludovico ambiguous city location Lena 75–6 Negromante 75 Suppositi 75 Cassaria 67, 69 Pellegrino da Udine’s stage setting 74 Suppositi, perspective stage setting 70 Aristotle, Poetics 69, 218 Asia Italian travelers writing about 245–6 and modernity 247 see also Terzani, Tiziano, In Asia Atkinson, Niall 25 on Pucci 35–6 The Noisy Renaissance 21 authority, and papal architecture, Pope Nicholas V on 44–5 Avignon Papacy 39, 42 Baccolini, Raffaella & Moylan, Tom, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination 213 Baillie, Britt 140 Baldi, Andrea, on Naples 211, 212, 215 Baratto, Mario 68 Barthes, Roland, on tourist destinations 139 Bataille, Georges 239 Belpoliti, Marco, on grayness 199 Benedict XIV, Pope 130

Benjamin, Walter Arcades Project 153 origins 146 Surrealist influence 142 on the flâneur 147 on tourism 146–7 Benjamin, Walter & Lacis, Asja, on Naples as porous city 209–10 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo builder of San Andrea al Quirinale 53 Fountain of the Bees (Piazza Barberini) 55 Four Rivers Fountain (Piazza Navona) 54, 55, 56 Berzal de Dios, Javier 74 Bianciardi, Luciano death 189 “Il complotto” 189 Il lavoro culturale 189 La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life) 13, 184, 186, 190 commuting to work 191 escape into sleep 200 grayness 191–2, 195–6, 198 intellectual protagonist 192, 193 “Le strade” 189 L’integrazione 189 loneliness in Milan 188 “Punte di spillo” 189 “Vacanza alla foce” 189–90 Bologna 1977 Movement 13 Café Goliardo 227–8, 230 communal existence 239, 241 DAMS artistic department 236 elements 226 feminism 227–30 gay groups 231, 231–2 Ginsborg on 226 legacy 232 Marcasciano on 225–6, 232 Piazza VIII Agosto 231 temporary success 240 and Traumfabrik (Factory of Dreams) 13, 233, 234, 235 Via Clavature 20, cartoonists’ collective 233 violence 227, 230 Borromeo, Charles, Cardinal 52 Bowen, Elizabeth, The Hotel 145 Bramante, Donato 46 Brinton, Crane 217 Buck-Morss, Susan 142, 146 Calvesi, Maurizio 153 Calvino, Italo on grayness 197–8 Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno 186 La nuvola di smog (Smog) 13, 184, 186–7 critique of capitalism 196

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grayness 187, 197 smog, symbolism 198 working class powerlessness 193 Ultimo viene il corvo 186 Cambodia, In Asia (Terzani) 252 Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill) public celebration of Possesso 49 renovation by Michelangelo 49 canonization of saints, Papal Rome 56 Canova, Lorenzo 140 carnevale, and commedia erudita 67 Carpi, Girolamo da, Sketch of scene with a background illustrating the square of Ferrara 70 Cassiani, Chiara 23, 35 Castel Sant’Angelo 48 Castelvetro, Ludovico 71 Castiglione, Baldassar on perspective 71 on realism 65, 71–2 The Courtier 71 Cecchi, Giovanni Maria, L’Ammalata 10, 21, 22–3 extract 34 Christina, Queen of Sweden, arrival in Rome 57, 57, 58 churches, ancient, and temporal papal authority 48 Ciapelli, Giovanni, Quaresima e Carnevale Cicero, on comedy 23 cities ambiguous city location Cortigiana 76–7 Lena 75–6 Negromante 75 Suppositi 75 literary, and real 251 mirror of fears and anxieties 259 Moran on 9 see also the city; urban space the city experienced on foot 258 stage representation 66 as textual representation 10 and tuberculosis in Fascist Italy 160 see also cities city space 7, 9, 11 representations of 13 Clarisse nuns 53 Clement V, Pope 42 Clement VII, Pope 48 Clement XI, Pope 114, 116 Clerici, Luca 207–8 College of Cardinals 46–7 colonie (summer camps) 12 children forming words: “Leader We Love You” 164 City of Childhood 164 cradle expo 175, 177

