Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space | G. Giovannoni, S. Ross

giulio giovannoni silvia ross

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space

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saggi | architettura design territorio

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space edited by

giulio giovannoni silvia ross with contributions by teresa v.sรก, luca pocci, richard ingersoll, remi wacogne, francesca mugnai, serena acciai, donata panizza, giulia brecciaroli, marzia beltrami, meris nicoletto, assunta de crescenzo, vincenzo binetti

The essays contained in this volume are the result of activities carried out by the Cross-Disciplinary Urban Space research network. The network was established by Giulio Giovannoni and Silvia Ross in 2015 in order to advance the debate on urban space from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space examines the city and its environment through theoretically-informed essays stemming from a variety of disciplines, including urban planning, architecture, cultural geography, architectural history, heritage studies, film studies, literary studies and photography. Updates on the activities of the research network can be accessed at: www. crossdisciplinaryurbanspace.com.

The volumes are subject to a qualitative process of acceptance and evaluation based on peer review, which is entrusted to the Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture (DIDA) with blind review system. Furthermore, all publications are available on an open-access basis on the Internet, which not only favors their diffusion, but also fosters an effective evaluation from the entire international scientific community.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Florence Publication Fund and of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Studies Research Publication Fund, University College Cork.

graphic design

didacommunicationlab Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Susanna Cerri Benedetta Bizzarri Printed on paper Fedrigoni FreeLife Vellum

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Introduction: Crossdisciplinary Italian Urban Spaces Giulio Giovannoni, Silvia Ross

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PART I. Theorizing Space(S) And The Environment Henri Lefebvre, Urban Society and Everyday Life Teresa V. Sá

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Franco Arminio and the Heterotopia of comunità provvisoria Luca Pocci

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Public Space in the Age of Climate Change Richard Ingersoll

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The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Florentine Peripheries Giulio Giovannoni

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Is There Space for Heritage in Marghera?

Remi Wacogne

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PART II. Representing Urban Space: Literature, Film, Photography The Literary Image of Brunelleschi’s Dome Francesca Mugnai, Serena Acciai

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Florence Overexposed: Early Photography and the Production of the Cinematic City Donata Panizza

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Uncanny City: An Exploration of Milan and Turin in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini (1960s-1970s) Giulia Brecciaroli

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Natalia Ginzburg and Gendered Space: Country, City and House between Fascist Womanhood and Feminist Liberation Silvia Ross

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Urban Space as Cognitive Metaphor?

Suggestions from Alessandro Baricco’s City Marzia Beltrami

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Turin: ‘Narrating Architecture’ Meris Nicoletto

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Naples in Antonella Cilento’s Narrative: “un corpo di animale antico” (“an ancient animal’s body”) Assunta De Crescenzo

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“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”: Narrating Transnational Urban Spaces as Fluid Forms of Resistance and Conflict Vincenzo Binetti

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space edited by

giulio giovannoni silvia ross

Giulio Giovannoni, Silvia Ross

introduction: crossdisciplinary italian urban spaces

Urban Space and Cross-Disciplinarity Urban space is the physical continuum on which human existence and social life unfold, with their complexities and contradictions, conflicts and fights, passions and needs. However, urban space is not simply a container for human and social life, neutral like an empty theatre stage which waits to be used by actors and performers. Although inert and difficult to transform, urban space has a natural tendency to form an indistinguishable whole with the society which inhabits and shapes it. Social structures, as well as power relations, resident cultures, and modes of production are differently encoded within it. Spatial transformations signify social dynamics and changes which are often conflicting and contradictory. Urban planners and designers tend to ignore their controversial and problematic role, hiding themselves behind the supposed neutrality of technical expertise. This is one of the reasons why it is important to reconsider critically the notion of urban space from diverse disciplinary perspectives, in order to gain a better awareness of the many implications of urban design and the representation of the built

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environment in cultural production. At the same time, the use of spatial theory, along with architectural and geographical thought, for instance, can unlock innovative and thought-provoking interpretations of cultural production such as novels, short stories, film, art or photography, providing thus a new window not only on our views of these texts but also contributing to a deepening of understanding within the Humanities of pressing urban and environmental issues.

We are convinced, therefore, of the benefits of a cross-disciplinary study of the topic of urban space, and maintain that the different points of view represented here enable original insights into timely questions concerning urban life, society and space. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including urban design, literary studies, film studies, photography, and urban and architectural history. Drawing on case studies predominantly from modern and contemporary Italy, the collection of essays serves to juxtapose these diverse perspectives on the theme of urban space in novel and stimulating ways, ranging from a reconsideration of classic spatial theory (Lefebvre), to representations of urban spaces across Italy (Florence, Milan, Turin, Naples, Marghera), and consideration of the environmental implications of climate change on the built environment.

Cross-disciplinarity/Interdisciplinarity/Transdisciplinarity and Originality of Thought Much has been published on the concept of Interdisciplinarity, especially as many higher education institutions have in recent years been extolling the practice (although,

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admittedly, not always for entirely convincing pedagogical or epistemological reasons)1. That said, as a research practice, cross-disciplinary investigations yield, in our experience, original insights and have served to foster creative synergies, leading to thought processes that might otherwise remain obscure or inaccessible.

Our intent here is not to disparage a discipline-based formation, in fact, precisely the opposite: we are firmly convinced of the need for individual disciplines and the value in disciplines defining themselves and forming scholars within their recognized and commonly-defined spheres. As researchers, we credit our deep engagement with our respective disciplines as having given us the key instruments with which to interpret our fields and, in turn, as having furnished us with the tools with which to teach our discipline to undergraduate and graduate students. At the same time, we wish to underscore that it is precisely when different disciplines come into contact with each other that a sparking-off of critical thought often takes place, allowing us to pay attention to some neglected aspect of our subject and enabling a cross-polli-

We have opted for the term ‘cross-disciplinarity’ but, for all intents and purposes, are using it interchangeably with ‘interdisciplinarity’ or ‘transdisciplinarity’. We have not made a distinction here, but others have sought to do so: “Some scholars draw clear distinctions between research that is cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary (contributions from two or more fields to a research problem), interdisciplinary or pluridisciplinary (integration of knowledge originating in two or more fields), or trans-disciplinary (knowledge produced jointly by disciplinary experts and social practitioners) […]. Others are more comfortable with looser distinctions.

We count ourselves among the latter group and in this article use interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity as general terms for describing interrelationships among academic disciplines” (Jacobs and Frickel 45).

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nation of concepts that would otherwise not occur2. Furthermore, certain over-arching themes, ideas or theories often cut across disciplinary borders; that said, there is a clear usefulness to attempting to understand just how differently interpreted such meta-themes are, according to subject area.

Critics have regularly indicated the advantages of inderdisciplinarity with respect to generating new thought and creativity. Patrick Dunleavy, for instance, states that: being original in the modern social sciences and humanities is rarely about coming up with an entirely new way of looking at things. Instead, it is mostly a more modest activity. Here originality involves encountering an established idea or viewpoint or method in one part of your discipline (or in a neighbouring discipline) and then taking that idea for a walk and putting it down somewhere else, applying it in a different context or for a different purpose. This characteristic also explains why the fringes of disciplines are often the most productive areas for new approaches. It is here that scholars are often most actively borrowing or adapting ideas developed in one discipline to do work in another (p. 40).

Dunleavy’s comments on working on the margins of disciplines and the advantages of slippage across subject borders constitute a form of advice to doctoral candidates who are seeking to articulate their research project’s contribution to existing knowledge.

Carol Becker, on the other hand, in her article ‘Interdisciplinarity’, reflects on her own work across disciplinary Interdisciplinarity is not without its sceptics: sociologists Jacobs and Frickel, for example, critically examine the concept and remain unconvinced of the superiority of interdisciplinary knowledge over disciplinary knowledge (p. 60).

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boundaries. The critic explains that she received a ‘vertical’ training in her subject (English Literature) but that when she started teaching in an Art Institute she realized how much creativity was in fact linked to reflection on the creative process and to working across different areas (drawing, sculpture, video, etc.). Thus, she also advocates thinking that is ‘horizontal’, that is, across disciplines, since subject boundaries can be too restrictive: Fields have expanded and exploded as thoughts have changed. Such movement could be understood as a revolution in thinking or similar to that which occurs in the development of language, simply a natural evolution. Ideas locked into a disciplinary structure too prescriptive and constrictive to contain all the thinking and doing that emanates from them, eventually move on to create new manifestations, to break free of the restrictions that once defined them and limited their growth. (pp. 197-98)3

Significantly, Becker stresses the necessity for opening our boundaries by discussing our situatedness in the world, leading her to articulate the importance of crossing boundaries in spatial terms: The world we now stand in requires us to be able to move both vertically and horizontally, in a way both deep and wide. We need to understand the dynamics of our immediate situation; the place we call home in the physical and intellectual sense But we must also come to know the world we live in globally, the places that are Other, the not-home.

3 Becker thoughtfully concludes her piece, saying “borders are crossed and disciplines merge and intertwine daily. Our job as cultural producers is to embrace these changes with the right mix of interrogation, rigor, and enthusiasm. At the same time, we must recognize that at the core of creativity is a blend of the new, the revised, the rethought, and the reimagined, all attempting to manifest the what through endless permutations of, and debates around, the how” (pp. 207-08).

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We need to be able to understand where we are in relationship to the totality, since our daily lives are so directly related to this totality—from the food we eat, the products we buy, the books we read and the films we see, to the people down the block and to the wars being fought in our name.

We no longer live in cultural isolation: all is interrelated.

In this sense we have become tourists, pilgrims, nomads and travellers in our daily lives, even if we never leave home and simply—or not so simply—cohabitate in urban life with people who have immigrated from various other nations. What is now our cultural touchstone, or point of reference, if not this strange amalgam of familiar and foreign—the terrain we negotiate between? (pp. 203-04)

Interestingly, Becker anchors her discourse of interdisciplinarity within the lived environment, comparing an openness to Otherness facilitated by intellectual cross-fertilization to abiding in an urban environment which includes ethnic and cultural diversity.

Cross-disciplinarity and Literary Studies: the Impact of Spatial Theory on Literary Criticism Literary criticism is no stranger to engagement with diverse disciplines: continental philosophy, for example, has furnished the building bricks of critical theory such as Deconstruction or Postmodernism. Social movements, too, such as Feminism, have exerted an enormous and even revolutionary influence on textual criticism and have given rise to ground-breaking work on Gender and Sexuality Studies, both in literary studies and beyond. Furthermore, Environmentalism’s intersection with literary analysis has led to the birth of approaches such as Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism and, more recently, the literary and philosophical current of Post-humanism or Environmen-

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tal Humanities. These developments have spawned many publications which apply these philosophical currents to a wide variety of national literatures and which have given rise to journals such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 4, and Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Art5.

Given the scope of this volume, it seems particularly pertinent to explore the area of influence of Geographical thought on literary studies, and its profound impact on how we read aspects of the text, canonical features such as setting or descriptive passages, and the interplay between character and background, for example. Such synergies have given rise to the approach now known as Geocriticism, or similar, related disciplinary convergences such as Spatial Humanities and Urban Humanities, new modes of approaching textual interpretation which have inspired the founding of journals such as Literary Geographies6. For instance, the related area of literary urban studies has been gaining increasing interest, as witnessed by such publications as Intellect’s Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, which embraces scholarship that crosses the humanities/social science divide, or the new dedicated series on literary urban studies published by Palgrave, which also envisions an intersection between literary studies and cultural geography, urban planning, and urban history. Related edited collections by Palgrave include Literary Second Cities (2017), co-edited by Finch, https://academic.oup.com/isle, consulted 2/2/2018. http://www.ecozona.eu, consulted 2/2/2018.

6 http://literarygeographies.net, consulted 2/2/2018. See also Westphal (2007), as well as Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu (2016).

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Ameel and Salmela, as well as Literature and the Peripheral City (2015), edited by Ameel. The monumental Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, also provides a wide range of essays addressing the city across a span of national literatures and diverse cities. While the aforementioned volumes provide a global overview of urban space and literature, there are few references to Italian cities or literature.

It is these interdisciplinary cross-pollinations that are responsible for burgeoning new areas and innovative research that is capable of transcending conventional boundaries, such as those between the humanities, social sciences and the spatial. And while this tendency towards cross-pollination between disciplines has affected literary scholarship more generally, it also has exerted a profound effect on Italian Studies, as Brook, Mussgnug and Pieri have noted: Cultural Studies and transnational perspectives have opened up the scholarly field and encouraged a move away from mono-disciplinary, nation-bound modes of enquiry towards a stronger interest in studying patterns of connectivity. Moving between disciplinary, artistic and medial boundaries is now common and has strong institutional backing (2017, p. 381).

The intersection between the spatial and the literary has resulted in a blossoming of publications produced by Italianists which address the city and Italian culture, reflecting the tendency to put different subject areas in dialogue with each other7.

A couple of examples of this current include John Foot and Robert Lumley’s edited collection on the Italian city (2004), as well as work by

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Cross-disciplinarity, Urban Studies and Urban Planning Urban studies is in itself a field of research in which diverse disciplinary perspectives are employed to interpret complex socio-spatial phenomena, the understanding of which implies the use of multiple interpretive lenses. In urban planning, the combination of the technical approaches typical of the engineering tradition with humanistic and literary approaches appears to be particularly fertile and relevant. The main theoretical justification for this type of disciplinary contamination is given

by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space production. According to the French philosopher, the production of space takes place on three levels: the symbolic/cultural level, the physical/designed level, and the social/lived-space level. These three dimensions of space production intertwine in complex and not immediately recognizable ways. It is important to focus briefly on the relationship between cultural production and physical production of space, as this is what really links and justifies the use of literary and cultural representations in the urban planning domain.

Urban and planning policies are built through discursive practices, i.e. through a process of interaction between different actors and stakeholders. Pier Luigi Crosta rightly defines planning as a process of multiple interactions. In this process, urban and territorial representations play an important role. By transferring a concept of Freudian psychoanalysis to urban policy-making, one might say that Monica Seger (2015), Serenella Iovino (2016), Enrico Cesaretti and Elena Past in the burgeoning area of Ecocriticism and Italian culture. For more on Italian literature and spatial studies, see also S. Ross (2013).

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representations of places contribute to building the ‘setting’ that delimits the field of admissible discursive and argumentative practices, as well as to define legitimate policy options. By ‘setting’, psychoanalysts mean the physical and functional environment within which the psychoanalytic relationship takes place, the organizational rules of the ‘analytical contract’, and the relational rules that regulate the analyst-analyzing relationship. Each discursive practice aimed at building a policy agenda is based on its own setting, made of representations and rules, mostly implicit and shared.

Diverse cultural products – e.g. literary, filmic, journalistic, photographic and pictorial – contribute to create the shared representations of places on which policies are based. These representations enter the political decision-making process almost unconsciously. They define how a place ‘should be’ and thus contribute to clearly distinguishing between eligible and non-eligible policy options. However, the cultural production of places is never uniform nor homogeneous. Underneath the thick media patina of places as stereotypes there are minority representations that can do justice to the complexity of reality. Therefore, the use that an urban planner – and more generally an urban policy-maker – can make of literary, filmic, and journalistic sources is always complex and diversified. For example, it can consist of deconstructing stereotypical images that are far from reality but can produce unequal and unjust outputs. Or it can aim to discover and bring to light minority and hidden representations with the aim of subverting hegemonically constructed

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‘settings’. By so doing, alternative policy-making scenarios can be constructed, that would be otherwise unimaginable. In any case, the cultural production of space and its physical construction inevitably go hand in hand, so a fully responsible planner can only move simultaneously on these two levels. Interdisciplinarity, therefore, is not an option but an essential condition for constructing effective and socially just policies.

Urban Space: Why the City?

Everything happens in space! In the course of the twentieth century all disciplines, from philosophy to sociology, from economics to literature, made this discovery, which apparently should not appear as an intellectual bombshell. In fact, all these disciplines have been featured by a real ‘spatial shift’, i.e. they have placed space at the centre of their reflection. Henri Lefebvre opened his masterly work, The Production of Space, published for the first time in French in 1974, with the following words: Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’, and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space’, therefore, would have sounded strange.

The French philosopher pointed out the substantial absence of space from sociological reflection and its progressive expulsion from philosophy towards the physical and mathematical sciences. Before Lefebvre, the analysis of social conflict was basically de-spatialized and most-

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ly focused on the notion of ‘class’. The political and sociological debates on social justice were once again based on the a-spatial concepts of alienation and exploitation. It is mainly thanks to Lefebvre that space was placed at the forefront of the analysis of social conflict and power dynamics.

A similar transformation occurred in the field of Economics. In Italy, starting from the 1960s, the research of some important economists and socio-economists placed space and local territorial systems at the centre of their investigations into the development of small and medium enterprise systems. The works of Giacomo Becattini, Arnaldo Bagnasco, Carlo Trigilia, went beyond the basically a-spatial economic models of neo-classical economics, to study the dynamics of economic development within very specific social, spatial and historical contexts. In 1966, the fundamental work of the German economist Johann Heinrich Von Thunen was translated into English for the first time, his 1826 Theory of the Isolated State, considered the first spatial economic theory. This was perhaps the most obvious sign of the occurrence of a fundamental spatial shift in the field of economic studies.

The discovery of space within literary studies is a more recent phenomenon and dates back to the late 1980s. The fact that any story, real or imaginary, is inherently spatial has justified and given strength to the use of spatial theories developed in different disciplinary fields for the interpretation of literary texts. Even mnemonic studies have an intrinsically spatial dimension, as demonstrated by the fascinating mnemonic/spatial constructions developed throughout history, and magnificently described by

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Frances A. Yates in her famous book The Art of Memory.

While different disciplines converge in placing space at the centre of their reflection, there is no doubt that spatial and urban studies can only be a field of interdisciplinary research. But why ‘urban space’ and not ‘geographical space’? Because just as the different disciplines reorganized their theoretical and empirical investigations in the rediscovery of the the centrality of physical space, cities grew in size and importance. In 1950 the urban population of the planet was estimated at 746 million, or 30% of the world’s population. Sixty-four years later, in 2014, the world urban population was 3.9 billion, corresponding to 54% of the total. In 2050, according to UN estimates, the percentage of the planet’s urban population will be 66% of the total, so the world will be a predominantly urban world.

This massive urbanization of the planet poses a number of challenges of enormous magnitude: environmental and ecological, social and economic. These challenges can only be addressed by equipping ourselves with adequate interpretative and conceptual tools. An interdisciplinary reflection on urban space, therefore, can only be at the centre of the investigative agenda of all those scholars who attribute to their research work a social function for the whole community.

Description of Contributions The diverse essays included in this collection explore space and the built environment in the modern and contemporary period and encompass a range of primarily Italian urban spheres. The volume is structured in two parts: an initial, more theoretical section on urban space (cov-

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ering Lefebvre; the concept of heteropia; non-places and urban peripheries; urban heritage and the impact of climate change on the urban sphere); and a second section which highlights the literary and visual representation of Italian cities, including Florence, Naples, Milan, and Turin, across genres (novels, travel writing, detective fiction) and media (cinema; photography).

Part I. Theorizing Space(s) and the Environment The starting point of Teresa Sa’s ‘Henri Lefebvre, urban society and everyday life’ is the work of Lefebvre – a key thinker whose theories resurface throughout many of the contributions in this volume – looking, specifically, at his critique of urban practice and urban planning as it was practiced in France in the aftermath of World War II, under the aegis of the state and of the government. The essay focuses on Lefebvre’s criticisms of post-war urban planning, and on his proposals towards what he called a ‘new urbanism’. One of the central aspects of his critique, as developed in Right to the City (Le Droit à la ville, 1968), has to do with the way in which urbanism emerges as a scientific and positive theory that would solve all the problems of the city. Viewing urban planning as a technique that can solve planning problems as well as social problems, without questioning their underlying causes in the capitalist system, amounts to covering up urbanism’s ideological basis, which is the capitalist ideology in its technocratic version. For Lefebvre, space is a social product, the result of a particular social, economic, and political setup. Sa maintains that you cannot think of urban space as something external to society, to its prevailing values, the

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dominant culture, and the existing power relations. Thus proposals presented by urban planners are not merely applied techniques, but also expressions of ideology. Urbanism is not a value-neutral technique that can transform the territory: every urban plan assumes a set of values connected with a particular conception the city, and such values ought to be explicitly stated in planning proposals. In his proposals for a ‘New Urbanism’, Lefebvre refers planners to the old city, in which ‘habiter’ (dwelling) was more important than ‘habitat’. As well as using ‘transduction,’ a method in which practice and theory are intertwined, planners should also take into account the inhabitants’ systems of meaning. Based that knowledge, urban planning will be the product, not of the strategies and restrictions of power, but of the strategies and acts of those who inhabit the territory.