exhibition 172–7, 172 exhibition entrance 175 map 173, 174 corporate involvement 165–7, 166 ENEL building 178 gymnastic displays 169 and health promotion 161 history 159–61 as holiday camps 161 medical use, conversion to 178 and modernity 170 and Montecatini Chemicals 166–7, 166, 176–7 nautical motifs 168–70, 169, 170 numbers 164–5 political indoctrination 165 present day existence 178 purpose 157–8, 160 Rimini 167 ruin tourism sites 178, 179 Colosseum, prints 115, 116, 116, 129 comedy Cicero on 23 classical 66 Gelli on 23 see also commedia erudita commedia erudita (learned comedy) 11 audience involvement 78 and carnevale 67 conciliation mechanism 68, 68n8 origins 67, 67n5 perspectival stage settings 69 and realism 66 communal existence, Bologna 1977 Movement 239, 241 Constance, Council of (1414-1418) 44, 47 Constantine, Emperor, Donation of Constantine 47 corporations Fascism, cooperation 170 involvement in colonie (summer camps) 165–7, 166 Corti, Maria 187 Costola, Sergio 70 Cruyl, Lieven, View of the Piazza Navona 55 culture, American, influence in Italy 190 Damasco, Carlo Un paio di occhiali (film) alienation 221 claustrophobia of courtyard 218–19, 220 dystopianism 215, 216–17 fixed camera shots 217 neighbors as chorus 218 shadows of reality 216 space limitations 218 theatricality 217–18, 221 see also Ortese, Anna Maria

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Index

de Chirico, Giorgio Catalogo generale Giorgio de Chirico 143 on empty space 148 inner motivations 141 Le Piazze d’Italia 12, 140 alienation 152 dating issues 143 emptiness of 140, 150 “museumification” 151 prophecy 153 timelessness 151 unnatural suspense 151 verifalsi reproductions 143, 144 warped perspective 151 Metaphysical style 141, 143 Surrealism, influence on 141, 142 de Paolo, Antonio, The Possesso of Pope Leo XI 49 de Rossi, Domenico 119 de Rossi, Giovanni Giacomo 118 de Rossi family 114 della Colletta, Cristina 216, 218–19, 220 Dovizi, Bernardo, Calandria, perspectival stage setting 65, 72, 74 dystopianism of Naples 210 Un paio di occhiali (film) (Damasco) 215, 216–17 “Un paio di occhiali” (short story) (Ortese) 215 Eco, Umberto Il nome della rosa 236 meeting with Tondelli 236–7, 240–1 Egyptian Obelisk, Rome 130, 131 Eliot, George, Middlemarch 145 empty space de Chirico on 148 Le Piazze d’Italia (de Chirico) 140, 150 and Metaphysical painting 148 and tourist expectations 139–40 Evelyn, John 52 on the Mercerie (Venice) 88–9, 101 Falda, Giovanni Battista 118 Farnetti, Monica 213 Fascism and architecture 162 as cure for societal ills 177–8 corporations, cooperation between 170 Figli della Lupa youth group 158, 161, 171 youth cult 160 youth groups 158, 161, 171 feminism, Bologna 1977 Movement 227–30 Ferrara square 70 theater 70 Ferrarese, Ippolito, street singer 28 Finotti, Fabio 69

flâneur Benjamin on 147 tourist, similarities 144–5, 147 Florence Forster on 148–9 Piazza Santa Croce 141, 148 Fo, Dario 231 Foot, John 185 Forster, E.M. A Room with View 145 on Florence 148–9 view of Piazza Santa Croce (Florence) 149 fountains, Papal Rome 54–6 Gagliardi, Filippo & Lauri, Filippo, Carousel in the Courtyard of Palazzo Barbarini 57 Garzoni, Tommaso 28 gay groups, Bologna 1977 Movement 231, 231–2 Gelli, Giovan Battista (shoemaker/playwright) on comedy 23 La Sporta 10, 21, 23 borrowing practices 30–1 extracts 29–31 Lo errore 10, 21 analysis 33 extract 31–2 Genga, Girolamo 72 Gessani, Alberto 190, 192, 198–9 Ghesini, Manuela 228 Ghezzo, Flora 211 Ginsborg, Paul 191 on Bologna 1977 Movement 226 Goldthwaite, Richard 95 Gramsci, Antonio L’ordine nuovo 190 Quaderni del carcere 190 Grand Canal, Venice 89 Grand Tour, Italy’s place in 112, 144 gray(ness) (grigiore) Belpoliti on 199 Calvino on 197–8 characteristics 183, 185 escape from 199–200 of factory workers 194–5 of intellectuals 195 La nuvola di smog (Smog) (Calvino) 187, 197 La vita agra (It’s a hard life) (Bianciardi) 191–2, 195–6, 198 literary expressions of 184, 186 of Milan 185, 186–7 ubiquity 184 Great Western Schism 39, 44 Gregory XI, Pope 44 health promotion, and colonie (summer camps) 161 heliotherapy, children undergoing 159

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Heller, Eva 183 Hirsh, Jennifer 143 Hom, Stephanie 147–8 Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral, In Asia (Terzani) 254–5 Horn, David 161 Huber, Giampiero 233 Iandolo, Alessandro 187 Innocent XIII, Pope 114 Irace, Fulvio 158 Italian Communist Party 187, 230 Italian Gay Liberation Front 230 Italian travelers, writing on Asia 245–6 Italy American culture, influence 190 British travelers in 145 Cook’s Tours 147, 149 economic miracle 183–4 place in Grand Tour 112, 144 plague (1348) 95 see also Ferrara; Milan; Naples; Rome; Venice James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady 145 Japan leisure time, In Asia (Terzani) 256 Mount Fuji, In Asia (Terzani) 257 Lefebvre, Henri The Production of Space 9 three-part theory of space 250 Levitas, Ruth 215 literary journals, proliferation 190 Lukach, Joan 141 Macao, In Asia (Terzani) 253–4 MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist 144 McCarthy, Mary 185 Marcasciano, Porpora Antologaia 225 on Bologna 77 Movement 225–6, 232 Marder, Tod 117 Marshall Plan 190, 191 Martin V, Pope 39, 44, 58 mass tourism and public space 144, 147 theorists of 144 and travel 144 mass worker 190 Mazzi, Gilberto, Mille lire al mese 219–20 mercato vecchio (Florence) 10 demolition 20 diversity 20 walking tours 20fn1 see also Pucci, Antonio, Proprietà Mercerie see Venice, Mercerie Metaphysical painting and de Chirico’s style 141, 143

and empty space 148 and Freudian dream analysis 141 Mieli, Mario 230–1 Milan Bianciardi’s loneliness in 188–9 grayness of 185, 186–7 modernity and Asia 247 and colonie (summer camps) 170 Montecatini Chemicals, and colonie (summer camps) 166–7, 166, 176–7 Moran, Joe, on cities 9 Morante, Elsa, L’isola di Arturo 188 Moravia, Alberto 186 Morson, Gary Saul 215 Moryson, Fynes, on the Piazza San Marco 87–8 Mussolini, Benito Ascension Day speech 160 speech inaugurating Mostra Nazionale delle Colonie Estive 170–1 Nancy, Jean-Luc 239 Naples 13 Baldi on 211 dystopianism of 210 performativity of inhabitants’ lives 210, 221 as porous city 209–10 see also under Ortese, Anna Maria Nebbia, Cesare 53 Nicholas V, Pope on authority and architecture 44–5 restoration of Aqua Virgo aqueduct 54 Olivetti, Adriano 184 Oppo, Cipriano Efisio 173 Orientalism concept 247 Ortese, Anna Maria Il mare non bagna Napoli 207–8, 217 “Un paio di occhiali” 13, 207 characters, theatrical existence 212–13, 215 coming-of-age story 213 courtyard, as theater of misery 210–11 dystopianism 215 estrangement 214 glasses as evidence of wealth 219 and loss of innocence 213, 214–15 plot 208–9 see also Damasco, Carlo Pagano, Giuseppe 163, 175 Palazzo Barberini 120, 120 Papal Rome (1417-1667) 11 canonization of saints 56 carriage numbers 52 fountains 54–6 male domination 52–3

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Index

population increase 58 and power of papalism 58 processions 56–7 prostitutes 53 rebuilding of 45–52, 58 Via Pia 52 water supply 54–6 women’s role 53 as world capital 46 see also Vatican Papal States 11, 42 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Le ceneri di Gramsci 188 Pastoureau, Michel 183 Paul III, Pope 50 Paul V, Pope 54 Pazienza, Andrea Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo 234 graphic novels 233–5 Pellegrino da Udine stage design for Cassaria 74 stage designer 69 Peretti, Camilla 53 perspectival stage settings Calandria (Dovizi) 65, 72, 74 commedia erudita 69 as idea of a city 74–5 Prosperi on 69, 74 Suppositi (Ariosto) 70 perspective Castiglione on 71 and realism 71 in stage design 66 see also perspectival stage settings Peruzzi, Baldassare, stage set for Calandria (Dovizi) 74 Pesca, Carmela 73–4 Piazza della Repubblica (Florence) see mercato vecchio (Florence) Piazza Navona (Rome) 54, 55 entertainments 56 Piazza San Carlo (Turin) 141 Piazza San Marco see Venice, Piazza San Marco Piazza Santa Croce (Florence) 141 competing gazes 149 de Chirico’s view 149 Forster’s view 149 Piazza VIII Agosto, Bologna 231 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 11, 12, 112 architect, S. Maria del Priorato, restoration 123 Bird’s Eye View of Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum) 129 Egyptian Obelisk Erected by Sixtus V 130, 131 Le Antichità Romane 123, 124–8 contents 124 Plan of Ancient Rome (1756) 124–5, 125 Plan of Ancient Rome and Index of Ancient Fragments 126