In ‘Franco Arminio and the Heterotopia of comunità provvisoria’, Luca Pocci maintains that Arminio is arguably one of the most original and controversial voices in contemporary Italy. An interesting aspect of Arminio’s anti-systematic style of thought is the concept of ‘comunità provvisoria,’ which is intimately linked to his sustained meditation on a marginal and neglected Italy, the Italy of the thousands and thousands of ordinary ‘paesi’, more often than not located off the beaten track of the Belpaese and, consequently, of mass tourism. In this essay, Pocci discusses the heterotopic implications of Arminio’s ‘comunità provvisoria’ and its resistance to the dominant discourses of globalism and glocalism. He argues that the raison d’être of the ‘comunità provvisoria’ is neither a defensive and/or nostalgic return to the sup-

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posed virtue(s) of country life, nor the expression of a clichéd anti-modernism fueled by an unconditional rejection of the space of the city and city life in general. Rather, Arminio’s ‘comunità provvisoria’ can be seen as an attempt at thinking community outside the box of the current hegemonic doxa of city-based communal living and urban modes of being. This (re)thinking takes place within the context of the paesi of Southern Italy, a geographical and cultural context whose marginality assumes the characteristics and function of an overall heterotopia of civil deviation. In discussing the heterotopic community envisaged by Arminio, Pocci’s analysis relies, in particular, on Foucault’s theory, on Agamben’s idea of ‘comunità inessenziale’, and on the concept of ‘becoming minoritarian’ proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Pocci’s goal is to show that Arminio’s model of community implies a form of identity that brings together Agamben’s idea of ‘singolarità qualunque’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s radical call to embrace a minoritarian ethos of deviation from the norm.

Richard Ingersoll’s contribution, ‘Public Space in the Age of Climate Change’, confronts us with the two main contemporary transformations of environment and society and with how these affect – and will increasingly affect in the near future – the way we relate ourselves to public spaces. The first of these transformations is the widespread diffusion of Wi-Fi connectivity and the fact that our social life is increasingly based on the use of web-connected digital devices. The importance of the square and the street has progressively decreased and the use of space is increasingly mediated by digital technologies. The second trans-

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formation, on which the author’s contribution is mainly focused, is the rapid and progressive climate change. Seventy percent of the world’s large cities will see their spaces threatened by the increase in water levels, which is estimated at between 0.2 and 2 metres during the 21st Century. This will strongly impact the way public spaces are designed. Ingersoll assesses this impact against five criteria that, according to William H. Whyte, determine the quality of public spaces: access, comfort, the fact of having a balanced density of political and commercial functions that provide some points of attraction, access to democratic attractions such as water, arts and sports, the fact of achieving what Whyte defines as ‘triangulation’, a concept that is reinterpreted by Ingersoll as ‘biographical diversity’. The author then reviews some spatial solutions conceived by different cities from Venice to Rotterdam, from New York to Freiburg, which together demonstrate that adaptation to climate change will become one of the main factors in the reorganization of cities and of their public spaces, which will have to both perform ecologically while offering a sense of place for the Wi-Fi generation.

In ‘The Social Life of Non-Places: Lessons from Florence’s Peripheries’, Giulio Giovannoni argues that the concept of non-place used by Marc Augé to define some of the main spaces of the contemporary city is an ideological device, a harbinger of negative effects on urban planning and policy-making. A non-place is essentially defined as a space without identity and history in which no social life is possible. Augé’s book is dominated by a clear nostalgic accent, which can also be discerned in works by many of the great critics of contemporary urbanization, in-

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cluding Henri Lefebvre. Giovannoni’s basic thesis is that Augé’s non-places are in fact the main social spaces in the suburbs and that their dystopian representation prevents policy-makers from adequately understanding, regulating and designing them. His thesis is supported by an empirical social life analysis of two petrol stations and of a large shopping centre – i.e. two typical non-places, according to Augé’s criteria – on the outskirts of Florence and Prato, in Tuscany. The result of this analysis confirms that these spaces are rich in social life and have all the potential to be designed as fully successful social spaces. Giovannoni contends that for this to happen, however, we need to get rid of the negative label with which they are usually identified. Such a label in fact prevents us from recognising their potential and from investing the necessary resources in them. Dystopian narrations of non-places, therefore, contribute to further exacerbating the existing centre-periphery dualism, where the centre is well equipped and continuously improved, whereas the peripheries are substantially neglected.

In ‘Is There Space for Heritage in Marghera?’ Remi Wacogne contends that recent studies in the field of heritage have been characterised by a more comprehensive approach, based on a revision of the concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘value’. Urban heritage has, in turn, received much attention by researchers and professionals, as well as by local and international organisations, as exemplified by the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. The ‘historic urban landscape approach’ it endorses offers a substantial contribution to cross-disciplinary perspectives on urban space by emphasising the ‘organi-

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city’ of historic urban cores and their articulation with surrounding areas, as well as by introducing the intangible dimension of their heritage. Although it does not appear to correspond to the usual definition – at least in Italy – of historic urban cores, the città giardino or ‘garden city’ in Marghera has undergone a remarkable conservation process. As such, what does its heritage consist of, Wacogne asks. Furthermore: who defines it as such and how? And what are the implications of such conservation process for Marghera’s urban space? The città giardino provides an interesting limit case study, in that it allows us to inquire into the very ‘making’ of urban heritage, the opportunities it offers, as well as the critical issues it presents.

Part II. Representing Urban Space: Literature, Film, Photography This second section focuses on Italian cities and their representation in modern and contemporary cultural production, in particular in literature, film and photography.

The section opens with Francesca Mugnai and Serena Acciai’s ‘The literary image of Brunelleschi’s Dome’. The authors explain that from the time of Leon Battista Alberti until today, travellers, writers, artists and architects have meditated upon Brunelleschi’s Dome. Along with its architectural value as a product of a highly technical genius, they have seen the close connection of the Dome with the city of Florence and its surrounding hills. This indissoluble bond has determined the shape and proportions of the Dome, but has also inspired the very structure of Florence itself. Nevertheless, recent writings suggest that during the second half of the twentieth century this bond

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has gradually loosened, transforming what was the physical and visual fulcrum of the city, from being a unique majestic landmark of the valley, into an isolated element with no relation to the magma of the new city. Today, maintain Mugnai and Acciai, it is reduced to a holographic icon for rushed tourists and a trivial idol for nostalgic Florentines. Tracing the evolution of the iconography of the Dome in literature through writers such as Charles Dickens, Stendhal, Herman Hesse, Vasco Pratolini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giorgio Manganelli – (to mention a few), or through architects – Leon Battista Alberti, Le Corbusier, Giovanni Michelucci and Edoardo Detti (among others) –, offers an unusual perspective from which to observe the transformation of the city. This view considers such detail as key to understanding the general; in other words, it considers architecture as a prime element of the city along with the complex interweaving of the mutual relationships between buildings, as well as between buildings and the surrounding landscape. In newly-built areas such connections seem to be weak and incapable of generating specific urban spaces: the paradigm of Brunelleschi’s Dome and its current isolation can offer an opportunity to reflect on how to intervene in the contemporary city.

The Tuscan capital also features in the subsequent contribution, ‘Florence Overexposed: Early Photography and the Production of the Cinematic City’. The author, Donata Panizza, explains how, in 1852 Florence, as the city’s resonance as ‘Italian Athens’ was blooming internationally, the Alinari brothers took on the burgeoning photographic medium and in a few decades produced a vast archive of photographs of the urban locale’s Me-

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dieval and Renaissance heritage, which circulated widely throughout Europe and the United States. However deliberate the Alinari’s attempts to frame historic monuments and areas were, their photos contained traces of mid-to late-nineteenth-century urban upheaval, as Florence changed its medieval structure to become a modern city and the capital of newly unified Italy from 1865 to 1871. The Alinari photographs’ tension between the establishment of the myth of Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance and an uneasy attitude towards modernization, at once cherished and feared, produced a complex and multi-layered city portrait, where notions of memory and progress, heritage and industry coexist in an unstable balance. The visual and conceptual power of such a portrait still affects the ways in which Florence is represented today, as is revealed by the analysis of three films partially set in the city – Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), James Ivory’s A Room with a View (1986), and Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). By drawing upon the vast repository of urban issues embodied in the Alinari photographs, these films establish Florence as the place where something crucial happens, which sets the plot in motion. The reference to renowned photographic views of Florence enables the films to address issues still relevant for today’s urban space such as, respectively, the conflicting needs of a speculative and an affective approach to architecture, the possibility of an emotional interaction with the city, and the mediated nature of the relationship with the urban environment.

In another essay on literature and the city, gender figures predominantly. In ‘Natalia Ginzburg and Gendered

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Space: Country, City and House between Fascist Womanhood and Feminist Liberation’, Silvia Ross argues that the rural/urban dynamic and the domestic sphere constitute key spatial and textual tropes in two novels by the renowned Italian writer. In her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City, 1942), Ginzburg presents characters who live in the provinces and view urban space as dynamic centres of life. This is the attitude of the protagonist, Delia, who functions as a flâneuse, as she walks to and through urban streets in her youth, only to be relegated to the rural sphere when she becomes pregnant outside of marriage. The book rejects (but at the same time upholds) Fascist rhetoric on motherhood and women’s domestic roles, portraying characters who have bourgeois aspirations to a home, while at the same time problematizing the role of the mother and the stereotypical family.

Published over four decades later, the novel La città e la casa (The City and the House, 1984), reveals an even greater obsession with the domestic sphere, and sets up a contrast between an idealized country villa outside Perugia, and Roman apartments and real estate. At the same time, Ginzburg’s last novel revolves around characters who explore alternative living arrangements, and thus dismantles the canonical notion of the family, reflecting a changing Italian society in the wake of second-wave feminism. Clearly both texts, while appearing at polar opposite ends of Ginzburg’s long literary career, reflect but also largely undermine women’s (subordinate) role in Italian society, while exploring the rural-urban dynamic and the importance of domestic space of the home.

The following chapter concerns the relationship between

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literature and the Northern Italian urban sphere in the mid-twentieth century. Giulia Brecciaroli’s ‘Uncanny City: An Exploration of Milan and Turin in the work of Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini’ investigates how Milan and Turin have been portrayed in a series of crime stories and novels, written by Giorgio Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini between the late 1950s and the 1970s. The texts are analyzed as a response to accelerated urbanization, following Italy’s post-war economic ‘boom’ (traditionally dated 1958-62), which is commonly read as a landmark in the country’s recent history. Milan and Turin were radically reshaped by industrialization: they were flooded with masses of newcomers arriving from the Northern provinces and the poorer areas of the South, and spread outwards at the expense of the surrounding countryside. In particular, Brecciaroli’s essay examines how the work of Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini articulates the city as a mental framework in which urban spaces are often sites for the emergence of feelings of estrangement, and, in so doing, aims to shed light on the type of modernity that was promoted in the boom years in Italy. Literary analysis draws on psychoanalytic approaches to the study of urban space. Central to the discussion are the Freudian concept of the uncanny, of which is provided a historical interpretation in relation to the Italian case, and Henri Lefebvre’s idea of urban unconscious as the re-emergence of aspects that ought to have remained concealed and excluded from the dominant organization of space.

In ‘Urban Space as Cognitive Metaphor? Suggestions from Alessandro Baricco’s City’, Beltrami opines that

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in the novel City (1999) Baricco encourages his readers to rely on their experience of urban space as a template to make sense of the narrative. Beltrami offers an alternative interpretation of City based on the assumption that the ‘city’ evoked by the title does not actually indicate the theme of the novel but rather works as a cognitive metaphor. The urban metaphor, in other words, indicates how readers should make sense of the narrative as a whole, rather than what the narrative represents. By arguing this, Beltrami accounts for the presence in Baricco’s novel of several of what Marc Augé (2008) has described as ‘non-places’; and yet claims that addressing them by adopting Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia offers a better alignment with the overall reading of the novel, as it endorses the interpretive shift from ‘city’ as a theme to ‘city’ as a cognitive metaphor. This contribution opens up an innovative interpretive path in geocriticism by incorporating a cognitive perspective and thus suggesting that more abstract narrative elements, such as plot, might also be understood and explored as spaces.

Meris Nicoletto’s essay “Turin: ‘narrating architecture’”, focuses on the role of Turin as a character in the three films directed by Davide Ferrario: Tutti giù per terra (1997), Dopo mezzanotte (2003), La luna su Torino (2013). According to Nicoletto, with Tutti giù per terra, Ferrario makes Turin a city which narrates the endless wanderings of an anti-hero, a new flâneur lacking all certainties. The result is a hostile territory where encounters happen by chance and human relationships are doomed to failure. The film Dopo mezzanotte fully realizes Ferrario’s imaginative experience of the urban landscape as

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a ‘narrating architecture’. The Mole Antonelliana is the magical centre of gravity from which the characters’ stories originate and where they end. At the same time, it is also the space of sight, as the Mole has recently become the seat of the National Museum of Cinema. In La luna su Torino, the post-industrial urban landscape is still a mute character yet capable of expressing that sense of instability typical of those who live on the 45º parallel, the metaphor for the existential pain and loneliness in the urban environment.

Moving to a Southern Italian urban space, in ‘Naples in Antonella Cilento’s Narrative: “un corpo di animale antico” (“an ancient animal’s body”), Assunta De Crescenzo uses the following quote from the writer to illustrate the representation of her native city: Can you imagine a body without inhabitants? It is impossible. Naples is a crowded and confused body, tormented by beings. It is in the rare moments of silence and rest that beauty is stronger, stronger than anything else.

These words, states De Crescenzo, best illustrate Antonella Cilento’s image of Naples, where she was born and now lives and works as a renowned, award-winning journalist and writer. In Napoli sul mare luccica (Naples over the sea it shines, Laterza, 2006), the protagonist, that is, the writer herself, wanders the streets of her city, reflecting on its history, tradition, and current state – her childhood memories mixing with today’s busy urban life. Her agile, direct prose is stimulating, the texture of her page rich and wittily thought-provoking. The city’s different areas, each with their own set of social and linguistic codes, are absorbed by the global metropolis, without ever losing their essen-

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tial characteristics. Therefore, to the reader’s eye, Naples is the real protagonist, with its geomorphic configuration and urban structure, with its peculiarities, limits, and huge potential. Thus, literary space is urban space, and urban space is life space, a sort of mirror which reflects people’s thoughts and feelings from a millenary tradition, with its industrious efforts, its problems, struggles, defeats and successful results. The present essay aims at analyzing the city’s main traits which emerge from the author’s pages. Like Fabrizia Ramondino’s beautiful narrative, or Luciano De Crescenzo’s humorously urbane writings, Antonella Cilento’s work elicits not only solid, rational considerations, but also an emotional response, by deconstructing Naples’ oleographic images and, at the same time, revealing a new symbology, made up of perseverance, creativity and strength of will.

Vincenzo Binetti’s “‘We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us’: narrating transnational urban spaces as fluid forms of resistance and conflict” investigates how specific literary texts characterizing ‘migrant literature’ today in Italy may indeed problematize and (re)negotiate the ways in which urban spaces and communities are commonly perceived and ‘imagined.’ These ‘micro-stories’ narrated by decentralized and nomadic subjects end up, in fact, provocatively and effectively deconstructing and fragmenting preconceived and categorical representations of public spaces, borders, and monumental landscapes – which often constitute ‘iconic’ and symbolic points of references necessary to propagandize an official, collective and homogeneous ‘mapping’ of Italian

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national identity and its territoriality – giving voice, at the same time, to more fluid, potentially destabilizing and subversive cultural-political discourses of resistance and antagonism.

The cities concerned in the various essays reflect in many cases the historical context of Italian society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, reacting to changes in settlement patterns, changing ideas of the nation, industrial development, social movements, environmental transformations and migratory patterns. At the same time, they illustrate innovations in representative devices, moving from literature to photography to cinema. Grounded in spatial theories, the contributions in this volume constitute a rich palette of approaches to urban space, showcasing the potential of juxtaposing diverse methods of analysis and highlighting crucial issues in urban life. In sum, the diversity of disciplines and areas addressed by this collection reflects the potential of transdisciplinary methods which revolve around the spatial, and how these can intersect and shed new light on the cities we inhabit, represent, research, theorize and plan.

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Bibliography Ameel L. ed. 2015, Literature and the Peripheral City, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Becker C. 2004, Interdisciplinarity, «Symploke», vol. 12, n. 1-2, pp. 191208.

Brook C., Mussgnug F., Pieri G. 2017, Italian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, «Italian Studies», vol. 72, n. 4, pp. 380-392.

Crosta P.L. 1995, La politica del piano, Milano, FrancoAngeli.

Dunleavy P. 2003, Authoring a PhD. How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation, Palgrave, Basingstoke.

Finch J., Ameel L., Salmela M. eds. 2017, Literary Second Cities, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Foot J., Lumley R. 2004, Italian cityscapes: culture and urban change in contemporary Italy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter.

Iovino S. 2016, Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, Bloomsbury, Basingstoke.

Iovino S., Cesaretti E., Past E. eds. 2018, Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.

Jacobs J., S. Frickel 2009, Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment, «Annual Review of Sociology», vol. 35, pp. 43-65.

Lefebvre H. 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford.

Ross S. 2013, Space, Place and Italian Literature: Writing a Region, «Italian Studies» vol. 68, n. 3, pp. 448-59.

Ryan M-L., Foote K., Azaryahu M. 2016, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative. Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, Ohio State University Press, Columbus.

Seger M. 2015, Landscapes in between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Tambling J. 2016, The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Von Thunen J. H. 1966, Isolated State: an English Edition of Der Isolierte Staat, Oxford, Pergamon Press.

Yates F. 1966, Art of Memory, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Westphal B. 2007, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, R. Tally, trans., Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011.

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part i theorizing space(s) and the environment

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henri lefebvre, urban society and everyday life Teresa V. Sá University of Lisbon

Introduction According to Sandrine Deulceux and Rémi Hess (2009), there are two major themes in Henri Lefebvre’s work: the everyday and the urban. There is a clear relationship between these two objects: the urban reflects the macroeconomic transformations of capitalist society; the everyday (the micro level) reflects transformations in the time, pace, and ways of life of different social groups. This is not a deterministic process: the ‘macro’ never determines the ‘micro’, but it does involve it, control it, and submit it to regulations, conducts and behaviours.

On the one hand, the ‘macro’ endeavours (although through the actions of privileged individuals, leaders) to contain, absorb and reduce the ‘micro’. It never manages to do so fully. It fails, but never completely. The ‘micro’ resists despite its ambiguities, or thanks to them (2014a, p.

144 [1962])1.

Throughout the text, two dates have been used for to Henri Lefebvre’s books: the date on which they were first published and the date of the books used for this article. This makes it easier to contextualise his thought in time. The two dates will also be included in the bibliography at the end. The translations of quotations are the author’s responsibility.

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This is a dialectic, conflicted and mobile but also complementary relationship – one term cannot exist without the other. For that reason, the everyday is made via two routes: the local and the global, the micro and the macro (ibid., p. 125).

For Lefebvre, reflecting on the urban and the everyday at the same time involves adopting a new strategy according to which scientific and political thought come together: Knowledge is not defined by its epistemological purity but by its critical reach (in Deulceux p. 52).

Although I cannot take up the story of how Lefebvre’s work was received scientifically and politically, it is perhaps opportune to add that to a large extent I share the view expressed in the following fairly long quotation of Marcelo Lopes de Souza (2014): it cannot be denied that he [Lefebvre] captured several important aspects of economic trends, political and cultural characteristics and a sense of the struggles of today’s world, which was already perfectly outlined during the 1960s and 1970s. […] In the 1980s and even in the 1990s, Henri Lefebvre [… was] also translated into English, and his writings therefore spread much more widely […]. And then, at the beginning of the 21st century, the explosion of interest […] – a variety of protests and movements against gentrification, for more and better public spaces, against real estate deals and horse-trading, against sporting mega-events and their consequences for residential segregation and wasted public resources […] – found a slogan in the “right to the city” banner that fit like a glove. As one would expect, this fed back into academic curiosity. And that is not all. As one would also expect, it instigated the desire of governments and NGOs […] to use the same expression for their official programmes and so-called ‘social inclusion’

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projects. Containing a radical demand, […] the slogan has gradually been appropriated by a whole variety of actors, not infrequently with the goal of legitimating state intervention and policy.

In fact, Lefebvre’s argument is very clear regarding the study of the urban. What is in question here is not understanding the city today, nor how it was before, but thinking about how we want it to be, how we imagine it in the future. For Lefebvre, this does not mean taking an anti-scientific stance because, as he says, reality itself is in constant transformation. When we think about the ‘real’ based on the ‘possible’, we do not start with another reality external to the reality studied. We start with its internal movement and what is possible (2014a, p. 204/205 [1962]).

If the city is constantly transformed, do we have nothing to say about those transformations? The present contains the seeds of the future. Social scientists should have the ability to foresee and propose a path that moves towards the range of values underlying the society that we wish to build. As Laurence Costes says, when talking about Lefebvre’s thought: His space and his city are a ‘project’, a ‘will’ that he intends to be collective and scientific; it is not a dissertation on them being the receptacle or driver, i.e. creator, of the activities that exist there (2009, p. 145).

In Droit à la Ville (2012 [1968]) (Right to the City), Lefebvre critiques the urbanism and urban planning of the 1950s and 1960s. Although we can say that it is a highly contextualised book, and that the author would later de-

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velop many of the criticisms contained therein, the main question posed on the ideological nature of urbanism, which itself includes a discussion on the role of science in the city’s transformation, is still, or increasingly, a problem facing today’s society. At the start of the 1970s an article by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973), was published that raises the same problem, although with different solutions, arguing that planning problems are ‘wicked problems’ that cannot be solved through a true/false approach, through ‘solutions’ that can be scientifically tested, since they are social problems that have a political answer rather than a scientific one.