prolific output 123 Vedute di Roma 128–32 View of Ponte Fabrizio 127 Pisa, Beatrice 229 Pius IV, Pope 52 Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” 216 Plautus, comedies 66 Ponti, Gio 163 popes religious authority 47 secular authority 47 Posesso procession 48 Jesuit church of the Gesù on the route 50 of Pope Leo XI 49 public celebration at Campidoglio 49 power relationships, and space 252–3 processions, Papal Rome 56–7 see also Posesso procession Prosperi, Bernardino, on perspectival stage setting 69, 74 prostitutes, Papal Rome 53–4 public space 36 and mass tourism 144, 147 ordered image of 66 Piazze d’Italia (de Chirico) 12 and private space 72 and reality 78 Proprietà di mercato vecchio (Pucci) 10, 20, 23–7 Pucci, Antonio Atkinson on 35–6 life 23–4 Proprietà di mercato vecchio 10, 20, 23–7 analysis 21–2 diversity of characters 25–6 holiday preparations 26 praise of market 24–5 vicissitudes of fortune 26–7 vignette of premodern market 27 Pusan, In Asia (Terzani) 260–1 Pyongyang, In Asia (Terzani) 252–3, 259 Quirinale Hill fashionable area 50 protected space for elite women 53 public gardens 50–1 Rangoon, In Asia (Terzani) 255 Re, Lucia 208, 210–11, 217 realism Castiglione on 65, 71–2 and commedia erudita 66 and perspective 71 Redaldi, Bernardino 104 Renaissance Italy, street singers 27–8 Rimini, colonie (summer camps) 167 Rome abitato and disabitato areas 40–1, 51 Accademia di San Luca 122

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architectural identity 112, 113 Black Death (1348) 42 British architects in 112 earthquake (1348) 42, 44 Egyptian Obelisk 131 identity, blending of ancient and modern 127, 130, 131 map (1748) 59 material decline 40 overloaded streets 51 Piazza Navona, entertainments 56 Ponte Fabrizio 127–8, 127 population decline 42 protocol disputes 51fn43 return of papacy from Avignon 44 Sack of (1527) 48 Severan Marble Plan 125 topographical map (1561) 41 visitor numbers 51 see also Papal Rome Rossano, Teresa, Io sono femminista! (I am a feminist!) (film) 227, 229 Rossi-Doria, Anna 229 ruin tourism former colonie (summer camps) 178, 179 sites 159, 177–9 “The Ruin” (Simmel) 145–6 Sacco, Pier Luigi 140 Saigon, In Asia (Terzani) 253 St. Peter’s Basilica reconsecration 48 symbolism 48 Salzberg, Rosa & Rospocher, Massimo 28 San Giacomo di Rialto, Venice 89 San Giovanni in Laterano, coronation ceremony of popes 48–9 Sansovino, Francesco 83–4, 102 Santa Maria Maddalena convent 53 Sanudo, Marino 87 Sargent, Lyman Tower 217 sceanae frons 11, 69 Schiassi, Sandra 228, 230 Schmeid, Wieland 152 Scholem, Gershom 146 Seger, Monica 186 Seoul, In Asia (Terzani) 260 Serlio, Sebastiano Scena Comica 72–3, 73 Secondo libro di prospettiva 72 Sforza, Caterina Nobili, builder of Foglianti monastery 53 Simmel, Georg 150 “The Ruin” 145–6 Sistine Chapel, election of popes 46–7, 48 Sixtus IV, Pope 53 Sixtus V, Pope builder of Lavaroio Felice 53 and Egyptian Obelisk 130, 131