According to Lefebvre, urbanism appears as a scientific and technical discipline, and it hides its ideological side, which is the ideology of capitalist society. It is precisely this ideology that Lefebvre intends to lay bare in this book (2012 [1968]). The issue of accommodation and the urgent need to find a solution to it, as a result of industrial growth and the consequent increase in cities’ populations, hid and continues to hide the problems affecting cities. In this process, the city becomes a ‘simple means’ for seeking to adapt the production of goods and the consumption thereof (ibid., p. 85/86). It ceases to be an oeuvre, to be used by everyone, and becomes an entirely commodified product. This is what happens today in large cities where consumption (major shopping centres) and movement (motorways and ring-roads) structure space, relegating to second place or forgetting symbolic areas of interaction.

Droit à la Ville announces the emergence of the urban as a new reality, as a problem of the modern world. It unveils

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the ideologies implicit in urbanism practices and reveals the absence of social, political and philosophical neutrality of space. When Lefebvre describes the transformations that were happening in the Marais neighbourhood in Paris at the start of the 19th century, he shows us the relationship between the emergence of new classes that acquire power and the transformation of space. An example of those transformations can be seen in the short excerpt below, at the time when an aristocratic neighbourhood with gardens and small palaces is transformed into an area of modest workshops and shops: Bourgeois ugliness, the greed for profit, visible and legible in the streets, is installed in the place of the somewhat cold beauty of aristocratic luxury (2012, p. 27 [1968]).

Space should therefore stop being understood as ‘natural space’ and be considered as the result of the projection of social relations.

What is inscribed and projected is not only a faraway order, a social unit, a mode of production, a general code.

It is also a time, or rather, times and rhythms. The city is heard like music is, but it is read as discursive writing (ibid., p. 66).

Lefebvre understands the right to the city as a right to ‘urban life’, taking the form of a meeting place, a ludic space, and above all a space that is appropriated by individuals and not a space imposed on them: Urban life attempts to appropriate time and space by hindering dominations, by craftily deviating them from their goals. It also intervenes, more or less, at the level of the city and the way of inhabiting. The ‘urban’ is therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, the oeuvre of its inhabitants and not

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something imposed them as a system, as an already finished book (ibid., p. 75).

We should remember Sennett (1992) and his idea of understanding space as a narrative. When we read a book, we unravel the story, the landscape, the characters. The same thing happens with space. People need to appropriate it, build it up from needs they experience and that change over time. Rational planning is the exact opposite of this; it is, to go back to Sennett, as if we were told the whole story of the book on the first page. And, just like that book, new cities cause the ‘boredom’ discussed by Lefebvre (1970, 1977 [1962]).

The New Towns in France ‘Urban life’ is the opposite of the idea of habitat underlying urban planning from the 1950s onwards. The habitat, according to Lefebvre, is a pseudo-concept that arose at the end of the 19th century which limits the human being to some basic actions: eating, sleeping and reproducing.

The ‘habitat’ was installed from the bottom up and translated the imposition of a global, homogeneous, quantified space that forces people to stay trapped as if they were in ‘boxes’ (1970). The ideas underlying the dominant planning are centred on habitat/home rather than inhabiting, a social and poetic act.

The 1960s were marked by a multiplication of “New Towns” (E.g. Sarcelles, with 13,000 homes for more than 40,000 people). These towns were built to respond quickly to the accommodation crisis for the working class, and

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produced a standardised form of habitat of which Lefebvre was one of the greatest critics. In 1960, he signed an important article in the Revue française de sociologie2 on the new town of Mourenx. Among other things, his analysis showed that the new town produced a ‘profound boredom of being’ as a result of the lack of normal places for socialising: cafés, small shops, etc.

The New Towns and the Disappearance of the Street In his housing model Le Corbusier suggests creating a ‘shopping street’ on one level of a residential building that would satisfy all everyday needs: food shops, boutiques, laundrettes, restaurants, home deliveries, etc.). Each building would function as a self-sufficient village, in fact allowing everyday life to take place between home and work. The street had the function of meeting needs, and it would be more functional and practical if it was contained within the buildings where people live – the building contains the home, the system is closed (in Choay, 1965).

According to Lefebvre, Le Corbusier’s thought reduces urbanism to one function and one goal of human beings: having a certain space to organise their ‘private’ individual and family lives (1970, p. 159).

In contrast, for Lefebvre, it is essential to be able to prioritise spaces that are connected to social times and rhythms in which 2 The article was later published in the book Du Rural à l´urbain (1970).

In 1962, he wrote another short text on the same topic, “Notes sur la ville nouvelle”, which was published in the book Introduction à la Modernité (1962) (Introduction to Modernity).

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‘inhabiting’ – or, in other words, the social dimension, the everyday, the experienced, the perceptible, are restored above the ‘habitat’, in other words, above the idea of building only for accommodation (Costes, 2009, p. 101).

The ‘zoning’ approach defines the design of new towns.

Its method intends to meet inhabitants’ needs by creating spaces with specific functions that are separate from each other: housing, schools, hospitals, commerce, leisure, etc.

All these spaces are designed and projected rationally in order to solve residents’ everyday problems.

Within this functional city, everything appears to have a meaning and a reason, but at the same time everything is designed to make life easier for everyone. Centrality is diluted, the mix of functions that is at the root of cities is lost, people live a long way from workplaces, commuting increases, socialisation decreases and socio-spatial segregation intensifies. Walking, when body and space meet, is replaced by driving, in which time overtakes space. All this leads us to eschew the street, the space of the neighbourhood, meetings, surprise: The street is disorder [… and] that disorder lives. It informs. It surprises (Lefebvre, 1970, p. 30).

In the New Towns, the street disappears, either because it is emptied or because the car traffic makes it unbearable. The functional aspects related to the movement of people, goods, vehicles, take precedence over places for meeting – the street, the café, the station (Lefebvre, (2014a, [1962]). The street contains the functions neglected by Corbusier: the informative, symbolic, ludic function (Lefebvre, 1970). For Lefebvre, urban life corre-

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sponds to a time, a rhythm, which takes place in a space – the street. Without the street, there is no urban life; there is no urban society, The street represents the everydayness in our social life; (...) like everydayness, the street is always changing and always repeats itself. (...) The street is a spectacle, almost uniquely but not completely a spectacle, because one is within it, walks in it, stops in it and participates in it. Those who hurry do not see the spectacle and, nonetheless, they appear in it [...] the street presents our eyes with a social text that is generally good, dense and legible.

(Lefebvre, (2014a, p. 310 [1962]) Functional City and Informal City Let us dwell here on an aspect regarding the ideas that underlie the planning of the ‘new towns’, an aspect that is even more topical today, thanks to the new possibilities that science and technology have for organising and running each person’s everyday life. We return to wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973), where the authors demonstrate the impossibility of rationalising human life.

In Le Corbusier’s urban planning, this was the goal: to plan everything, to foresee everything.

Lefebvre mentions the difference between Probability (a theory of exact sciences) and Randomness (information theory). Statistical probability, the rationale which is the starting point for planning, produces forecasts based on the past or based on something that is new and emerging, while the random involves a broadening of the field of possibilities, i.e., it allows something new and unlike-

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ly to occur. In everyday life, we have to bear in mind the freedom of the actor, which can never be entirely rationalised.

There is a certain unpredictability in reality, which is not only the result of a lack of awareness of the causes and the limits of knowledge. It also comes from change as such, and also from freedom (Lefebvre, 2014a, p. 115 [1962]).

The city that is gradually built by everyone – such as the example given of the transformation of Marais or informal buildings that can be found in the peripheries of cities – may not be pretty or the city that we imagine, but it is different from the ‘functional city’ built on technical knowledge. It is on technical knowledge’s terms that specialists and technicians have carefully studied all the functions of the urban community. Lefebvre asks: According to what criteria can one judge the expert who has exhausted the city’s ‘functions’, discovered its hierarchy of urgency and its connections in time and space?

(Lefebvre, 1970, p. 114).

When Lefebvre describes to us the place of his childhood, Navarrenx, and the new town that grows beside it, Mourenx, (1977 [1962], 1970), he highlights the symbolic and historical character of his village, in a description approaching that of Marc Augé’s “anthropological places” (1992) and the functional nature of Mourenx, with no history, no monuments, coming close to ‘non-places’.

In Navarrenx, the village was gradually built up over the centuries, like a snail that gradually builds its shell: the places, the houses, the streets were modified in time and over time, “each house has its own face” (Lefebvre, 1977

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[1962]), similar to the others but different from every one.

In Mourenx, Lefebvre acknowledges the qualities of the plan: the relationship between the landscape and the buildings is not overly aggressive, the buildings appear to be well-built, the rooms have good lighting, they have bathrooms, housing is cheap, etc. As Lefebvre writes, with a certain irony, all this enables residents to put the radio or television on in the living room and use them to contemplate the world. But, despite everything, Lefebvre says that when he looks at those “machines for living in” he feels terrified (ibid., p. 123). One of the aspects that terrify him is the excess of clarity and legibility with which we are able to read Mourenx. While villages such as Navarrenx are filled with symbols and stories and big cities, where everything is transformed quickly, have every function necessary, in new towns the sign prevails over the symbol, and there is a lack of symbolic, historical elements.

Everything there is too clear, closed, legible, boring (Lefebvre, 2014a, p. 144 [1962]). In the everyday lives of those who live in the new towns and big cities of our time, there is a code prohibiting and proscribing behaviours that prevails over the symbolism that builds relationships. Lefebvre’s concern is with the exact opposite, searching for an urban form that enables and encourages everyone to interact and for bonds to form.

When we analyse Lefebvre’s thought about the urbanism-planning that was put into practice in France following the Second World War, we find a vision that is deeply critical about the projects built and the ideology that underlies them. Nonetheless, Lefebvre recognises some

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positive aspects in that functionalist urban planning – building homes for a population that lived in slums, bits of houses, shanty towns – but he criticises it when urban planning tries to design the ‘best way’ of living everyday life for everyone. This aspect, the rationalisation of space and time regardless of culture, history, the environment, and everyday experiences, is in some way intrinsic to the process of planning and urbanism in capitalist societies.

As Lefebvre states: It is a general trend linked to the importance of techniques and the formation of a technocratic ideology in all of today’s societies (2014a, p. 201 [1962]).

However, Lefebvre also questions whether, in such a rationally planned city environment 3, where everything has an easily discernible function, it will still be possible for the functional to be integrated with the organic, with life, and for its inhabitants to adapt to that structure and transform it (1977 [1962]).

Lefebvre and Everyday Life It is this connection between urban space and everyday life that Lefebvre maintained as the central concern of his thought from 1947 onwards, when he published the first volume of Critique de la Vie Quotidienne 4 (Critique

The support services for the ‘new town’, such as shopping centres, leisure centre, public services, had not yet been built in Mourenx. In many towns, they never were.

4 Lefebvre wrote three volumes entitled Critique de la Vie Quotidienne published in 1947, 1962 and 1981 respectively. In 1968, he published La Vie Quotidienne dans le Monde Moderne (Everyday Life in the Modern World).

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of Everyday Life). Everyday life is a difficult object to study using a scientific approach: how can it be defined?

How can it be quantified? How can we compare feelings and emotions? But, according to the author, when we avoid it, we leave a fundamental aspect of society to one side. What Lefebvre proposed is not a detailed analysis of everyday life, but to use the study of everyday life to understand global society and its criticisms and transformation: It is also about checking whether or not this critical analysis of everyday life can serve as the guiding thread (Ariadne’s thread!) for getting to know society and guiding it in a direction – for giving it a direction. (Lefebvre, 2014b, p.

7/8, [1981]).

Lefebvre acknowledges that there has been material and moral progress in twentieth-century human life, but he insists that the other face of that progress, the other side of the coin, has to do with the privatisation and alienation of everyday life: Private life is more and more connected to the growth in needs and the alienation of desire (2014a, p. 92, [1962]).

In Lefebvre, there is clearly a criticism of capitalist society in which “exchange value” takes precedence over “use value”, but also a criticism of “socialist societies” in which transformations in infrastructure have not transformed everyday life. What is at play, for Lefebvre, is precisely understanding what transformations are needed to actually change life for each and every one. It is not about reducing social inequalities (which was achieved to a certain extent by the welfare state), ending private property

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(which was accomplished by the Russian Revolution), but instead transforming everyday life as a whole.

That transformation of everyday life involves the emergence of something new: changer la vie, an idea that marked May 1968 and corresponds to a criticism of everyday life in capitalist society. Later, as Lefebvre himself states, this idea was recovered by capitalism through the idea of “quality of life” or “creating better living conditions”. Changer la vie, which Lefebvre says can only happen with a new production of the urban space (Lefebvre, 2000, [1974]), means being aware of the alienation that exists in everyday life, an alienation that ‘hides’ true reality.

Hegel’s alienation theory and the idea of the ‘full man’ are central for Lefebvre when a critique of everyday life is to be developed, because they make it possible to assess the direction of social development. Alienation, which Lefebvre identifies in several fields (economics, politics, workers, women, etc.) exists to a certain extent in all of us due to the socialisation process through which we internalise a certain culture (Lefebvre, 1977 [1947]). Our entire life is subjected to alienation, and that is why it is very difficult to remove. It is only possible to achieve very slowly, by becoming aware of reality and through action: Alienation does not come only from the norms and models that we set ourselves. It does not just come from the fascinating, fertile behaviours that drag us to ourselves. It comes from our initiative and our acts, when born from ignorance of the level where awareness is located. If I confuse myself and confuse the ‘I’ with the ‘we’, if I mix them up, if I do not take into account the distance between those levels, alienation is introduced. The ‘I’ is taken for ‘we’ and, even worse, for ‘them’ (2014a, p. 173 [1962]).

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Lefebvre, when referring to the second half of the Twentieth century, which he calls “the managed, bureaucratic consumer society” (1967, 2012 [1968]), believes that what is at stake within it is not manufacturing products to meet the majority’s needs but also producing consumers themselves by using mass media and new information technologies. This process is, according to Lefebvre, highly ambiguous: While, on the one hand, modern techniques improve the level of culture, instruct, educate, on the other, they turn individuals into spectators of themselves, spectators of a scene that they are included in but that is set up in advance. They, we, are freely compelled to walk into the scene. (Lefebvre, 2014b, p. 225/226, [1981]).

‘New Towns’ or Towns with a New Life?

The idea of a shift away from the past that can be found in Le Corbusier’s urbanism and the Modern Movement contrasts with Lefebvre’s ‘new urbanism’ which, using technique and rational thought, should be able to create a social life that is as good or better than life born of history (Lefebvre, 1970). What is in question is not only the use of the analytical method, which makes it possible to dissect elements to get to know them better separately, but having all the elements as an object. For us to be able to build not only new towns but towns with a ‘new life’, a new intellectual approach would be needed using new instruments, such as: transduction, the regressive-progressive method, and experimental utopia, among others (ibid.,). Using these methods, Lefebvre answers a range of questions that today continue to face those who today wish to think about urban life:

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What are cities like today, cities that are being built?

How can a new ‘urban society’ be built?

The role of urbanists and architects: what should be planned in the ‘urban society’?

I shall end by answering these three questions, following Lefebvre’s thought.

What are cities like today, cities that are being built?

Let us return to the two types of city presented by Lefebvre at the beginning of Droit à la Ville: The city as oeuvre and the city as product. The author gives the example of the city in the Middle Ages, dominated by merchants and bankers. The city that was commissioned by those groups cannot be understood as a simple object of traffic or a simple moment of profit (Lefebvre, 2012, p. 56 [1968]).

The city for them was more a use value than an exchange value. They loved the city like a work of art. That is why medieval cities continue to represent for us an urban reality in which use, enjoyment, beauty, the provision of meeting places overlap with profit and gains, with exchange values, with markets and their demands and impositions (ibid., p. 57).

Throughout his work, Lefebvre mentions Tuscany as an example of where the growth of productive forces (handicrafts, budding industry, agriculture) produces a space that is neither urban nor rural but the result of a blending of the two spaces, enabling in the areas around Florence and Siena until very late

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the residents of towns and villages to keep living their space in a certain emotional, religious way (2000 [1974], p. 96).

Unlike the city as oeuvre, the capitalist city that was built over the Twentieth century created a dual centrality.

We already know the dual character of capitalist centrality: place of consumption and consumption of place (ibid., p. 131).

Lefebvre, when observing New York or Paris, notices the signs of danger that threaten these cities: A more powerful centre, a centre for decisions as well as consumption, ruled over by the ‘new lords’ (Costes, 2009, p. 97).

In contemporary cities (in the 1980s), time was projected in space according to the following plan: Homogeneity (similarity between places); fragmentation (spaces are divided according to the functions they hold); hierarchisation (clear distinction between “central places” and “peripheral places”) (Lefebvre, 2014b, p. 134, [1981]). The city that is being built also ‘requires’ an everyday life cut into fragments: work, transport, private life, leisure. The human being is dismembered. The senses (smell, taste, vision, touch and hearing) are decoupled, starved. The city had lost its everydayness and celebrations (Lefebvre, 2012 [1968]).

How Can a New ‘Urban Society’ Be Built?

How can we escape from this form of urbanism? How can we cause a new ‘urban society’ to emerge? In these two questions, which are fundamental in his works, Lefebvre ‘mixes together’ the urban and the everyday, as if they

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could not be thought of in isolation. He questions the physical space and the social space at the same time.

How can this situation of the ‘human being’, unfinished and full of contradictions, be expressed architecturally and in urbanism? (Lefebvre,1970, p. 116).

To answer these questions, Lefebvre maintains the need to think ‘backwards’, i.e. the secondary should appear in first place.

The predominance of the global, the logical and the strategic is part of the ‘backwards world’ that one attempts to put the right way round (ibid., p. 115).

We must start with the place, with everyday life, and look for spaces and places that are socially successful: What times, what rhythms of everyday life, are recorded, written and expire in these spaces that are achieved, i.e. beneficial to happiness? (2012, p. 112 [1968]).

The urban, for Lefebvre, is a ‘virtual object’ with two possible developments: one, it becomes visible and is materialised in the transformations that are taking place. This corresponds to the development of the Western world’s big cities (Paris, London), which leads us to the planetary society, to the ‘world city’, in which exchange value dominates; the other emerges sporadically, undercover, is hard to see, and is related to what remains in everyday life connected to meeting, to life in the street, in which use value takes precedence.

The construction of the ‘urban society’ proposed by Lefebvre involves choosing the second, less likely path, but it is part of the realm of possibilities:

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It is possible, established by a direction, in terms of the route that leads up to it. To reach it, or to realise it, it is first necessary to go around or overcome the obstacles that currently make it impossible” (1970, p. 27).

The emergence and development of the ‘urban society’ are the result of a process, a praxis: a practical action (ibid., p. 9). This means that, for Lefebvre, the city to be built, urban society, will have to be the oeuvre of its own residents.

The Role of Urbanists and Architects: What Should Be Planned in the ‘Urban Society’?

Building the ‘urban society’ should include the precedence of inhabiting over habitat, of use over exchange, of everyday life over planned life. Streets, squares, cafés, commerce, meeting spaces, celebration spaces, where ‘all’ interact and where it is possible for something unexpected to happen: that is Lefebvre’s ‘urban society’. David Harvey (2011) underlines the importance of heterotopia in Lefebvre, together with new urban practices.

In fact, heteropias are spaces where anything different is possible. They do not necessarily arise from the conscious plane, but simply from what people do, feel, guess and end up expressing when they look for meaning in their everyday lives. These practices create heterotopian spaces everywhere (Harvey, 2011, p. 43).

According to Lefebvre, the urbanist and architect’s task in the on-going transformation stage of the city (at the end of the 1960s) is not an easy one. Analysts should distinguish between types of urbanisation and understand the

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forms, functions and urban structures that dissolve the old city through widespread urbanisation. At the time when different transformations arise which, in Lefebvre’s eyes, characterise the ‘critical stage’5, the city looks like a ‘black box’ that we know how to enter but only sometimes know how to leave (Lefebvre, 1970). Things now seem clearer: with the globalisation process, it is easier to understand the causes and effects of the city that is gradually built.

However, as already mentioned, with new technologies and the growth in consumption, the ability that the system has to transform the criticisms of it into ‘support’ is ever greater. The ‘new urbanism’ defended by Lefebvre proposes some aspects that we can see materialised in contemporary cities: multifunctional buildings, ludic events and celebration, art and creativity, concern for certain ‘social needs’ such as old age, etc. Let us look as one example that reflects one of the fundamental aspects of the city to be built, according to Lefebvre, and that involves bringing celebration and ludic moments to the city again. Ludic moments and celebrations return in a range of initiatives that happen today in European cities: concerts, parties based on culture, popular and traditional celebrations, festivals connected to restaurants and hotels or fashion exhibitions, art shows, the creation of new ‘public spaces’, etc. All this may at first sight seem to call upon Lefebvre’s proposals, but it is based on assumptions that are entirely 5 The ‘critical stage’ is, for Lefebvre, the moment that took place in the mid-Twentieth century when the old city disappeared and widespread urbanisation arose. It is very difficult during this period to understand which transformations do away with the old city and which ones create widespread urbanisation (1970, p. 28).

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different from his thought: it is based on exchange value rather than use value, domination rather than appropriation, socio-spatial segregation rather than cohesion, separation between everyday/extra-everyday times rather than fusion of the two, participation in the commercial management of the city rather than political participation in decisions.

Lefebvre’s ludic space coexists with spaces for exchange and movement, with political space and cultural space (2012 [1968]). It is similar to the Greek agora, to some spaces in Paris so excellently described by Balzac, and to some streets in New York that Sennett passes through (1992). There, the ludic is a process that overcomes use and exchange, uniting the two (Lefebvre, 2012, p. 134 [1968]).

For Lefebvre, the ideal city should be the oeuvre of its residents. It cannot be built following a traditional planning rationale that foresees everything: The ideal city would encompass the obsolescence of space: It would be the fleeting city, the eternal oeuvre of its residents, who are themselves mobile and mobilised by and for this oeuvre. Time again takes its prime position here.

It is certain that technique makes the fleeting city possible, the height of the ludic, of work and luxury (2012, p.

134 [1968]).

This city will need the contribution of architects and urbanists but, when urbanists obey the rules of industrialisation and the architect is imprisoned in the world of goods, it becomes hard for both to assert the supremacy of the urban and the priority of inhabiting because

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that priority demands freedom of invention and the establishment of unprecedented relationships between the urbanist and the architect (Lefebvre, 1970, p. 122);

alone, they cannot build a new ‘urban society’, which can only be the oeuvre of all the city’s residents.

Brief Conclusion When I presented “Henri Lefebvre and Urbanism Criticism” at the “Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Urban Space” conference, in June 2016, I was asked: why talk about Lefebvre to think about the city now? The question implied the existence of the extensive changes that are taking place, forcing a new relationship with time and space, changes which Lefebvre was only able to see in the final stages of his life. I answered poorly at the time and I am still not able to answer the question properly. What makes us choose to study one author over another is connected to a range of circumstances that go beyond the rational explanation of that choice. We can justify it rationally after the fact, but reasons go beyond reason. However, I have no doubt as to the importance of Lefebvre’s work and thought for thinking about today’s city/society.

There is a perspective in his thought that is deeply critical of capitalist society, together with a very sui generis view of Marxism, and at the same time a human side whereby philosophy, literature, art, and everyday life form part of his analysis. That is why in this article I seek to bring two aspects of his thought together: the urban and everyday life. This involves to some extent thinking at once about “representations of space” connected to knowledge and

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power and “spaces of representation” connected to experiences, to everyday time, to the body.

It is always difficult to link one great author’s thought to a scientific discipline. Aware of that difficulty, I am tempted to argue that Lefebvre is above all an urbanist. It is true that this statement requires a long explanation that cannot be included in this article, but his work, or part of it, comes into play at the heart of the search for a new discipline that thinks about and acts on the city, a discipline that he called “the new urbanism”.

His work and his life reflect a profound criticism of capitalist society developed around the pillars of the dialectic method, Karl Marx’s thought, and literature and art, attempting to understand reality scientifically but never losing the singularity and emotions that make up human beings. When Lefebvre says that capitalism is not just someone whose main goal is to achieve profit (“Every capitalist is a man. Within it, the man and the capitalist challenge each other in some way. The extreme situation is rare: the capitalist entirely embodying money and capital” (1977, p. 27 [1947]), he gives us precisely that dimension of human ambiguity that makes each person more than the ‘prison’ in which we put ourselves and/or have been put by in others.

Let us end with the question that Lefebvre has left open since 1968, linking it to the main theoretical – and undoubtedly political – problem of the “right to the city”: Can urban life recover and strengthen the city’s capacity for integration and participation, which has almost entirely disappeared, and that we cannot boost through authoritar-

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ianism, or proscription by the administration, or intervention by specialists? This is the main theoretical problem (2012, p. 106, [1968]).

Bibliography Augé M. 1992, Non—Lieux. Introduction à une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité, Éditions du Seuil, Paris.

Choay F. 1965, L`urbanisme, utipies et réalités, Éditions du Seuil, Paris.

Costes L. 2009, Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville, Ellipses, Paris.

Deuceux S., Hess R. 2009, Henri Lefebvre, Ellipses, Paris.

Lefebvre H. 1977, Critique de la vie quotidienne I, Paris, L’Arche editeur (first ed. 1947).

Lefebvre H. 2014 a, Critique de la vie quotidienne II, Paris, L’Arche editeur, (first ed. 1962).

Lefebvre H. 2014 b, Critique de la vie quotidienne III, Paris, L’Arche editeur, (first ed. 1981).

Lefebvre H. 2012, O Direito à Cidade, Lisboa, Letra Livre (first ed. 1968).

Lefebvre H. 1977, Introduction à la modernité, Éditions Minuit, (first ed.

1962).

Lefebvre H. 1970, La révolution urbaine, Galimard, Paris.

Lefebvre H. 1974, La Production de l’espace, Anthropos, Paris (first ed.

1974).

Lefebvre H. 2001, Du rural à l’urbain, Paris, Anthropos, (first ed. 1970).

Lefebvre H. 1967, Position: contre les technocrats, Gonthier, Paris.

Harvey D. 2011, Le Capitalisme contre le Droit à La Ville, Éditions Amsterdam, Paris.

Rittel H., Webber M. 1973, Dilemmas in a General Theorie of Planning, «Policy Sciences», 4, pp. 155-169. http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_ Theory_of_Planning.pdf.

Sennett R. 1992, La ville à vue d’oeil, Plon, Paris.

Souza M. L. 2014, Do ‘direito à cidade’ ao direito ao planeta: territórios dissidentes pelo mundo afora e seu significado na atual conjuntura (1ª parte), in Passa Palavra, http://passapalavra.info/2014/07/97823.

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franco arminio and the heterotopia of ‘comunità provvisoria’ Luca Pocci University of Western Ontario

Franco Arminio is one of the most original voices to emerge in recent years within the intellectual scene of contemporary Italy. A prolific writer, he has authored numerous books of non-fiction, poetry collections, and film documentaries, while also collaborating with several newspapers, including il manifesto, Il Corriere del Mezzogiorno and Il Mattino1. One of the recurring features in Arminio’s diverse intellectual activity is a strongly critical look at how the relationship between space and community is commonly perceived and experienced in today’s globalizing culture. Arminio’s goal is to rethink this relationship from outside the dominant point of view and discourse of our urban-centric cultural environment. In what follows, I will focus, in particular, on his idea of the Arminio’s idiosyncratic non-fiction prose includes, among others, writings on his native Irpinia—Viaggio nel cratere (2003) and Vento forte tra Lacedonia e Candela: Esercizi di paesologia (2008)—and his travelogue about present-day Southern Italy, Terracarne: Viaggio nei paesi giganti e nei paesi invisibili del Sud Italia (2011). Among his poetry collections, one could mention Stato in luogo (2012) and Cedi la strada agli alberi: Poesie d’amore e di terra (2017). His most important documentary films on the landscape and small towns of the Italian Mezzogiorno are the self-directed La terra dei paesi (2006) and Di mestiere faccio il paesologo (directed by Andrea D’Ambrosio, 2010). As well, Arminio has founded a blog significantly called Comunità provvisorie.

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comunità provvisoria, an idea which is intended to be a response to the current hegemony of urban models of spatiality and community.

To begin with, let us recall what Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space: Any ‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be real, but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the ‘cultural’ realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination, and its feeble degree of reality (1991, p. 53).

When applied to the form of ‘social existence’ that Arminio calls comunità provvisoria, Lefebvre’s claim may prove to be a helpful heuristic springboard. We could say that Arminio’s comunità provvisoria is not, of course, an abstraction; it is a real thing, an actual state of affairs that presents itself as a concrete social entity. However, we would have to further suggest that it is indeed a ‘strange entity’, since its existence and raison d’être are not aimed at producing any kind of new space; rather they are aimed at reinventing a possible relation with a re-appropriated space outside the boundary and norm (or normality) of city-based spatial culture and experience. The vision of space and of its relation to community on which Arminio’s project is grounded has nothing to do with folklore. In fact, as we will see, this vision is motivated by a strong denial and repudiation of the folkloric stance and, specifically, of its (more often than not) shallow celebration of the presumed comfort zone and value inherent to spatial and relational models derived from tradition. Whereas folk-

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lore causes the past and tradition to be viewed as a museum, Arminio rejects any museal and monumentalizing look, taking, instead, the hard road of experimenting with the meaning(s) of space and community, in the present, on the basis of the knowledge which comes from a residual, but living and lived, past.

The purpose of my reflections here is to explore the kind of potential, if not actual, countersite that Arminio’s project may be said to represent through its interplay between a re-appropriated space and experience of space, and a particular image and meaning of community. As I will argue, a close look at Arminio’s project permits us to uncover a number of significant points of convergence with the theories of Foucault, Agamben, Bonesio, and Deleuze and Guattari. For the sake of clarity, let me emphasize that none of these theorists can be said to have influenced Arminio directly. However, my objective here is to show that all of them (and each in a different way and from a different perspective) may help us to better understand and appreciate his idea of the comunità provvisoria.

The question that needs to be raised right at the outset of these reflections is: what is Arminio’s comunità provvisoria? If we try to capture its specific mode of existence in ontological terms, along the lines of an ontology of community, we cannot help but attend to the qualifier, the word ‘provvisoria’, in Arminio’s expression. ‘Provvisoria’ suggests of course impermanence, transitoriness, indefiniteness. A comunità provvisoria is a form of human association that sees itself as passing, as a passing community. Arminio explains what he means by comunità prov-

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visoria in an interview that has appeared on the Gruppo Abele website. Interestingly, both in this interview and in the title of the blog that Arminio has created to disseminate his project, the project itself is expressed in the plural, comunità provvisorie (temporary communities), thus implying that the concept of comunità provvisoria (concepts tend to be singular, grammatically speaking) ought to be transferred into the sphere of actual experience, so as to give rise to a plurality of empirical manifestations of the concept itself. This is how Arminio describes the project of the comunità provvisoria in the abovementioned interview with Federica Grandis: Per comunità provvisorie intendo la costruzione di luoghi, reali più che virtuali, in cui le persone si incontrano esponendosi agli altri generosamente e cercando di fare delle cose insieme agli altri, azioni che possono essere di svago o di contestazione, di riflessione intellettuale o di produzione artistica, ma sempre con l’intenzione di tenere vivo un intreccio di umori e di gesti in cui sia riconoscibile allo stesso tempo la matrice individuale e la tensione corale (2 January, 2013)2.

From this description, one can infer that the kind of community which is envisioned is a negation of communitarianism and, at the same time, an affirmation of a sense of collectivity that is predicated not on having something in 2 [By temporary communities I mean the creation of places, real rather than virtual places, where people meet by way of generous and mutual exposure to one another, while seeking to do things together; these things can be leisure activities or actions of contestation and protest, actions of intellectual reflection or artistic production, but they must be in all cases characterized by an intention to keep alive a web of moods and gestures in which individual contribution and collective desire coexist and are recognizable, (my translation)].

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common but on doing some things together. Communitarianism implies frequently, perhaps even congenitally, an idea of community as immunity; the communitas being conceived and experienced as a source of immunization from the outside, from all outsiders who do not and must not belong. Accordingly, the community inspired by communitarianism needs to project itself onto a demarcated and delimited space whose function is not simply that of providing a space of individuation (to be intended as the expression of the difference that the community seeks to preserve)3, but also that of constituting a space of immunization. The fact that in his blog Arminio talks of ‘persone’ in general, without any excluding specification, proves that his comunità provvisoria is a denial and critique of the relation between community and immunity 4, a relation that all too frequently feeds and supports the contemporary political praxis of national and supranational actors.

Additionally, the explicit reference to a willingness to meet and interact “esponendosi agli altri generosamente” [opening oneself to others generally] suggests that each participant is expected to view the comunità provvisoria as an opportunity for a genuine encounter with the other participants, an encounter, though, that should ideally produce a harmonizing balance between the single person and the

David Harvey includes the community among the spaces of individuation claiming that “everyone occupies a space of individuation (a body, a room, a home, a shaping community, a nation)” (1980, p. 302).

4 For a sustained reflection on the notions of community and immunity as well as on the importance of their correlation in the discourse of communitarianism, see, in particular, Roberto Esposito (1998) and Elena Pulcini (2009).

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whole, between “la matrice individuale e la tensione corale” [the individual matrix and the collective tension]. If one were to look for a view of community that resonates with the view advanced by Arminio one would have to name Luisa Bonesio’s comunità di paesaggio. Assuming the perspective and framework of geo-philosophy while concurrently rejecting the ocularcentric reduction of landscape to an aesthetic(ized) object (to an object of contemplation or spectacle), a reduction designated as “finzione simulacrale” 5, Bonesio undertakes to achieve a double goal. On the one hand she strives to promote a vigorously ethical, rather than aesthetic, approach to landscape; on the other she aims at inflecting the meaning of community in such a way as to steer clear of communitarianism and the risk of equating community with immunity. In other words, the idea of comunità di paesaggio is motivated by the necessity to eschew both a localistic and an ethnic-based sense of belonging to a certain space and to a particular landscape.

The lived and shared space of the comunità di paesaggio is not the setting for a nativist but for an elective mode of belonging, the difference between the two models being that the first presupposes a logic of filiation where the second, instead, requires a logic of affiliation.

This brief overview of Bonesio’s conception of community shows that the commonalities with Arminio’s con5 According to Bonesio, the challenge that the age of globalization poses to us is how to approach landscapes and places in such a way as to attribute to them a singularity “che non sia finzione simulacrale o mera estetizzazione” [“that avoids both mere aestheticization and the fiction of the simulacrum”, my translation]. In P. D’Angelo (ed.) 2009, Estetica e paesaggio pp. 260-61.

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ception are numerous and significant, but it does not cancel or obscure the major elements of difference. Not only is Arminio’s project based on a model of community that affirms and anticipates, unlike Bonesio’s project, its transitory existence, it also, and no less importantly, places emphasis on the need to reconsider the possible function of the paese rather than the understanding of the idea of paesaggio in present-day globalized culture.

A central and distinctive aspect of the comunità provvisoria is that the space in which it is supposed to be imagined and created – the type of place where it is expected to come to life and, indeed, to take place – is the small community of the contemporary paese. More specifically, it is a marginal, peripheral locale, both in terms of geography and economy. It is the locale of the most remote and, in part, still rural Italian South, including, in particular, the area where Arminio has lived all his life, the area of Irpinia in the region of Campania. The landscape of Irpinia and of the most marginal mezzogiorno possess a residual distinctive quality. As Arminio notes in Terracarne (2011), [Q]ui c’è un’Italia che ha ancora un’aura, in cui puoi ancora passare qualche ora senza farti irretire dal gioco del consumare e del produrre (p. 74)6.

What is important to mention at this point is that Arminio calls himself a paesologo, a sort of neologism originating 6 [Here one finds an Italy that still has an aura, where you can still spend a few hours without being trapped into the game of consuming and producing (My translation)].

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from paese, a term that in Italian carries the two distinct meanings of village and country; country in the sense of both place and nation, as the place of a nation. The paesologo is the practitioner of a peculiar art, named paesologia (another term coined by Arminio), which is defined as the capacity to activate a special “form of attention”7 toward the paese as a cultural microcosm. Paesologia is, therefore, an art or discipline intimately connected to the project of the comunità provvisoria. As a special “form of attention” toward the surviving world of the paesi, it is, to a certain degree, the condition of possibility for the concrete objective of translating the project into action and reality, which means bringing temporary communities into existence within the space of the most neglected and unglamorous Mezzogiorno. The intimate connection between paesologia and comunità provvisoria is traced in two anomalous and eccentric travelogues, Vento forte tra Lacedonia e Candela (2008) and the already mentioned Terracarne (2011), both of which exemplify the original mélange of aphoristic diary style and anti-narrative moral prose that characterizes Arminio’s idiosyncratic writing8.

Here is a clear example of how such intimate connection is drawn in Terracarne: 7 This is how Arminio defines his paesologia: “La paesologia è una forma d’attenzione. È uno sguardo lento, dilatato, verso queste creature che per secoli sono rimaste identiche a se stesse e ora sono in fuga dalla loro forma” (2008, p. 101). [Paesologia is a form of attention. It means casting a slow and dilated gaze on those creatures that have remained unchanging over the ages and are now in flight from their own form (My translation)].

8 In Vento forte, the prose style of the paesologo is described as follows: “Il paesologo non ama il narrare disteso, ma la smania aforistica, la frase singola, spaiata” (p. 185). [The paesologo is not fond of the narrative flow, he is fond of the aphoristic urge, the single and odd phrase (My translation)].

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I paesi sono delle comunità sospese, provvisorie. E le comunità provvisorie saranno i miei paesi del futuro, fuori dalle solite manfrine conformiste, luoghi in cui non si fa manutenzione dell’agonia, ma si prova a sovvertire, a percepire diversamente noi stessi e gli altri. La paesologia continua il suo cammino, staccando ogni suo filo dalla paesanologia.

La questione non è la questione meridionale, non è la difesa dei piccoli paesi e neppure il loro abbellimento, non è la vocazione al recinto, al campanile, e soprattutto non è il lamento sullo sviluppo che non c’è stato, su chi se ne è andato, su ciò che eravamo e non siamo più. È un modo di stare al mondo facendosi tentare continuamente dall’impensato, un modo di stare qui connettendosi ad altre strampalate lietezze che ancora vagano per il mondo (pp. 330)9.

As Arminio explicitly states, another distinctive feature of his comunità provvisoria is its indeterminacy, its not being a collectivity held together by a definite goal and a limited and clearly designed programmatic agenda: [N]on faccio programmi, non faccio promesse, posso scrivere solo parole penultime mentre il tempo decide cosa fare di noi (2011, pp. 330)10.

9 [Paesi are suspended communities; they are temporary communities. And these temporary communities will be my future paesi, away from the usual conformist poses. They will be places where people try to subvert things, and to perceive themselves and others differently, instead of focusing on agony control. The paesologia continues on its own path, cutting all ties with the paesanologia. The primary concern is not the Question of the South, it is not the defense or beautification of small villages, or a yearning for closure, for the ‘campanile’. Most important, the primary concern of paesologia is not to complain against a progress or development that has never been achieved, or against those who have left. Nor is it to lament for what we used to be and we no longer are. The paesologia is a mode of being in the world, whereby we are constantly tempted by that which has not been thought. It is a way of being here while feeling, at the same time, connected with other like-minded and joyous eccentrics who are still wandering the world (My translation)].

10 “I don’t make any plans, I don’t make any promise, I can only write penultimate words, while time determines what will be of us” [My translation].

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The comunità provvisoria is envisaged as a loose collectivity characterized by an open, indeterminate, and unlimited horizon of concerns and actions: artistic, social, political, recreational actions. This is important because it means that, perhaps, what Arminio has in mind is a mode of making community that aims at remaining formless and unstructured for two possible and interrelated reasons: 1) the preservation of an unbounded degree of malleability, and 2) the forestalling of the risk of rigidity which is associated with structured and tightly-knit models of collectivity. If this is so, Arminio’s loosely defined model of community can be seen as a project that aims at creating a countersite whose character and orientation seem to correspond to Foucault’s heterotopia of deviation.

Let us recall that Foucault describes heterotopias of deviation as those sites in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed (p. 25).

Foucault has in mind places like rest and retirement homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons, places where people are not just placed but confined for criminal or medical reasons, or where they are (at least in part) forced to live due to their age and personal circumstances. Of course, if seen through a Foucauldian lens, Arminio’s comunità provvisoria constitutes a special case of heterotopia of deviation, as it relates to a voluntary confinement, so to speak; a confinement in a peripheral/marginal space which offers the possibility to diverge, individually and collectively, from the norm and doxa of city-based lifestyles and modes of being.

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This possibility of deviating from the urban mentality is hard to seize and cultivate, especially because the urban mindset and its related life-style have virtually become pervasive and ubiquitous, conquering the paesi and almost cancelling their long history as spaces of difference, in fact of deviation, from the cultural and experiential centrality of the city. Arminio is, of course, well aware of how deeply untimely it is today to take up the challenge of thinking outside the box of a solidified and hegemonic urban culture. And he is even more aware of the risk that such a challenge involves, namely the complacent regression into a preservationist and cosmetic localism: La paesologia non è la paesanologia, non è idolatria della cultura locale […] Non so più come dirlo: i paesi stanno sparendo, sta sparendo un mondo e da questa sparizione noi che abitiamo i paesi siamo attraversati come da una slavina silenziosa. Assistiamo a un urbanesimo al contrario. Non sono più tanto i paesani ad andarsene, è la città che raggiunge i paesi e li distrugge. Spesso ho scritto che dalle mie parti è stato troppo veloce il passaggio dalla civiltà contadina alla modernità incivile. Forse bisognerebbe segnalare un passaggio parallelo e altrettanto virulento dalla civiltà dei paesi al modello della città diffusa (2011, p. 13)11.

11 [Paesologia is not paesanologia, it is not an idolizing of local culture […] I don’t know how to say this anymore: the paesi are disappearing, a world is disappearing and people like us who live in the paesi are struck by this disappearance as if by a silent avalanche. We are witnessing a process of inverted urbanization. It is no longer the people from the paesi who are leaving; it is the city that is invading and destroying the paesi. I have often written about how the passage from a peasant civilization to an uncivilized modernity has been too fast in my area. Perhaps, it is necessary to highlight a parallel and equally virulent passage from the civilization of the paesi to the model of the sprawling city (My translation)].

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Thus, by entrusting the form of the paese with a heterotopic function, the art of paesologia and the project of the comunità provvisoria set themselves the goal of refusing and resisting not only the omnipresence of urban space and culture, but also the common sense of localistic and ruralist revivalism, which is popular and fashionable for the simple reason that it caters to the desires of urbanites. In other words, the heterotopic function that Arminio attributes to the paesi, seen as ideal settings for experimenting with the alliance between paesologia and comunità provvisoria, is also a response to what he terms (with yet another of his neologisms) paesanismo. The trivially museal and cheaply monumentalizing view of the past as a source of folklore, the core-element of paesanismo, is what makes it such a false and undesirable phenomenon to Arminio’s eyes.