social control, architecture as 161–3 social relations, space, intertwining 250–1 space characteristics 250 conceptualizing 250 Lefebvre’s three-part theory 250 and power relationships 252–3 protected, for elite women, Quirinale Hill 53 social relations, intertwining 250–1 theorized as neutral container 250 travel as movement in 247 see also city space; empty space; public space; urban space Specchi, Alessandro 11, 112 architect Porta di Ripetta 114, 116–17, 117 St. Peter’s Basilica 115 Architect of the Tribunale delle Strade 114 elected to Accademia di San Luca 114 Il Nuovo Teatro 114, 122 Il Quarto Libro del Nuovo Teatro 114, 118 Palazzo Barberini 120–2, 120, 121 print of Colosseum 115, 116, 116 printmaking 112, 113, 131 Studio d’Architettura Civile 114, 118, 119, 122 vedute (city views) of Rome 113, 114, 115–23 Spinola, Ambrosio 52 stage design, perspective in 66 Stefanini, Piera 228 street life, early modern 22 street singers, Renaissance Italy 27–8 Surat, plague, In Asia (Terzani) 255–6 Surrealism Arcades Project (Benjamin), influence on 142 de Chirico’s influence on 141, 142 Taylor, Michael R. 143, 152 Terence, comedies 66 Terzani, Tiziano expulsion from China 247 fall of Saigon, witness to 247 In Asia 14, 246 Cambodia 252 Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral 254–5 Japan leiure time 256 Mount Fuji 257 Macao, smell of history 253–4 Pusan 260–1 Pyongyang 252–3, 259 Rangoon 255 Saigon, smell of garbage 253 Seoul 260 storytelling 249 Surat, plague 255–6 Tokyo, modernity 258 urban space 247, 261

271

Index

Orientalism concept 247 publications 248fn13 relocation to India 256 Tokyo, modernity, In Asia (Terzani) 258 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio 236–7 Altri libertini 237, 238–9 meeting with Eco 236–7, 240–1 on wine culture 237–8 tourism, Benjamin on 146–7 see also mass tourism; ruin tourism; tourist; travel tourist expectations, and empty space 139–40 flâneur differences 145, 147 similarities 144–5 and locals 145–6 in Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste 145 Promenades dans Rome 144 tourist destinations, Barthes on 139 see also mass tourism Traumfabrik (Factory of Dreams), and Bologna 1977 Movement 13, 233, 234, 235 travel advertising 150 collective 149 as movement in space 247 and mass tourism 144 with a book 248, 248fn14 see also tourism travel writing 144, 247 Trione, Vicenzo 140 Turin, Piazza San Carlo 141 urban life 9 urban space 250 in Asia 247, 261 premodern diversity 35–6 sources 21–3 see also cities urban studies 9 Urban VIII, Pope 48 commission, Fountain of the Bees 55 Urry, John 149 The Tourist Gaze 144 Valla, Lorenzo, on Donation of Constantine 47 Vasi, Giuseppe 123 engraver of vedute 128 Vatican, rebuilding of 46–8 see also Sistine Chapel Venice

churches 92, 93 “consumer revolution” 94–5 craft workers 96 Grand Canal 89 as image of Venetian state 86 luxury goods 95, 98 Mercerie 11, 91, 99–105 etymology of name 99 Evelyn on 88–9, 101 funeral processions 102 location 82 Procurators’ processions 101–2 mercers cloth sellers 103 coveted profession 102–3 decline 104 earnings 103 guild 100 numbers, table 100 Partial perspective (1583) 82 Piazza San Marco 83–4, 83 description by grand touriste 87 markets and fairs 87 Moryson on 87–8 renovation 85–6 view from the Piazetta dei Leoni and San Basso (1960s) 86 Rialto marketplace 89, 90 San Giacomo di Rialto 89, 90, 91 shops 88, 92–4, 100, 105 silk industry 96–7, 99 textile industry 97–8 topographical map (1762) 88 Torre dell’Orologio from the Mercerie 85 Torre dell’Orologio in Piazza San Marco (1960) 83, 84 trade offices 91 traders, diversity of 104 versimilitude, meaning 71 water supply, Papal Rome 54–6 wine alcohol, polarity between 237, 239 conviviality of 239 culture, Tondelli on 237–8 Womack, Peter 71, 72 workerism, development 193–4 world, as theater (theatrum mundi) 210 zanaiuoli (“deliverymen”) 10, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 35 caterers 29 food purveyors 29 Zorzi, Ludovico 70, 74