Ultimately, Arminio’s view of paesanismo is that of a phenomenon totally internal to, and complicit with, the hegemony of urban culture. This means that the project of the paesologo/proponent of the comunità provvisoria is doubly untimely, as it purports to deviate from two ever-expanding and interconnected realities. After all, the trendy paesanista, a (re)producer of the fiction of an authentic ruralism that relives in the present, and the hip urbanite (the consumer of the ‘healthy’ sensations afforded by the fiction of an authentic and surviving ruralism) are interdependent and mutually necessary. Neither of them could exist without the other. As a matter of fact, we might venture to suggest that the posture of the trendy paesanista and that of the hip urbanite co-exist, quite frequently, not

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separately but in one and the same figure, a figure which is itself not so much in vogue as utterly central to (even defining of) our times: the middle-class cultural tourist.

As a product of an age whose global and fast-growing urbanization is without precedent in world history, the middle-class cultural tourist has assumed the status of universal type in affluent societies. The reason why this social figure is so intimately integral to the spirit of our time is that its vital role or part – the role for which it exists and, also, the part that it cannot not play in the world order of globalization – consists in its going with, indeed in its obeying, the flow of the space of flows, to use Manuel Castells’ well-known expression12. What is expected, if not required, of the middle class cultural tourist is to move in total accord with the rapid and continuous movements of capitals across geographical and political borders, with that flow of economic resources and investments that, in many cases, is instrumental to the efficient functioning of the cultural attractions which s/he will (have to) visit and ‘consume’. The space of flows marks the emergence of a spatial logic and ideology whereby everything and everybody must be flowing along the routes and according to the directions determined by the technocratic-financial-managerial élite.

In The Rise of the Network Society, Castells defines flows as follows: “By flows I understand purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of society. Dominant social practices are those which are embedded in dominant social structures. By dominant structures I understand those arrangements of organizations and institutions whose internal logic plays a strategic role in shaping social practices and social consciousness for society at large” (p. 412).

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Arminio’s project, with its combination of paesologia and comunità provvisoria, is a form of resistance to the powerful dominance of the space of flows and, in particular, to the logic and ideology that its characterizing figures – the urbanite, the paesanista, and their syncretic fusion, the middle class cultural tourist – have come to embody. But it is a form of resistance that does not aspire to simply reclaim the experiential and social importance of the “space of places”, which in Castells’ theory is the spatial logic that the rise of the space of flows has weakened and downgraded. Rather than defending the value of placeness (a value derived from the perceived necessity to build an authentic sense of place) against the placelessness inherent to the “space of flows”, Arminio sets out to call attention to the possibility of creating a third space, a heterotopic countersite of marginal places (the paesi of a peripheral South of Italy) to be used as springboards for bringing into existence temporary heterochronies named comunità provvisorie. That Arminio imagines and experiences his heterotopic countersite also as a possible, temporary heterochrony, as an enclave of contestatory untimeliness and critical non-synchronicity within the flow of the present, is not a speculation but a fact. This is proven by a passage from the interview quoted earlier, published in the Gruppo Abele website, where the paesologo unequivocally affirms that untimeliness and marginality are the guiding principles of his project: È un tempo, questo, che ci offre la possibilità di oscillare, di muoversi in diverse direzioni, per cercare nuovi modi di sentire. Le comunità provvisorie non vanno al mercato delle idee e delle opinioni: si preferisce l’inattualità, si preferisce il margine non battuto, il luogo non illuminato. Si abitano gli spigoli più che il centro, si sta nei territori che fanno resi-

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stenza all’omologazione, nei paesaggi che segnalano il ritiro dell’umano piuttosto che il suo trionfo (January 2, 2013)13.

What needs to be added at this point is that in addition to Foucault’s heterotopia of deviation, Arminio’s comunità provvisoria also calls to mind two different but not unrelated concepts: Agamben’s concept of the comunità inessenziale and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term “minoritarian” with the orientation toward a particular form of minority politics that such use of the term makes possible. I will first discuss the points of convergence between Arminio’s comunità provvisoria and Agamben’s comunità inessenziale. Agamben coins the expression comunità inessenziale in La comunità che viene (The Coming Community), a 1990 collection of epigrammatic essays, each characterized by a dizzying fusion of brevity and density of thought. The one reference to the expression comunità inessenziale, which has been translated in English as “inessential commonality”, appears in the essay on the principium individuationis. Agamben writes: [T]uttavia ciò che è comune non può in nessun caso costituire l’essenza di una cosa singolare. Decisiva è, qui, l’idea di una comunità inessenziale, di un convenire che non concerne in alcun modo un’essenza (p. 14)14.

[We live in a time that offers the possibility to move back and forth, to follow different directions in search of new ways of feeling. Our temporary communities do not frequent the market of ideas and opinions, preferring to be untimely, and to explore uncharted paths and places out of the limelight. Temporary communities situate themselves on the margin rather than in the centre, in territories that resist homologation, in landscapes that bear the signs of the retreat of human life, not of its triumph.

(My translation)].

14 [And yet what is common cannot in any case constitute the essence of the single case […] Decisive here is the idea of an inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence (1993, pp. 17-180)].

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It is important to note that Agamben invites us to connect his concept of the comunità inessenziale with what he calls singolarità qualunque, in English “whatever singularity”. In his definition, a singolarità qualunque is a singularity that remains such, meaning a dynamic and centrifugal singularity that does not converge or solidify into (an) identity, the identity that arises from any kind of centripetal/static sense of belonging.

Moving from this premise, Agamben proceeds to suggest that a community of singolarità qualunque is the greatest threat for the State, because the State cannot tolerate that delle singolarità facciano comunità senza rivendicare un’identità, che degli uomini appartengano senza una rappresentabile condizione di appartenenza (pp. 58-59)15.

Now, a parallel between this picture of the comunità inessenziale and the idea of the comunità provvisoria can be drawn if we pay due attention to the fact that the first overlaps quite substantially with Arminio’s description of his own model of community. Just like Agamben’s comunità inessenziale, Arminio’s comunità provvisoria is a collectivity whose mode of being and modus operandi are based precisely on the denial of terms like essence and identity, terms that carry a heavy ontological burden and an equally heavy ideological baggage. The challenge, for both Agamben and Arminio, consists in proving that a mode of belonging together – a mode of making communit(ies) – that turns away from the fixity of every form of essence [What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (1993, p. 85)].

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as well as from the principle of sameness associated with identity is possible. And it is possible not only in the sense that is conceivable but also in the sense that it has already been attempted (as in Agamben’s example of the 1989 student demonstrations in China) and continues to be attempted (as with Arminio’s temporary communities).

I would like to argue that Arminio’s comunità provvisoria may be seen as one of the ways or modalities in which Agamben’s concept of the comunità inessenziale can take on concrete and actual life. This, to a certain extent, is tantamount to saying that Arminio’s temporary community can be viewed somewhat as a species of the genus “inessential commonality”. Arminio’s insistence on the fact that the form of community he advocates does not correspond to any kind of ideal society and image of humanity to be cultivated and propagated could be read as implicating that his temporary community, exactly like Agamben’s “inessential commonality”, is a collectivity of “whatever singularities” (“singolarità qualunque” being subjects whose coming together produces a sense of collective belonging immune from essentialist modes of identification).

Let me now turn to the possible relation between Arminio’s comunità provvisoria and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term minority. In Negotiations, Deleuze writes that [A] minority has no model, it’s a becoming, a process (1995, p. 173).

This resonates with the following remark from A Thousand Plateaus: There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority’s never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian (1987, p. 106).

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I take both remarks to mean that whatever is majoritarian, every social phenomenon or formation that assumes a position of majoritarianism aims at placing itself within the realm of being or essences, and thus of identitarian constructions. On the contrary, that which occupies a position of minority can assume change, transformation, mutation as the constitutive features of its condition and mode of presence as well as presentation. But what is even more significant for our purpose at hand is that the remarks I have quoted are connected to another major concept that we owe to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical inventiveness; the concept that they express in and through the phrase “becoming minoritarian”. To put it somewhat succinctly, by “becoming minoritarian” Deleuze and Guattari mean the capacity, possessed in potentia by all individuals, to take upon themselves the task of thinking and acting against the grain of the majoritarian political doxa which, insofar as it is doxa or sensus communis relies, almost invariably, on a crypto-utopian discourse to legitimize itself.

In other words, this “becoming minoritarian” is presented by Deleuze and Guattari as the condition of possibility of any form of effective minoritarian politics, or, to be loyal to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, of politics tout court, given that for the two French philosophers genuine, transformative politics, with its commitment to effecting change, is always and necessarily minoritarian.

As I pointed out, existing in a constant state of becoming is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the mode of existence or state of being of minorities, contrary to major-

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ities which typically tend toward being and permanence as their state of being.

On the basis of the above, what is the possible relation between Arminio’s idea of the comunità provvisoria and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term minority? My suggestion is that Arminio’s form of collectivity/sociality can be considered a mode of experimenting with and a way of experiencing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minoritarian becoming for two basic reasons. The first reason is that the people who choose to be part of Arminio’s form of collectivity also choose to situate their activity within a marginal, peripheral, and, in actual fact, minoritarian geopolitical locality; the small towns of the Italian Mezzogiorno, and in particular the small towns of Arminio’s native Irpinia. The second reason is that the geopolitical context that I have mentioned is the context from which a minoritarian politics capable of defying the majoritarian political practices of what we could call the metropolitan centre can be planned and brought into effect. The challenge, the difficult challenge, for the kind of project which is associated with the idea of the temporary community is to steer clear of two equally undesirable outcomes: localism and glocalism.

Arminio affirms quite strongly that his attention and commitment to the marginal paesi of the Italian South is a response to both these majoritarian modes of activism. Localism is not only conservative; it also caters, as previously noted, to the majoritarian ethos and mentality of the city, because its mots d’ordre are restoration and cosmesis which, in turn, are instrumental to creating the fiction of

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the picture-perfect village with its authentic communitarianism (or communitarian life). In Arminio’s view localism gratifies itself by reducing locality to the image or vision desired and demanded by urbanites who, typically, are occasional consumers of rural sensations. As for glocalism, Arminio sees this phenomenon as a rationalization and justification of a state of things which is ubiquitous and ever expanding, a state of things that could be described as the power of the global; or, more precisely, as that power by means of which globalization is able to subsume the local within the bounds of its space and ideology, thereby imposing its own logic (and spatial logic) to every single place and locality. In other words, globalism designates, in Arminio’s view, the capacity of globalism and globalization to localize themselves, that is to say their capacity to install and assert their false cosmopolitanism, quite literally, all over the place: Here is a snapshot of the effects of glocalism in Salento from Vento forte tra Lacedonia e Candela: [A]nche qui fanno le feste ad agosto. Ne abbiamo viste due. Ci hanno sorpreso. E di queste feste non so dire molto. Noi ci aspettavamo la pizzica e abbiamo trovato la Scozia e il Western, motociclette e impero romano (p. 105)16.

It is, therefore, from the margins of the Globe and, better still, from the margins of globalized Italy that Arminio and his fellow proponents of the comunità provvisoria

16 [Here too festivals are organized in August. We saw two of them. They surprised us. And I don’t know what to say about these festivals. We expected the pizzica but found Scotland and the Western, motorcycles and the Roman empire. (My translation)].

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launch their challenge to the dominant conceptions of community and to the rigid alternative between localism and glocalism that they imply. Against the intellectual straitjacket of this rigid alternative (a product of the closure of all binary oppositions and binary thinking) Arminio points to a third way, a way which is predicated upon the negation of notions and criteria such as essence, identity, majoritarian gaze. In Arminio’s idea of the comunità provvisoria all these notions and criteria disappear to make room for the possibility to experiment with a different and truly alternative form of collective affiliation, one which seems to bring together, as I have tried to argue, Agamben’s concepts of the comunità inessenziale and singolarità qualunque, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minoritarian becoming.

In closing, it is worthwhile to return once again (and for one last time) to the affinity between Arminio’s project and Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia as a countersite. If, as the French philosopher argues, a heterotopia of deviation is, unlike utopia, not only an existing, real place but a place that stands outside the perimeter of hegemonic spatial norms and logic(s), then it is safe to say that the comunità provvisoria envisioned by Arminio sets itself the objective of being, first and foremost, a Foucauldian countersite. Insofar as it is a countersite located in the marginal geography of the Southern Italian paesi, the comunità provvisoria purports to give rise to an indefinite plurality of temporary places from which to cast an estranging look at the generic urbanism of our time, namely at that incessant flow of urban-like forms and ur-

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ban life-styles which is rendering the experience of space more and more homogenized and standardized. To reassert difference and dissent in the face of an undifferentiated process of global/glocal urbanization, we must start, in Arminio’s view, from space. We must start, that is, by re-thinking the way(s) we place ourselves in and before space. We have no other choice, if we want this diagnosis to remain a bleak risk, not to turn, instead, into a dystopic reality: Si viene tutti dallo stesso posto, dalla stessa città invisibile.

Calvino ne aveva immaginate tante, se n’ è realizzata una sola, quella dell’autismo corale (Terracarne 2011, p. 14)17.

17 [We all come from the same place, from the same invisible city. Calvino imagined many of them; only one has become real, that of collective autism (My translation)].

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Bibliography Agamben G. 1990, La comunità che viene, Einaudi, Turin (The Coming Community, 1993, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN).

Arminio F. 2008, Vento forte tra Lacedonia e Candela: Esercizi di paesologia, Laterza, Bari.

Arminio F. 2011, Terracarne: Viaggio nei paesi invisibili e nei paesi giganti del Sud Italia, Mondadori, Milano.

Arminio F. 2013, Un passo indietro per guardare avanti, «Gruppo Abele», http://www.gruppoabele.org/un-passo-indietro-per-guardare-avanti/ (01/02).

Bonesio L. 2009, Il paesaggio come luogo dell’abitare, in P. D’Angelo (ed.), Estetica e paesaggio, Il Mulino, Bologna, pp.239-265.

Castells M. 1996, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell, Oxford.

Deleuze G., Guattari F. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (Mille Plateaux, 1980, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris).

Deleuze G. 1995, Negotiations, 1972-1990, Columbia University Press, New York (Pourparlers, 1990, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris).

Esposito R. 1998, Communitas: origine e destino della comunità, Einaudi, Turin (Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 2010, Stanford University Press, Stanford).

Foucault M. 1986, Of Other Spaces, «Diacritics», vol. 16, no. 1, Spring, pp. 22-27 (Des Espaces Autres, 1984, «Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité», no. 5, pp. 46-49).

Harvey D. 1980, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford.

Lefebvre H. 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford (La production de l’espace, 1974, Editions Anthropos, Paris).

Pulcini E. 2009, La cura del mondo: Paura e responsabilità nell’età globale, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin.

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public space in the age of climate change Richard Ingersoll Syracuse University in Florence Politecnico di Milano

The design and use of public space are no doubt entering a new historic phase due to two intransigent factors. One, the most evident, is the mass introduction of cell phones and nearly universal Wi-Fi connectivity. The type of information that previously relied on public space has become virtual, while the users of public space increasingly defer to electronic devices that despatialize their participation. Due to the easy access to information in cyberspace, there seem fewer reasons to use the real space of streets and plazas. If there are currently 98 cell phone contracts for every 100 people on the planet (World Bank Group, 2017), one can assume that digitization has become a factor that probably surpasses other technological influences on public space such as automobiles. Through the virtual layers of GPS, e-commerce, email, selfies, twitters, and social networks, space becomes increasingly mediated and inevitably internalized. One can find significant exceptions, such as the ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 at Puerta del Sol in Madrid and Zuccotti Park in NY, and in other cities around the world, or the Arab Spring, which occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, leading to the fall of Hos-

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ni Mubarek’s reign. For these political occasions a human swarming was orchestrated through the organizational capacity of electronic media. They represent, however, a temporary respatialization for democratic agendas, and in no way should they be considered a ‘normal’ use of public space. Indeed the continued political use of space usually inhibits normal uses because access points become more controlled and commerce and public offices are put at risk. The installation of thousands of pairs of shoes at Place de la République in Paris as a protest against the state’s prohibition of demonstrations during the COP21 meetings in December 2015, captures the notion of the convergence of the political with the virtual. Digitalization thus encourages both less regular use of public space and more intense political occupations of it.

The other issue governing the destiny of public space, Global Warming, is less easy to quantify, as it is not a constant condition, yet due to its impact on the rise of shore lines will eventually play a major role in the life of the world’s greatest cities, including Tokyo, Manhattan, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, and London. Although a very influential climate-change-denier has assumed power in the USA, all knowledgeable sources agree that the planet has entered a new geological phase, defined by Paul Crutzen as the Anthropocene.

After two centuries of intense human-generated carbonic gases (GHG’s) released into the atmosphere, the climate is incrementally warming up, freak storms intensifying, threatening major urban areas with either excesses of water or lack of it. Hurricane Katrina devastated New

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Orleans, while the annual inundations in Dacca make the option of public space tenuous. The 100,000 inhabitants of the Kiribati Islands in the Pacific will be the first climate victims to officially surrender their land to rising waters. Global warming must be recognized as the new primary condition of urban space.

The production of buildings, their heating and cooling, carbon fuels for transportation, industrial production, industrial agriculture, and modern livestock methods have pushed the planet to a critical level of GHG accumulation, recognized with urgency at the afore-mentioned COP21 meeting in Paris, 2015, at which 175 nations (but since US elections, one less) agreed to attempt to contain further temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In the design and programming of new or restructured urban areas, however, the effect of global warming on public spaces is rarely taken into consideration. Yet as many as 70% of the world’s great cities will unfortunately find their open spaces threatened as the waters rise from 0.2 to 2 meters or more during the 21st century. The advent of climate change offers a compelling reason to rethink the function of public space in the near future. This was punctuated with the floods in Paris in June, 2016, six months after the COP21 meeting, which seemed to echo the concerns of the meeting and demonstrate how fragile public space can be.

The situation of Piazza San Marco in Venice, flooded for nearly one-third of the year, will probably be shared by countless cities around the world by the end of the 21st century. The thermal expansion of the oceans and the de-

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glaciation of the polar icecaps will nonetheless continue.

In the submerged urban environment of the future what will happen to public space? The often cited prediction based on UN projections that 70% of the planet’s population will live in cities by 2050 does not seem to take into account this hydraulic future. Nor does such a statistic consider the quality of this ‘urban’ population: will they be in slums, in suburbs, in periurban situations? More than half of the world will not live in cities but in informal edges where the idea of public space is quite dubious. As sprawl progressively consumes the edges of cities, the objective need for a place analogous to the piazza declines. Cities have been the determining player in the production of GHG’s but for this same reason they promise a greater awareness of the problems. Thus an increase in the urban population has the potential to stimulate more conscientiousness and better planning in the confrontation with the effects of global warming. But when so much of the territory of future development is predicated on informal and laissez-faire practices, one must doubt the capacity to anticipate fragile environmental conditions.

As a historian and social thinker I have been deeply involved with the theory and history of public space during the past three decades. While studying with Spiro Kostof, I wrote a dissertation in 1985, The Ritual Use of Public Space in Renaissance Rome, and since then I have pursued research on many contemporary spaces, mostly thinking about behaviour and design. My notion of what makes good places is not so distant from that of William H. Whyte in “The Social Life of Small Public Spaces”

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(1980), except that I have always considered ideological questions first, to the point that I consider the phenomenon of most contemporary space-making as a by-product of multinational globalization, often resulting in projects that look like good public spaces but are not intended for real people. One literal example is the two block area owned by the Proctor and Gamble Corporation in Cincinnati, which appears to be a lovely planted plaza but where pedestrians are warned by armed guards not to linger, or sit, or eat; it is a private space in the centre of the downtown only to be enjoyed from the windows of the corporate headquarters. When this sort of deterrent occurs, I call it the “Cities without People Syndrome”. The two factors mentioned above will indeed enhance this syndrome: the first through despatialization, the latter through flooding.

The factors that I have always valued in the making of a good public space, such as the Piazza del Campo in Siena, may become completely irrelevant in the watery WiFi future. Of my five criteria, the first is access, which is clearly not possible in Cincinnati, nor in flooded Piazza San Marco. In an optimal situation there should be at least three points of access, the space should be between two or more points of interest, and, if it can be avoided, the level should remain at grade — putting public space up or down is generally perceived as a trap. Yet with the rise of water, elevated spaces like the new Piazza Gae Aulenti (Cesar Pelli, et al., 2015) at Porta Nuova in Milan may have an advantage, while the spaces at grade may be temporarily flooded as in Venice. One of the unconscious rea-

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sons for the success of the High Line in New York, a 2.3 km-long elevated park (James Corner, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, 2006-2018) raised two stories above grade, may be its utility in times of flooding. In any event, today when one speaks of ‘access’ we are usually referring to Wi-Fi, which transcends space.

A second point: public space should favour comfort, offering human scale, requiring no more than 2 to 3 minutes to cross it, with different areas for sun and shade, and flexible seating. In a world based on automobile transport, parking, and telematics, such scale becomes very difficult to maintain. The access to quick parking and proximity to a destination supersedes the pleasure of walking across a piazza.

A third criterion: public space should have a balanced density of political and commercial functions that provide its prime points of attraction. While most commerce and many institutions have abandoned centre cities, the lack of proximity of these functions, which are usually isolated in enclaves, may explain why it is difficult to generate a public space in suburban or periurban contexts.

Fourth: vital public space usually thrives on democratic attractions such as water, art, or sports. Unanticipated water features derived from climate change, such as New Orleans streets after Hurricane Katrina, may perhaps give cause for dread rather than joy.

Finally, close to Whyte’s concept of ‘triangulation,’ there should be crossed programs that encourage a condition analogous to biodiversity that I call “biographical diversity”, including a variety of education levels, a mix of elderly

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and young people, and a balance of different classes and ethnicities. The trend toward digital Darwinism, however, will probably limit this variety. Whyte reduces this last criterion to the importance of hotdog stands (today cappuccino stands), which motivate people to cross space, but I think it takes a bit more in cultural terms to achieve “biographical diversity”. Nonetheless, food always provides an incentive for using public space, even in a world dominated by automobiles and digital culture. In all of this one should not underestimate the importance of materials and design, as most of the five points must be translated into substance by designers.

Despite the various design and mechanical deterrents to use public space, many people still feel an emotional desire for it, in order to see others, to shop, to play, and, when necessary, to demonstrate. During the last 20 years cultural institutions, especially museums, theatres, and libraries, have generated the most articulated public spaces.

One thinks of the entry to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997), or the amphitheatre-shaped piazza of Renzo Piano’s Parco della Musica for three concert halls in Rome (2002), or the grand deck of the French National Library in Paris (Dominique Perrault, 1994).

But the public spaces of this generation, remain marginal to daily life functions and seem more for momentary display or reception. Adherence to the theory of social triangulation—a program with at least three different functions creating pretexts to cross public space—will probably remain a good idea for the near future, even if one has to get their feet wet in doing so. Just at the moment when

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the other protagonists of GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon) have opted for fortress solutions for their headquarters, Facebook hired Rem Koolhaas’s OMA to create Willow Village as an addition to its headquarters in Menlo Park: taking seriously the ‘social’ role of social networking led to the desire for something that simulates the type of public space that is elsewhere being lost. During the next five years Facebook will recreate a street lined with shops leading to a plaza for the company offices. The upper stories will provide 1,500 housing units, a portion of which will be low-income. Despite the good intentions to go beyond Wi-Fi urbanism, this return to the street will probably have problems of private corporate control similar to Proctor & Gamble.

Venice, where the water has risen 28 centimetres in less than a century, has long since experienced regular inundations, and until recently gives some indication of the process of slow, amphibious adaptation. During acqua alta its major public spaces are traversed by meter-high planks. While the temporary flooding of Venice has its joys if you are willing to get wet, the damage to buildings and paving is noteworthy and leads to overall degeneration. Venice’s traditional solution to rising water levels was to raise the embankments, or fondamenta. This all changed, however, with the introduction of MOSE, a project for three gigantic moveable dikes, that has been in construction since 2003, and was interrupted by corruption scandals in 2014, in which a billion euro of the 5.5 billion budget was siphoned off to political cronies. MOSE will hold back a bit more than a one-meter rise above

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the current tide change, but in all probability will not be sufficiently high by the end of the century. Theorists call such an approach a ‘grey’ system, inserting inorganic deterrents into a natural ecosystem, with the consequence of pushing the organic matter elsewhere. In the short term MOSE will help save the beloved public spaces of Venice, but this will carry significant economic and environmental costs.

A more passive ‘green’ approach to climate change is being proposed in Rotterdam, which since its origins has been below sea level and each day experiences a two-meter change of levels. Here we find the first large city, Europe’s largest port, that has seriously begun planning for the dramatic changes in store for the next generations.

The Climate Adaptation Strategy begun in 2006 acknowledges the hard infrastructure of dikes and barriers that has always kept the sea water level under control in outer and inner areas of Rotterdam, but as a supplement proposes soft ways that the city can both absorb water and float on it. The magnificent Maeslant water barrier, finished in 1996, should be the envy of MOSE, in cost and function, its two hinged fan-shaped arms swing into place when storms from the sea require it — thus far once every twelve years. With a meter rise in sea levels, however, it is predicted the barrier will be used every year.

Rotterdam’s internal solution, addressing excessive rainfall, is to encourage green roofs and water plazas. The city offers incentives of €30 per square meter for those who convert their roofs to green roofs, which has resulted in such pilot projects as Der DakAkker, the Schied-

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block Roof Farm, atop a 7-story office block (Buro Sant en co, 2012). The effort to turn public space into an urban sponge is more to the point in terms of the future of public space. Not far from the central station amid housing slabs is the city’s first water plaza, Benthemplein Square (De Urbanisten, 2013). It absorbs run-off water on three different levels, and can diffuse flooded space within 32 hours, while retaining and recycling a third of the rest of the water for service uses.

Officials from New York City have learned directly from Rotterdam, consulting the Climate Proof specialists after the damages of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Following a limited competition they hired Bjarke Ingels with a team of others to initiate the “Dry Line”, a mixture of benchlike barriers and planted sponges forming a protective berm that will wrap around the tip of Lower Manhattan.

This new flood-control infrastructure has the potential to become a spectacular linear park raised five metres above the shore line and stretching nine km from 42nd Street to the tip of Manhattan. The berm will incorporate the double function of flood containment and recreation, with strategically positioned flood gates and, inserted into the new landscape, many play areas, bike routes, urban farming plots, interior markets, interior play spaces, and treelined paths. It is intended to both resist water and absorb it. Thus sustainability offers the pretext for a new kind of public space.

Back to Rotterdam, one remarkable response to the consequences of Global Warming promoted by the municipality is the Drijvend Paviljoen, or Floating Climate Proof

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Pavilion (Public Domain Architecten, 2014), moored near the University in the newly urbanized Kop von Zuid district. This project proposes that the uncertainty of climate change and rising waters would risk less if buildings and public spaces were built to float. As dry land subsides urban dwellers should increasingly rely on well-planned floating surfaces. The Delta Cities project pursues hightech methods, planning for twenty-five-story buildings with concrete foundations set on floating pontoons. The floating city can also be achieved with low tech ways, such as the floating school of Makoko in Lagos, a project by the Nigerian architect KunlĂŠ Adeyemi, realized in 2013. The A-frame set on a raft of recycled oil barrels offered educational experience to slum dwellers for three years until its collapse in a tropical storm in 2016. That same year it was reconstructed at the Venice Biennale, and has been proposed as a prototype for floating neighbourhoods.

If global warming is the new base line from which to organize public space, to what degree is it the responsibility of corporations? Most educated people tend to recycle and maintain an awareness of their personal impact on GHG levels. Corporations and Governments are in most cases less concerned: only 90 companies, a third of them state agencies, and 87 of them involved with energy, are responsible for 63% of GHG’s! In agriculture only ten multinationals produce 70% of all food products, relying exclusively on industrial farming and meat raising.

Naomi Klein, in her book This Changes Everything. Capitalism Against the Environment (2015), hopes to change public opinion. She contends that it is not the duty of the

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individual to reform, even if this may make one feel gratified, but instead it is much more important for the individual to act politically in order to curtail the monopolistic protagonists of capitalism who pose the greater danger.

James Hansen, the NASA scientist who more than anyone has tried to bring the world to its senses about climate change, puts it bluntly, attach a fee of 15% on each ton of carbon allowed and see how quickly we reduce the gases.

Klein believes that consumers can democratically create pressure on corporations, such as the successful boycott against apartheid in South Africa. Hansen, on the other hand, thinks there is no time left and fascist governments such as China may eventually lead the way to reducing carbon output (and certainly Singapore has shown this to be possible).

While from the 1960s onward the notion of planning became unpopular, it is obvious that the scale of future catastrophes demands better planning more than ever. Top down versions of planning, such as Masdar, the sustainable utopia produced by Norman Foster’s office in Abu Dhabi, follow corporate dictates, and generally lead to cities without people. An alternative can be found in the planning of Freiburg Germany, in particular the Vauban district, where more of a bottom up practice occurred.

The complex process of negotiating with community participation, city planning, and developers resulted in a virtually car-free neighbourhood, with most of the units ‘energy plus’, that is producing more energy than they consume. The public spaces of Vauban, pocket parks and small plazas, are constantly in use while the community

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of 5000 has measurably reduced greenhouse gases. This combination of sustainable transportation and architecture with generous public space offers an organizational model worth studying.

But we should seriously consider that the problems facing the future are not just the responsibility of architects and planners. Listen to Carlo Petrini, who confronted the COP 21 conference with their absolute inattention to the greatest problem of the planet: agriculture. There will soon be no biodiversity, and even sooner, no good land and water left to grow food if we continue industrial agricultural processes.

Agriculture uses 70% of fresh water resources. Chemical fertilizers account for 38% of the greenhouse gases caused by agriculture. Livestock due to feeding from monocultures and transport contributes 14% to global warming. In less than a century we have lost more than 75% of agrobiodiversity. Every year we throw away 7 billion tons of food, while 800 million are going hungry. Agriculture is both cause and victim of climate change: let’s not eat the climate.

Considering the potential for a catastrophic future, something analogous to the Black Death — call it the Neodiluvian Flood — should we start punishing ourselves with guilt trips? Joining religious brotherhoods to beg forgiveness from Mother Earth? My answer, which I practice with students and neighbours, is to rethink public space as agricultural space in urban situations: Agricivismo. I organize students to participate in land restoration, using their skills as designers for more organic interventions. It is a compelling form of resistance, one that involves all walks of life, both biologically and biographically diverse,

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and if expanded to all urban situations can tangibly improve local environmental conditions while increasing a collective sense of readiness for the uncertainties of the Global Warming future. Water is collected and stored and successfully absorbed. The growing of food and its preparation becomes a community endeavour, bonding people to a common goal, and much healthier than Whyte’s hotdogs. The awkward and often dangerous voids between buildings can acquire a new public identity, rendered safe by the presence of people weeding and watering. So while public life may be significantly reduced due to digitalization, and many spaces will be at risk due to changing water levels, agricivismo offers one of many ways to transform public spaces into sponges. While it might be possible to apply telematics to farming, for instance the Geofolia surveillance method recently introduced in the UK, cultivation will probably remain the last sector of human life to resist despatialization.

Whether floating or soaking, public space in the age of global warming needs to both perform ecologically while offering a sense of place for the Wi-Fi generation. While not intended to symbolize the volatility of water levels, the Water Mirror in Bordeaux (Miroir des Quais, Michel Corajoud, Pierre Gangnet, and hydraulic engineer JeanMax Llorca, 2006), on the embankments of the Garonne River does just that and has become one of the most loved public spaces in Europe. It stretches more than 3,000 square meters parallel to the new tram line on a smooth granite plane that when drenched in calm water reflects the 18th-century façades of Place de la Bourse. During

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the day mist pours out of regularly placed holes forming a low-lying cloud, then water gurgles up through the cracks in ever greater jets to break the mist, after which the water mysteriously drains away much like the rhythm of the tides. The Water Mirror transmits an optimistic sentiment that even if water will become an inevitable threat to urban space, it can also become a source of great beauty and interaction.

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the social life of non-places: lessons from florentine peripheries Giulio Giovannoni University of Florence

Introduction The concept of non-places, introduced by Marc AugĂŠ in his 1994 book of the same name, is often used to describe most of the spaces that characterize the contemporary city. This use is widespread among architects and urban planners, who often qualify as ‘non-places’ spaces ranging from shopping centres to airports, car parks, service stations, public housing districts, and the suburbs in general. My thesis is that the concept of the non-place is an ideological device that is both useless and harmful. Its uselessness derives from its inadequacy for describing any socio-spatial system. In fact, by qualifying a space as a nonplace, a generic negative connotation is attributed to it and, in fact, its deeper understanding is precluded. The harmfulness of this concept is a direct consequence of its futility. By preventing us from understanding the complexity of the social dynamics that take place in space, the concept of non-place ends up by greatly limiting the design capacity of architects, urban planners, and politicians. This is particularly regrettable, since the spaces considered non-places by dominant urban thinking cor-

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respond to much of the contemporary city and its suburbs.

Therefore, it stands to reason that the frequent use of this concept would manifest a widespread unscientific, ideological and nostalgic attitude to the study and planning of the contemporary city and suburban areas.

In contrast, this essay contends that what Augé defines as non-places constitute the main social structure of the contemporary city. This social framework has been little studied by academics, and neglected by architects, urban planners and politicians, who have only in a handful of cases been able to plan and design the contemporary city and the suburbs in a way that is appropriate to their economic and social function. I argue that by challenging Augé’s concept of non-places, and proffering a theory that instead elevates and promotes these important spaces, it would be possible to manage and organize them appropriately as well as explore their full potential through architectural and urban design.

In the first part of this essay I discuss the definition of the concept of non-place provided by Augé and I sketch a critique of this theory. In the second part, I frame the ideology of non-places within the more general attitude of nostalgia for the historic city and of the ‘phobia’ towards contemporary suburban developments. Although this attitude to the ‘new city’ has existed in the history of Western culture since at least the first industrial revolution, I discuss what I call suburbophobia, from Henri Lefebvre to the most recent anti-sprawl trends and the discourse on the periphery in Tuscany. In the third part, I focus on the social life of non-places, commencing from empiri-

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cal research conducted over several years in the Florence and Prato areas. In the final section I draw conclusions on the policy and design implications of this analysis, making some proposals to revise national and regional legislation governing shopping centres, outlets, multiplexes and service stations. I also appeal to my fellow architects and town planners to conceptualise and design these collective facilities not only as spaces of consumption, but also as opportunities for social life.

The ‘Non-Place’: and Ideological Device?

The concept of non-place is defined by Augé in opposition to that of anthropological place. The anthropological place is a concrete and symbolic construction of space [which] is a principle of meaning for the people who live in it, and also a principle of intelligibility for the person who observes it 1.

Of variable size, the anthropological place is such insofar as it is an entity invested with meaning. It is also concerned with identity, as a place of birth and of self-identification; relational, as the object of a shared identity as well as support of social relations; and historical, as it is stable over time and it is possible to find in it reference points that are considered as fixed and immutable. On the contrary, a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place 2.

1 2

Augé (1995), pp. 51-52.

Ibid., pp. 77-78.

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For Augé, non-places are the product of what he defines with the neologism ‘supermodernity’ (surmodernité), that is, the current condition characterized by three main figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of references.

Overabundance of events is the phenomenon in which time perception is confused by the excessive number of stimuli and events. Overabundance of space is the result of the shrinkage of the planet caused by the conquest of space and the development of rapid transport. The individualization of references occurs when the individual considers him or herself to be a world in his or her own right3. For Augé, supermodernity, that is to say the present era characterized by excesses, essentially produces non-places, i.e. spaces without history, identity and social relations: [N]on-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified – with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance – by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself 4.

This way of conceptualizing time and space shares similarities with the concept of ‘dromology’ previously developed by Virilio, and with the notion of space-time compression developed by Harvey. See in particular: Virilio (2009); Harvey (1990), pp. 260-307. The notion of non-place is, in turn, similar to the concept of placelessness developed by Relph (1976).

4 Augé (1995), p. 14.

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Although the title of Augé’s book speaks of the ‘anthropology of supermodernity’, it presents an entirely superficial look at the spaces that are identified as non-places. His definition of non-places – and his repeated classification of their features – is not presented as a research hypothesis to be verified through accurate anthropological work, but is a kind of self-evident postulate whose validity is never questioned. The ‘ideal type nature’ of the non-place is recognized by Augé himself when he states: Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten5.

It is interesting, therefore, to consider the concept of nonplace in light of Max Weber’s definition of ideal type: It is a conceptual construct (Gedankenbild) which is neither historical reality nor even the ‘true’ reality. It is even less fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumed as one instance. It has the significance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication of certain of its significant components6.

If we assume that Augé’s non-place falls into the category of the ideal type described by Weber, what is missing from the work of the French anthropologist is the comparison of this concept with the empirical reality of which Weber speaks in the above definition. Spaces that are identified as non-places are never described and 5 6

Ibid., p. 79.

Weber (1949), p. 93.

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studied by him except in a generic, abstract and atopic way. This is the case when he speaks of shopping centres, which he claims are experienced “through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; [and that are] a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral” 7. Similarly, he imagines a hypothetical user of non-places as a “foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) [who] can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains” 8.

Also following this model are his descriptions of airports and stations, perhaps the spaces that are closest to the ideal type conceived by Augé.

Now, as we have seen, the non-place is defined as the negation and opposite of place. The latter is such only if it is historical, identitarian and relational. Even this definition is questionable to say the least. In fact, by prioritizing the characteristics of history and identity, the concept of place thus refers to a narrow and potentially perverse conception of the relationship between space and community, one in which those whose histories and identities are not rooted in the place where they live – who make up a considerable and growing share of the population of every contemporary city – might in theory have no right to claim to belong to that community or territory 9.

Augé (1995), p. 78.

Ibid. p. 106.

9 In my opinion, the notion of place defined by Augé risks interpretation in this narrow and exclusionary sense. For a critique of such concepts of community and place, see for example: Sennett (2002), 294-312; Harvey (1996), pp. 291-326.

7 8

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Being representative of the current era, non-places describe what Henri Lefebvre would have defined, albeit in different words, as the production of abstract space in contemporary capitalist society. Behind the concept of non-place, in fact, there is on the one hand a general criticism of urbanization and, on the other, a yearning for the pre-industrial city. In fact, Augé’s book is dominated by a clear nostalgic accent, which can also be discerned in works by many of the great critics of contemporary urbanization, including Lefebvre. It is important to give due attention to the persistent longing for the old city, as it continues to have profound effects on the way space is being produced today.

Urban Nostalgia, Non-Places, and Suburbophobia According to Raymond Williams, nostalgia for the past has long characterized English society. In his book The Country and the City (1973), he retrospectively retraces several generations of poets and writers who, while living in different eras, had in common the fact that they missed the ‘good old days’. The ironic aspect, he argues, is that in many cases the same era that an author remembers as a happy period of an honest and genuine society is seen by some other author, who is perhaps only a few decades older, as a time in which an earlier moral and material order had already become corrupted irreparably. Based on this phenomenon, Williams imagines an escalator that takes one back in time and allows one to find at different periods in history the same nostalgia for the past and resentment of the present. Virtually, this escalator would stop

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only in front of Eden, the Paradise Lost, where of course no better precedent could be found. Williams points out that this way of relating to society and the living environment of the present and the past does not derive only from an innate tendency in each of us to be nostalgic for the years of our childhood, but from the ruling classes’ need to perpetuate, through a complex cultural and ideological structure, a certain social structure and power system.

Nostalgia for the city and countryside of the previous era has also shaped the planning debates in Europe and the United States since their origins10. The notion of nonplace developed by Augé in 1992 is part of a broader narrative characterized by nostalgia for the city of the past and by phobia of the contemporary city. In this section, I will focus in particular on Lefebvre, an author who had a very strong influence on the urban debate and policies in Europe since the early 1960s11.

Lefebvre’s critique of contemporary urbanization is based on the Marxist concepts of work and product, use value and exchange value. While use value is related to the utility of a good, exchange value refers to its selling price. For Lefebvre, contemporary urban growth has abandoned the traditional urban model in favour of abstract urbanization. Whereas the city of the past was a work (oeuvre) and was socially experienced according to its use value, contemporary urbanization is conceived as a product to See for example: Secchi (1984); Boyer (1983).

In the Anglophone context, the scholar who most contributed to what I call here ‘suburbophobia’ is certainly Jacobs, with her landmark 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For reasons of space, I will avoid dwelling here on the American author.

10

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be exchanged on the market as any other good. The shift from the traditional city to urbanization, determined by the advent of industrialization, causes the disappearance of community relations typical of pre-industrial societies: in fact, contrasting with today’s model, in the past the city was considered a work of art to be used and enjoyed without any consideration of profit12.

In addition to being poorly supported in terms of historical research, this way of representing the old city is quite idealized. In contrast, the representations of the periphery provided by Lefebvre are strongly dystopian. They have more than one point in common with Augé’s descriptions of non-places: Urban reality, simultaneously amplified and exploded, thus loses the features it inherited from the previous period: organic totality, belonging, an uplifting image, a sense of space that was measured and dominated by monumental splendor. It was populated with signs of the urban within the dissolution of urbanity; it became stipulative, repressive, marked by signals, summary codes for circulation (routes), and signage. It was sometimes read as a rough draft, sometimes as an authoritarian message. It was imperious. But none of these descriptive terms completely describes the historical process of implosion-explosion (a metaphor borrowed from nuclear physics) that occurred: the tremendous concentration (of people, activities,

12 “This city is itself ‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts with the irreversible tendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products. Indeed the oeuvre is use value and the product is exchange value. The eminent use of the city, that is, of its streets and squares, edifices and monuments, is la Fête (a celebration which consumes unproductively, without other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enormous riches in money and objects)”. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on cities (1996), p. 66. Author’s italics.

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wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space13.

According to this description, in the periphery produced by capitalism, movements and behaviours are as if forced and dictated by a repressive and authoritarian order. This idea forms a very recurrent topos in sociological and urban literature. Assuming, like Lefebvre, a Marxist perspective, Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) already described the contemporary city as a device of social control and oppression14. Other descriptions of suburbs as culturally poor automaton environments include some of the works of Lewis Mumford, William Whyte, and David Riesman15. The loss of freedom, with controlled and conditioned movement, is also a recurrent and persistent film topos, from Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927) to Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin (1936), from the documentary The City by the American Institute of City Planners (1939) to Koyaanisqatsi (1982), up to more recent representations. It is not surprising that Lefebvre is also sensitive to this topos and basically describes the periphery as a space of forced movement and authoritarian control: Movement in the street, a communications space, is both obligatory and repressed. Whenever threatened, the first thing power restricts is the ability to linger or assemble Lefebvre (2003), p. 14. “[T]he town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital�.

From: Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), p. 94.

15 Mumford (1961); Whyte (1956); Riesman (1950).

13

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in the street. Although the street may have once had the meaning of a meeting place, it has since lost it, and could only have lost it, by reducing itself, through a process of necessary reduction, to nothing more than a passageway, by splitting itself into a place for the passage of pedestrians (hunted) and automobiles (privileged). The street became a network organized for and by consumption16.

It is not difficult to take an opposite viewpoint and see how, in many cases, the monumental splendour of historical cities had opposite meanings to the positive ones attributed to them by Lefebvre. For example, many of the old monuments were nothing more than the architectural and urban codification of a deeply hierarchical, unjust and authoritarian social and political order. Not to mention the baroque monumentality of Haussmann’s Paris, that was produced by policies of social and spatial purification of the centre of Paris, to the detriment of the lower classes. Correspondingly, it is possible to find numerous positive representations of contemporary mobility as a symbol of freedom and emancipation, both at class and gender levels.

In a way similar to Lefebvre’s approach, the passage for Augé from modernity to supermodernity, from places to non-places is reflected in the fact that words which, until a few decades ago, were not used have now become fashionable. Terms such as interchange, passenger, and communication, have taken over the terms crossroads, traveller, and language. While the former reflect an abstract and impersonal way of moving in space and relating to it, the latter describe a way of living and relating to others and to places17.

16 17

Lefebvre (2006), p. 20.

Augé (1995), pp. 107-8.

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This way of looking at the contemporary city is very rooted in the urban debate in the West, and has very important effects on the way we understand and govern it. In the United States, the condemnation and demonization of sprawl and suburbs commonly perpetuated by planners and policy-makers prevented them from grasping the complexity and diversity that certainly characterizes the American suburbs, in terms of social and ethnic composition, built environment and lifestyles18. Only a small number of more recent studies have attempted to account for this complexity 19.

In Italy and Europe, the myth of the city of the past is even more deeply rooted. In a recent study on Tuscany I tried to show how the utopian descriptions of the city and the countryside of the past, and the dystopian representations of the contemporary city, are two features of the same ideological device dating back to the cultural hegemony of the landed aristocracy. This device still has the effect of protecting the interests of a small cultural, political and economic elite that continues to produce, in the same way as in the past, a highly polarized and unequal urban space20.

In the German context, Thomas Sieverts argues that the myth of the compact city of the past prevents us from correctly understanding and designing peripheries, i.e. the

18 Many scholars have a dystopian view of suburban areas. A list of works which reflect this perspective, certainly too long to be made here, would include: Davis (1990); Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck (2001) and Silverstone, ed. (1996).

19 Interesting examples of this type of research are: Nicolaides and Wiese, eds. (2006); Archer, Sandul, and Solomonson, eds. (2015).

20 Giovannoni (2017).

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living space of most people. For this reason, he focuses his attention on the analysis and design of the Zwischenstadt, or city in-between, that is, that hybrid mixture of city and countryside which is one of the main features of most suburban areas21. On a similar slant, Rem Koolhaas speaks of the historical centres of the past as symbolically strong apparatuses that are now completely inadequate to support articulated and complex urban systems. And yet, their cultural and symbolic weight prevents the ‘new city’ from being understood and designed for what it is: Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. Its tragedy is given in simple geometric terms. As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value —a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention— is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency on the center: without center, no periphery; the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. Conceptually orphaned, the condition of the periphery is made worse by the fact that its mother is still alive, stealing the show, emphasizing its offspring’s inadequacies. The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy 22.

21 22

Sieverts (2003).

Koolhaas (1994), pp. 1248-1249.

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In fact, consolidated representations of historical cities and of contemporary suburbs strongly inhibit our ability to interpret and design peripheries. Augé’s book certainly belongs to this type of polarized utopian/dystopian representation, and is widely used by architects and planners to describe the contemporary city in opposition to the city of the past. My thesis is that the so-called non-places (i.e. shopping centres, multiplexes, service stations, etc.) that the French scholar speaks about are the new ‘squares’ – understood as the traditional places of urban sociality – of the contemporary city. However, while the debate on the dialectics between the centre and the periphery is now quite consolidated, that on the relationship between traditional public spaces and the new social spaces on the periphery, which I will deal with in the next section, is much less developed.

The Social Life of Non-Places: Evidence from Florence’s Peripheries.

In this section I summarize some findings from research on social life in shopping centres and service stations conducted in the outskirts of Florence and Prato in the last 10 years. Among the many locales investigated over the years, I will focus in particular on three case studies: two service stations on the outskirts of Florence and a large shopping centre, the so-called Parco Prato, opened in 2009 in the southern outskirts of Prato. The two petrol stations on the south-western outskirts of Florence have been the subject of an in-depth study, aimed among other things at capturing the social life of these spaces at different times of

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the day and week, their relationship with the neighbourhood, their level of ‘publicness’. Both service stations are equipped with bar-restaurants that are also open at night, making them suitable for becoming true landmarks for the inhabitants of this part of the periphery of Florence23.

The first of these service stations is located along Viale Nenni, a wide avenue that connects Florence to Scandicci. This avenue is located in a sparsely urbanized area between two historical routes – the Via Pisana and the Via di Scandicci – and is designed as a thoroughfare at some distance from residential areas. It is a sort of suburban ‘strip’ along which several petrol stations, the Coop Ponte a Greve shopping centre, some sports facilities and some neighbourhood commercial facilities are located.

Apart from a few remnants of historical urbanization, mostly of a rural nature, there is no residential building facing it. Since September 2013 the central portion of the avenue has been occupied by the Florence-Scandicci tramway, which is also used by many to reach the Coop Ponte a Greve shopping centre. However, this axis does not have any of the features of an urban route, and the commercial and service facilities that are found along it are all designed to be accessed by car. The petrol station in question is a large service station equipped with a washing area and a McDonald’s restaurant open 24/7. Given the characteristics of the area described above, it would seem logical to expect this petrol station to have all the features attributed by Marc Augé to the soFor a detailed discussion of the two case studies, please refer to Giovannoni (2016), pp. 75-94.

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called non-places, in particular the absence of stable social relations.

To study the social life of this space, our team of six research students, led by me, used structured observation methods, interviews and mapping techniques. The study was conducted in April 2014. The results of this research demonstrate that this space, and in particular the McDonald’s located inside the service station, is an important landmark for the inhabitants of the area. Obviously it does not have the continuity of frequentation and social life that is typical of traditional public spaces. However, at certain times of the day, particularly in the afternoon and evening, it becomes quite a significant meeting point. Contrary to what one might expect, most of the users of this McDonald’s restaurant were not the alienated and hasty drivers that Marc Augé discusses in abstract terms. The subjects observed were mainly inhabitants of the area, mostly young people. Although the driveway on which this service station is located is a car infrastructure, small groups of teenagers could be seen walking to McDonald’s from the surrounding areas. The idea that some people maintained a stable and lasting relationship with this place is made clear by the statement of one of the McDonald’s managers that “most of the clients are from the neighbourhood, we know many of them by name – there are few tourists here”.

The second petrol station analysed in the above study is located along Viale Etruria, also on the outskirts southwest of Florence. This research led to very similar conclusions. Thanks to the 24/7 bakery-bar, this service station

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had become a real focal point for the residents of a large area. Both of these service stations, in short, are unpretentious spaces without any particular architectural qualities, which, however, enjoy a certain level of social life. Considering the role they play for the inhabitants of the surrounding areas, these suburban facilities could be easily transformed into real centres for social life in the suburbs.

For this to be possible, however, their potential must be recognized and an appropriate regulatory system must be adopted. I will return to this point in the conclusion.

Applying these principles on a greater scale, similar considerations can be made in relation to the third case of ‘non-place’ which will be discussed in this section, namely the Parco Prato shopping centre. I dealt with this space during an urban design studio conducted with students in the autumn semester of 2017. An important part of the studio work consisted in the structured observation of the social life of this shopping centre and of the villages surrounding it, and in listening to the inhabitants of the area through a large number of interviews. During this phase of the lab it became clear that Parco Prato plays a central role for a large portion of the southern outskirts of Prato. This city, the second largest in Tuscany in terms of population, is located in close proximity to the outskirts of Florence and is famous worldwide for its textile industry, which was to a great extent taken over by the large Chinese community that first moved to this territory in the early 1990s.

The urban structure of the Prato suburbs is marked by a strong polycentrism of historical origin. There are numerous dispersed settlements, such as Iolo, Paperino, San

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Giusto, Galciana, and Maliseti, to name but a few. People from Prato call these settlements villaggi, or ‘villages’, underlining their small size and their strong historical and social identities. These villages are generally well equipped in terms of education and public facilities; although they often do not have sufficient commercial amenities. Many inhabitants blame the closure of neighbourhood shops on the opening of Parco Prato, inaugurated in November 2009 and considered the fourth largest and most visited shopping centre in Tuscany (the second if we exclude outlet villages, which are exclusively focused on fashion)24. This large commercial complex is developed along a substantial portico, with a total length of about 350 meters. The two arms that compose the portico find a fundamental junction in the central covered square, which is also the space where the main recreational and social events are organized. Although there is a lack of comprehensive data to establish a clear correlation between the opening of the centre and the closure of neighbourhood shops, it is not difficult to imagine that shopkeepers in peripheral villages would have experienced a decrease in revenue after the opening of this new commercial giant. However, during our structured observations and interviews with the inhabitants, we could appreciate how this space has become a fundamental focal point for a large part of the local population.

One of the results of the survey was the somewhat surprising fact that many parents regularly go to the shopping 24 https://www.cinquecosebelle.it/i-cinque-piu-grandi-visitati-centri-commerciali-toscana/ (accessed 22 October, 2018).

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centre exclusively for their children to play in the playground. A Moroccan lady from Iolo, one of the surrounding villages, particularly likes Parco Prato for weekend shopping with her family and her little daughter. Several other inhabitants expressed very positive opinions on this space. This is not surprising, as in this facility many exhibitions, concerts, and social and cultural events are organized on a regular basis. To give an idea of the number and scope of the events held in Parco Prato: between the beginning of June and mid-October 2018 there was a drawing competition for primary schools in the area, a music competition for young musicians (the ‘Talent Move’), a sporting event introducing golf, a dance show that donated the proceeds to the paediatric hospital in Florence, an exhibition with flag throwers from Volterra in medieval costumes, an initiative to promote alternative mobility, the Decathlon sports event, a day of volunteering, an exhibition of dinosaurs with entertainment activities for children, and various other events with entertainment and games for children.

The fact remains that this complex, though it boasts some quality spaces, including the covered square that connects the two arms of the gallery, was not expressly designed as a social space. The main characteristics that limit its sociability are its excessive mono functionality, its low porosity, i.e. its reduced ability to connect to the surrounding areas, the limited opening hours and the total absence of night activities, and the fact that it is accessed almost exclusively by car. This last problem is very much felt by a noteworthy portion of the local population. An elderly lady from the

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San Giusto neighbourhood complained that some old local stores have closed and that not all people have access to the shopping centre. The same problem was also found in Casale, another small village southwest of the shopping centre. Given that a significant part of Prato’s population is now elderly, many complain about the restricted accessibility of the shopping centre, which has by now become essential to meet the daily needs of purchase. For the elderly population with limited mobility, and perhaps also for other disadvantaged segments of the population, a phenomenon similar to that of the so-called American food deserts is taking place here25.

Perhaps the most interesting (and paradoxical) aspect of this story was the reaction of some administrators of Prato’s urban planning office to our projects and proposals.

The lengthy analyses carried out led us to believe that a functional integration project was necessary to promote this ‘quasi-centre’ to the rank of a real social centre. In particular, we wanted to facilitate the connection of this space to the different villages surrounding it, through a network of cycling and walking routes and through appropriate connections with local public transport. In addition, we presented a functional integration project that would allow the shopping centre to be experienced and used at all times of the day. We proposed the construction of some residential buildings, a library, and other ser-

Although food deserts are defined in various ways by different scholars, all definitions link this phenomenon to the difficulty that part of the population has in finding food. For a literature review on American food deserts see: Walker, Kean and Burke (2010), pp. 876-884.

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vices, restaurants and bars suitable for nightlife. We concluded from our research that this set of measures would, on the one hand, help to solve the problem of commercial desertification in the surrounding villages and, on the other, guarantee a satisfactory and easily accessible space of sociality to the whole area. The reaction we provoked was most surprising: it was not expected that a ‘non-place’ like a shopping centre could be expressly treated as a social space. This possibility was not even contemplated in the political agenda of Prato, which, conversely, is known in Tuscany and throughout Italy for its receptivity to innovation26. Moreover, this approach to the problem was also considered inappropriate and problematic from a political standpoint. Reactions to our projects aimed at transforming some petrol stations into small community spaces for the suburbs have been quite similar. Obviously there are cultural and ideological barriers, many of which I outlined in the beginning of this paper, that prevent us from considering these locations for what they already are: social spaces on the periphery.

Beyond ‘Non-Places’: Overcoming Ideological Barriers and Designing Contemporary Suburban Spaces Our inability to understand the role and potential that socalled ‘non-places’ assume in contemporary society de26 In urban policy documents by the municipal administration of Prato the terms ‘innovation’, ‘contemporaneity’ and the like are particularly recurrent. For example, see the document launching the procedure for the formation of the Prato urban plan available at: http://allegatiurbanistica. comune.prato.it/dl/20161209132428959/all_a_documento_avvio_procedimento.pdf (accessed 23 November, 2018).

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termines a more general incapacity to grasp the demand for sociality that exists in the periphery. What is it that obstructs our gaze and inhibits our planning? According to Sieverts, the persistence of the ‘myth’ of the old town is responsible. From Europe to the United States, suburbs and suburban areas are generally ostracized, because they are different from the traditional and stereotypical image of the city. To be seen in this way, a city must correspond to the urban canons of density, of mixed-use, of a certain relationship between solids and voids. These canons, codified in Jane Jacobs’s urban theory and easily found in European and North American cities before the First World War, prevent us from considering as a ‘place’ whatever does not conform to them. From this perspective, only the square and the street possess full dignity as public spaces.

Koolhaas, as we have seen, maintains that the centre, with its symbolic weight, continues to orphan the periphery and prevent us from appreciating its real importance and relative weight in contemporary urban systems. However, the analysis by Koolhaas, just like that by Sieverts, limits itself to providing an overview of the periphery as a whole without considering its social spaces. However, this consolidated view of traditional public spaces as the only legitimate social spaces of our cities has strong negative implications in the ways in which contemporary spaces are regulated at a functional, infrastructural and performance level, and designed at an architectural and social level.

Despite the recognized importance of shopping centres in contemporary society these spaces continue to be considered by many the enemies of the retail trade, the ‘bad

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giants’ who close the shops of the town centre. The fact that the majority of the population has been living in the suburbs for some time now, and that many lack the resources to go shopping in the city centre, is not recognized by the polemicists of the ‘small shops closing syndrome’. However, in the United States, this rhetoric has been swept away by the advent of electronic commerce and by the subsequent phenomenon of ‘dead malls’. Now that they are disappearing, even shopping malls are being missed. These spaces, after all, have enjoyed considerable importance in the social and cultural history of tens of millions of Americans27. The rapid evolution of e-commerce could quickly make Italian and European shopping centres obsolete as well. The fact remains that these centres have been and still are exclusively regulated as consumption spaces. For example, the legislation in force in Tuscany, drawn up on the basis of the national framework legislation, sets out the number of parking spaces that must be provided in relation to the selling surface. It also limits the number of large shopping centres that can be built. However, it does not give any guidance about the range of public and private functions that should be realized, the accessibility that should be provided for the various modes of transport (cycling, walking, driving, public transit), the necessity of creating some spaces of an exclusively public nature and that of providing adequate urban furnishings (such as seating areas and the like).

Kurutz, “An Ode to Shopping Malls”, The New York Times, July 26, 2017. Accessed 23 November, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/26/fashion/an-ode-to-shopping-malls.html.

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The case of Parco Prato presented above reveals that there is a demand for better and easier access to this important commercial and social facility. Citizens of this large suburban area also claim a ‘right to the city’ in terms of nightlife venues, services, recreational activities, and so on. Villages on the outskirts of Prato, as well as in many Italian and European suburbs, do not have the critical mass to create significant agglomerations capable of satisfying these needs and surviving in current market conditions.

The historic centres of Prato and Florence, furthermore, as well as those of the northern European urban areas discussed by Koolhaas and Sieverts, are located at significant distances to those living on the outskirts, and are difficult for them to reach. This is the case for the majority of the population today. National and regional regulations on shopping centre planning should therefore be updated to cover these key aspects. The advent of online commerce is not necessarily an obstacle. Personal services, food consumption and leisure activities continue to require real physical space. The growth of e-commerce could even encourage the spontaneous conversion of some of these commercial facilities into leisure and service centres.

This would further necessitate the regulatory and planning framework mentioned above.

Similar considerations, taking into account the difference in scale and the smaller radius of influence, can be made in relation to the planning of petrol stations. Although most of the petrol stations are exclusively technical facilities, some of them may well become, as we have seen, small centres for the local community. Urban planning

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and fuel distribution plans should acknowledge this reality and rework their regulations to recognize the difference between facilities providing simple petrol pumps and car washes, and those integrated service stations that could have a wider role in serving local communities. For the latter, functional hybridization with complementary social and commercial activities should be encouraged, and better accessibility from the surrounding residential areas should be ensured.

The cases presented in this essay provide just a few examples of what should, in my opinion, be a reconceptualization of a much more varied set of ‘types’ of new public spaces, which would include spaces such as outlet villages, airports, multiplex cinemas, stations, large car parks and sports facilities. Outlet villages could be thought of as gates connecting the highway network – along which they are located – with the surrounding regions. By integrating commercial functions with tourist and social services, the economic and social benefits of these large magnets could be distributed across wider areas. Airports, usually conceived as negative elements that reduce the real estate value of the surrounding areas, could be transformed into generators of positive externalities, as places of attraction in which to dine at night while observing the air traffic, to visit exhibitions and commercial spaces, to avail of personal services, and to participate in political and social events.

The transformations I have described above are in part already underway. However, they are almost exclusively led by big economic actors, without any capacity for control

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and direction by national and local political and administrative bodies. As I have tried to demonstrate, it will only be possible to develop an adequate regulatory framework and reach design potentials once the annihilating and obscuring rhetoric of the non-place has been overcome. This would involve deconstructing the consolidated and dominant narratives on this subject and basing our knowledge of these spaces on accurate socio-anthropological work that would allow us to grasp and appreciate their social relevance and functionality.

Bibliography Archer J., Sandul P.J.P., Solomonson K. (eds.) 2015, Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.

AugĂŠ M. 1995, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London, Verso.

Boyer C. 1983, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Comune di Prato, Servizio Urbanistica 1997, Piano operative e contestuale variante al piano strutturale: documento di avvio del procedimento, Prato.

Davis M. 1990, City of Quartz, New York, Verso.

Duany A., Plater-Zyberk E., Speck J. 2001, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, New York, North Point Press.

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Giovannoni G. 2016, The Social Life of Gas Stations, «The Journal of Public Space», vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 75-94.

Giovannoni G. 2017, Tuscany beyond Tuscany: Rethinking the City from the Periphery, Firenze, Didapress.

Harvey D. 2016, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell.

Harvey D. 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell.

Horkheimer M., Adorno T. W. 2002, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr G. (ed.), Jephcott E. (trans.), Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Jacobs J. 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Vintage.

Koolhaas R. 1994, S, M, L, XL, New York, Monacelli Press.

Kurutz S. 2017, An Ode to Shopping Malls, The New York Times, July 26.

Lefebvre H. 2003, The Urban Revolution, Bononno R. (trans.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre H. 1996, Writings on Cities, Eleonore K. and Lebas E. (trans.), Oxford, UK, Blackwell.

Mumford L. 1961, The City in History, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World.

Nicolaides B.M., Wiese A. (eds.) 2006, The Suburb Reader, London, Routledge.

Relph E. 1976, Place and Placelessness, London, Pion.

Riesman D. 1950, The Lonely Crowd, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press.

Secchi B. 1984, Il racconto urbanistico: la politica della casa e del territorio in Italia, Torino, Einaudi.

Sennett R. 2002, The Fall of Public Man, London, Penguin.

Sieverts T. 2002, Cities Without Cities. An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, New York, Spon Press.

Silverstone R. (ed.) 1996, Visions of Suburbia, New York, Routledge.

Virilio P. 2007, Speed and Politics, Polizzotti M. (trans.), Los Angeles, CA, Semiotext(e).

Walker E. R., Christopher R. K., Jessica G. B. 2010, Disparities and access to healthy food in the Unites States: A review of food deserts literature, «Health and Place», vol. 16, pp. 876-884.

Weber M. 1949, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Shils E. A. and Finch H. A. (transl. and ed.), Glencoe, IL, The Free Press.

Whyte W. 1956, The Organization Man, New York, Simon & Schuster.

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is there space for heritage in marghera?

Remi Wacogne IUAV | Italy

Marghera non ha un grande patrimonio storico, speriamo che non venga cancellato anche quel poco che c’è1.

Introduction Recent studies in the field of heritage have been characterised by a more comprehensive approach, based on a revision of the concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘value’ (Gibson, Pendlebury 2009). Urban heritage has, in turn, received much attention by researchers and professionals, as well as by local and international organisations: The Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on the 10 November 2011 represents a landmark in this theoretical and operational evolution (Bandarin, Van Oers 2012 and 2014). The “historic urban landscape approach” offers a substantial contribution to cross-disciplinary perspectives on urban space, by emphasising the ‘organicity’ “Marghera doesn’t have much heritage, let’s hope that the little that is left won’t be erased”. Letter by citizens of Marghera, sent to and published by the news website VeneziaToday.it, 31 October 2016, http:// www.veneziatoday.it/social/segnalazioni/marghera-chiesetta-della-rana-speriamo-non-venga-buttata-giu-3006087.html.

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of historic urban cores and their articulation with surrounding areas, as well as by introducing the intangible dimension of their heritage.

Following a brief discussion of this theoretical and operational framework, the case study of the città giardino in Marghera will be presented and explored. Whilst it does not appear to correspond to the usual definition of a historic urban core – a town in Venice mainland planned at the beginning of the 20th century to accommodate the workers of the nearby industrial area – Marghera’s original garden city design has been partially preserved, not so much due to heritage institutions as to the planning office within the municipality. As such, what does this heritage consist of? Who defines it as such and how? What are the implications of such a process for Marghera’s urban space? The città giardino provides a limit case study, interesting in that it permits inquiry into the very ‘making’ of urban heritage, the opportunities it offers as well as the criticalities it presents.

This essay draws from the results of an ongoing case study – dedicated more specifically to piazza del Mercato, the main square within the città giardino of Marghera – conducted as part of the “PICH-Planning & Heritage” project, a component of the Joint Programme Initiative on Cultural Heritage2. The PICH project, through the collection of data, the analysis and comparison of 12 case

This case-study has been supervised at IUAV by prof. Enrico Fontanari and by prof. Vincent Nadin, who coordinates the PICH project at TUDelft. Dr. Julia Rey Perez (Seville University) has also provided precious help.

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studies from 3 different contexts (urban cores, post-industrial areas and landscape), aims to understand the impact of urban planning and governance reform on the historic built environment and intangible cultural heritage3.

In addition to the bibliography, materials analysed include documents such as plans produced by the municipality (comune) of Venice – the main planning authority over Marghera – and listing proposals and declarations (vincoli) issued by the Venice soprintendenza – the local heritage authority – but also semi-structured interviews with both experts and ‘mere’ residents.

Historic Urban Landscape and the Recent Past It is now generally accepted that heritage, as with other cultural, social or historical values, is culturally constructed (Gibson, Pendlebury 2009). This does not mean that it is arbitrarily attributed, but rather constantly renegotiated and redefined by the actors involved: culture and heritage authorities, but also ‘mere’ citizens as far as they relate to such heritage. Heritage studies are therefore involved in “a questioning of what constitutes value” (ibid., p. 1).

In the urban context, a progressive redefinition of its heritage as a coherent complex rather than a set of single monuments has opened a wide field of study and pracSee for example https://planningandheritage.wordpress.com/pich-2/.

The PICH project involves the following research units: TUDelft (Spatial Planning and Strategy-lead partner) in the Netherlands; Newcastle University (Global Urban Research Unit) in the UK; NTNU (Department of Architectural Design, History and Technology) in Norway; IUAV (i) in Italy.

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tice (Bandarin, Van Oers 2014). As a multidisciplinary approach, Historic Urban Landscape deals with the management of urban heritage as a process, as much needed as its very conservation (Bandarin, Van Oers 2012). It has arisen from decades of debates and the progressive construction of an international consensus on the conservation of historic urban cores, marked by historic statements such as the 1964 Venice charter, and plans such as that developed for Assisi by Giovanni Astengo, considered “a classic of Italian urban planning”. Indeed, Italian planners and architects have played a key role in that sense (Albrecht, Magrin 2015), also through the conferences and activities promoted by the Associazione Nazionale Centri Storico-Artistici (National Association for Historic and Artistic Urban Cores, ANCSA; Toppetti 2011)4. Urban heritage has thus become a key category worldwide, as expressed by the listing as World Heritage of many historic cities, from Quito and Krakow in 1978, to the “Relict Landscape of the Mesopotamian Cities” in 20165. Among them, many have been undergoing a crisis characterized by a collapse in the number of residents and heavy tourist pressure, which has recently led UNESCO to consider their inclusion in the Heritage in Danger list and the formulation of recommendations for local and national authorities. Venice is currently in this situation6.

ANCSA was founded in 1960 by the same Giovanni Astengo, contemporaneously with the publication of the Carta di Gubbio (or Gubbio Charter), one of the first recommendations on the conservation on historic urban cores, which inspired later international statements.

5 See http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/.

6 See http://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/3428.

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The Historic Urban Landscape approach, as the UNESCO 2011 Recommendation7, is finally grounded in considering historic cities much more than mere urban fabric and gives significant attention to their intangible dimensions. Consequently, to this dynamic concept, it points out that the mere conservation and isolation of urban cores might have, in fact, made them more vulnerable to haphazard redevelopment and loss of identity, and urges for their ‘re-connection’ to surrounding areas.

The Recommendation thus identifies four main tool sets for urban heritage management in the contemporary context: civic engagement tools, knowledge and planning tools, regulating systems, and financial tools. A combination of these, specific to each case, should enhance the resilience of historic urban cores with respect to the challenges they are facing at both local and global levels, and make it possible to nurture the resources they offer also to their surrounding areas. Planning instruments developed by the municipality of Bologna between 2007 and 2009 provide an oft-cited example of application (Bandarin, Van Oers 2014).

Unlike its previous limitation on exceptional designs and experiments, such as those of Brasilia or Le Havre (both World Heritage sites)8, modern urban heritage has become a rich field for both research and planning and management practice. As a result, international organi7 Accessible online at http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ ID=48857&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html See also http://www.historicurbanlandscape.com/.

8 See http://whc.unesco.org/en/modernheritage/ for the list of modern World Heritage sites.

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sations were created, such as DOCOMOMO (in 1988)9, which devote their activities (i.e. publication of journals and books, organisation of conferences and workshops) to modern heritage. Interesting experiments have been conducted, such as that of Carbonia in Sardegna, where the former coal town of Carbonia, was inaugurated in 1938 and whose heritage has recently been rehabilitated also as a response to the crisis which followed the mines’ closure in the 1970s (Pehgin, Sanna 2012). Yet while the Historic Urban Landscape offers important concepts and methodologies for modern urban cores, the conservation of the latter relies on the background and sensibility of their administrators for their conservation and management, as the following investigation will show.

Marghera: on the Other Side of the Bridge, below the Chimneys Marghera is a town of 28,000 inhabitants situated in the immediate mainland of Venice, including a main district of about 20,000 inhabitants and suburban areas – namely Catene, Villabona, Ca’ Emiliani, Ca’ Sabbioni, Ca’ Brentelle and Malcontenta. Administratively, it is one of the municipalità (districts) within the Comune di Venezia (municipality of Venice), itself the administrative centre of the Città Metropolitana di Venezia (metropolitan district), which replaced the former 9 See http://www.docomomo.com/ DOCOMOMO has many national sections, such as DOCOMOMO Italia, created in 1990 and which itself has a few regional sections (respectively in Piemonte, Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Campania, Puglia-Basilicata and Sardegna), see http://www. docomomoitalia.it/.

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Provincia di Venezia in 2014 within the Veneto Region.

Although they are often considered together, Marghera as a city and the industrial area and harbour of Porto Marghera which separates it from the Venice laguna [lagoon] are two distinct geographical entities. Unlike the nearby and larger Mestre, the town of Marghera has a very recent history: it was only in 1917 that the creation of an industrial area was decreed, and a harbour and an urban district were annexed to Venice under the name of Marghera. While the marshy area where it soon was to rise bore the name of Bottenigo or Bottenighi, it was given that of another small village, which disappeared during the 19th century, when a fort – still existing bearing the name of Forte Marghera – was built in its place, successively under Venetian, French and Austro-Hungarian rule between 1805 and 1842 (for this paragraph and the following see Barizza, Cesco 2007).

Part of the Grande Venezia (“Great Venice”) project promoted by a group of Venetian and Milanese industrialists, the urban area of Marghera was planned to accommodate the workers of the nearby industrial plants and harbour. A master plan was commissioned to engineer Pietro Emilio Emmer, who designed the new district as a garden city, according to the model developed in England by Ebenezer Howard. The building site was inaugurated in 1921 (two years after that of the industrial area and harbour), following the strict rules indicated by Emmer’s plan: the houses should be no higher than three floors and the surrounding private gardens should be four times as wide as the houses themselves, the streets were to be large and

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planted with trees and converge on large round squares.

But Marghera’s development was not as rapid as expected, which, along with a lack of investment, followed by a housing emergency after World War II, soon caused the plan’s rules to be neglected both by public actors and private contractors. The main square itself, piazza del Mercato, was built on a 70m-wide axis which should have been a wide lane crossing Marghera from North to South, where it should have reached what is now piazzale Concordia, originally planned to be the main square but still peripheral to the urban area realized until the Second World War. The comprehensive garden city plan was thus only partially realized, as exemplified by piazza Mercato, which became the main square, but is still appreciable in a large portion of the main district of Marghera, on both sides of the central axis.

This città-giardino area represents a rare and early example of that planning concept in Italy, and as such has undergone a process of classification and conservation which was initiated in the 1980s but was completed only in 2004, with its protection under a variance area by the municipality of Venice, and its listing by the soprintendenza (the local heritage authority). The same area is, under the very appellation of città giardino, the main borough within the municipalità of Marghera instituted in 2005, under the Venice comune.

On the other side of via Fratelli Bandiera, the large street which separates them from the garden city area, the industrial area and harbour of Porto Marghera, which had secured Venice’s position as one of the main powerhous-

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es and industrial-chemical hubs in Italy, have undergone the effects of the general secondary sector crisis, seeing the number of workers collapse from about 30,000 during the 1960s and 1970s, to little more than 10,000 nowadays. In the meantime, the toxicity of many products handled became known to more and more workers, leading to important trials such as the one initiated by Marghera worker Gabriele Bortolozzo, who died of cancer before its conclusion. A large proportion of them, as well as of those who lost their jobs, lived in Marghera; today however very few people working in Porto Marghera still live in the città giardino.

Marghera’s inhabitants – Margherini – on their part seem to have a much stronger feeling of belonging than those of Mestre, although unlike the contiguous and far more populated city it has existed as an urban area for just a century. Such peculiarity is surely due in part to the tragic relationship the urban area has tied with the nearby industrial plants and harbour (Cerasi 2007), but also to the relative permanence of its shape compared to that of the nearby urban areas. One important aspect is that of a certain quality of life, characterised by limited extension, low density and traffic, and numerous green areas.

The urban fabric of Marghera has been under pressure from various factors, first of which private development aimed at replacing 1920s-1930s villini (family or bi-family houses) with higher buildings and/or at extending construction in green areas. It seems, for that matter, that awareness of Marghera’s value as urban heritage and the process of its classification and conservation find their origins in the destruction of some of these villini during the 1980s.

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A city of immigrants in its very essence, Marghera has a more varied population than ever. While the first inhabitants came either from Venice itself, from nearby areas in Veneto or from other parts of Italy (largely from Istria after the 1947 Paris peace treaty) the most important community today comes from Bangladesh, followed by those from Romania, Moldova, China, Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Senegal, Philippines and Kosovo. 20% of the garden city area residents are foreigners (the highest rate among the municipalità of Venice), and half of babies born there have foreign parents; foreign residents are also on average much younger than ‘locals’. Such variety challenges the identity of Marghera, but also raises practical questions, like that of education: many young pupils who enter school do not speak Italian, and are even the majority in some classes. While most of the Istrians who arrived after the Second World War learned Italian only once arrived, the proportion and diversity of the foreign population today is unprecedented.

The Space of Heritage: Conservation, Planning and Regulation Marghera’s planning and management as an urban core have been an innovation of the municipality, later followed by the soprintendenza10, as illustrated in the paragraphs below.[Fig.1] A few single buildings, like the Grimani school and several Soprintendenza is the name of peripheral offices of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage which are responsible, among other things, for the protection of the country’s historical and scenic landscapes.

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Figure 1 Comune di Venezia, Variante al Piano Regolatore Generale, categorie di intervento e tutela (“Amendment to the land use plan, categories of intervention and conservation�), 1994.

villini, had been recently listed, when in 1994 the Venice province requested to subject the area to a vincolo paesaggistico11. Such a request was quite exceptional, especially at the time, in the context of a town which was only a few decades old. Its application has indeed caused a governance conflict between the Venice province, its soprintendenza and the Veneto region, which lasted for a decade until its final effectiveness was declared first according to the 1999 Testo Unico (consolidated law), then according to the Codice dei Beni Culturali (Cultural Heritage Code)12.

A vincolo paesaggistico consists in legal restrictions on the free use of private property aimed at preserving landscape integrity.

12 The Codice dei beni culturali substituted the Testo Unico in 2004 and 11

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The adoption of the urban plan amendment for the città giardino (garden city), even before its vincolo (which was effective only a few years later), put an end to a decades-long sacking (saccheggio), in the words of an interviewee. The legislative framework built over the previous decades to preserve historic urban cores was indeed not effective in Marghera, which according to the 1968 Decreto sugli standard was a zona B, that is a residential area but not a historic urban core (zona A), implying less restrictive standards 13. The urban plan amendment itself, adopted by the municipality in 1994 and ratified by the region in 1997, is in that sense a remarkable planning instrument, in fact quite like a vincolo: in addition to defining the area itself, it indicates specific categories of intervention for each single building (from possible destruction to limited restoration) rather than volumetric dimensions by zones.

This was justified by the designation of the città giardino as a ‘significant area’ even though it was not considered an historic urban core (zona A). The Variante al P. R. G. per l’area significativa della città giardino (amendment to the urban plan for the significant area of the garden city), as indicated by its complete title, was coincidentally incorporated in the 1994 Venice master plan (Piano Regolatore Generale, see Benevolo et al. 2007).

But the urban plan amendment not only set stricter building and renovation standards; it also included some straclarified previous confusion in competence over heritage.

13 The 1968 Decreto sugli standard is an important law that introduced minimum standards for public facilities and services and mandatory zoning criteria in urban planning: notoriously, historic settlements are classified as zona A, existing residential settlements as zona B, and so on.

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tegic planning, applied to piazza Mercato. Grounded on the central dimension of the square, the general aim was to foster local commerce and refurbish an urban space considered of vital importance for the town. Although the architectural design considered originally was quite different, the square’s current asset corresponds to what had been planned in the urban plan amendment. Renovation started right after the amendment was adopted but was completed only after more than ten years, due to the scarcity of resources. No such operations have been realised or planned since then in Marghera, and even in the case of the funds offered by the Italian government for peripheries after 2012 the municipality has submitted only one project for Marghera, and not for the città giardino (it consisted in social housing refurbishment in the Vaschette area — and was financed).

The urban plan amendment, which thus coupled preservation to some strategic planning, is still effective after two decades; in the terms of a municipal officer interviewee, the planning authority and the città giardino “live on the revenues” [produced by the urban plan amendment].

The Piano d’Assetto del Territorio adopted by the municipality in 2014 introduced no innovation and simply incorporated the urban plan amendment as “coherent with [itself] and with the objectives it pursues”14.

But both the urban plan amendment and the vincolo only partially discipline uses (destinazioni d’uso), in front of 14 See https://portale.comune.venezia.it/pat_app/allegati. The Piano di assetto del territorio is a land use plan foreseen by the legislation of the Veneto region.

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local businesses’ (de-)regulation, such as the 2012 liberalisation in licenses introduced by the municipality: indeed the urban plan amendment merely planned a ‘predominantly’ residential or commercial (for those deprived of upper storeys to host flats) use of buildings surrounding the square (edifici a prevalente destinazione residenziale or edifici a prevalente destinazione terziaria/commerciale), and the vincolo itself can limit uses only insofar as they constitute a threat to the property. Similarly, the liberalisation introduced in 2009 by the region’s Piano casa to favour housing development and the building sector conflicts with the urban plan amendment’s standards.

Furthermore, the urban plan amendment and vincolo are ineffectual over the città giardino’s surroundings, where important developments have been under way, such as the recent inauguration of the Nave de Vero mall and the regeneration process of Porto Marghera, the impact of which is complex but noticeable. The articulation of such areas with the città giardino has rarely been considered in the interest of the latter, but rather for such purposes as the accessibility of the Nave de Vero’s, which has been secured also through the tramway line which traverses Marghera from Mestre.

In the meantime, the public library in piazza del Mercato, managed by the municipality, has carried on a remarkable commitment to Marghera’s heritage and its promotion. The cultural initiatives it organises, along with its activity of collecting the archives of residents and local associations, may slowly bring more inhabitants to know and care about the town in which they live, and maybe contribute to its heritage, i.e. by donating photos and docu-

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ments or sharing their experience as ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’. Considering that a large part at of the destruction of the historic fabric of Marghera until the mid 1990s was undertaken by its inhabitants – who pursued extensions of their houses or business, or invested in real estate renewal, as expressed in interviews – this progressive building of a shared sense of place might be as necessary to the preservation of the città giardino as the urban plan amendment and vincolo themselves.

The Space of Everyday Life: Sense(s) of Place Interviews with both ‘mere’ residents, shop-keepers or passers-by, and professionals involved in one way or another in the administration of Marghera, have shown a noticeable variety of perceptions of their town. Thus, while some interviewees professed they merely live (or work) in Marghera and feel no attachment to the town, others actively participate in its social, civic and cultural life. [Fig. 2] Now a municipalità (district) within the municipality of Venice, Marghera had long been a mere borough. Although its functions consist mainly of ordinary administration, this ‘promotion’ corresponds to a feeling of belonging expressed by many interviewees, not all of whom were born in Marghera. Manifestations of this feeling can be also found in different contexts, from Facebook pages like Marghera libera e pensante (“Free-thinking Marghera”), “Margherini DOC” (which could be translated as “[people] made in Marghera”) or simply “Marghera”, to the opening of the ‘walk’ organised by G12415 with a song 15

G124 is a group of young architects and planners hired on a yearly ba-

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Figure 2 Market day in the città giardino (author’s photo)

dedicated to Marghera, performed by pupils of the Grimani school. It is remarkable that such feeling is commonly expressed indistinctly for Marghera within which the città giardino constitutes the urban core. Thus the ‘walk’ organised by the group of young architects and planners hired by Renzo Piano in collaboration with local associations started with a song for Marghera in the Cita borough, and continued among the peripheral areas the group has been working on.

The counterpart to many inhabitants’ sense of Marghera as the place where they belong is a strong relationship with Venice, expressed in terms of pride as well as with some resentment. Thus, Venice as an urban core incarnates, for most of them, what heritage is and means, and they hardly see what should be preserved in Marghera itsis by Renzo Piano to work on the ‘mending’ of Italian peripheries; see http://renzopianog124.com/

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self. One of the interviewees, working in one of the two villini remaining in piazza Mercato who was born by the Rialto bridge, even suggested that the villino be torn down so that his business premises could be enlarged while he could live in one of the several new flats that would be created. This was merely a provocation, but it can be considered a caricature of how little most inhabitants seem to value Marghera’s urban heritage. At the same time, many feel like second-class citizens of a second-class town, considering that the Venice municipality focuses its attention elsewhere.

As for what residents value in Marghera, it is generally its modest dimensions – those of a town, or even a village (un paese) according to some interviewees. Such dimensions are associated with specific forms of socialisation, such as the simple fact of stopping to chat when meeting someone, as happens every day in piazza Mercato, but also with the fact that any part of town is within a walking distance, and the traffic is limited. Finally, residents associate the expression città giardino merely with greenery, and the presence and conservation of trees and green spaces has been a recurrent theme in interviews. Few have a more accurate sense of the planning concept it implies, and none refer to urban heritage otherwise than by citing Venice rather ironically: “not even Saint Mark’s Square”16 would be worth piazza Mercato.

The role played by Porto Marghera’s industries in Marghera’s identity is flagrant – from the very name that the

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Neanche piazza San Marco!

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town and industrial area share – and complex. Indeed, not only is Porto Marghera contiguous to the città giardino; the past, present and future of the town and the nearby industrial area remain inextricably linked. The history of Porto Marghera (and thus that of Marghera itself) is rich in strikes and trials, but even after the decline of its plants the risk of chemical hazard still exists. A strong ecological sensitivity is now widespread in Marghera, and not only among associations such as the “Permanent assembly against chemical hazards” (Assemblea permanente contro il rischio chimico). Thus, Marghera’s identity has been built also against Porto Marghera, as a permanent threat to its inhabitants’ well-being (Cerasi 2007). The president of the municipalità Gianfranco Bettin (a member of the green party Federazione dei Verdi) even suggested in an interview that the industry’s decline has left ‘room’ available for an identity grounded only on the città giardino and detached from the former workplace of a large part of its residents, whose horizon in everyday life would have shifted from the factory plants’ chimneys to the town’s lower skyline and trees.

Conclusion It may be that not even we residents are aware of ‘what Marghera is’17

– thus reads the “About” section of the Assemblea permanente contro il rischio chimico’s website. Indeed, the cit-

17 “Forse nemmeno noi residenti sappiamo ‘cosa è’ Marghera”. https:// postaspecoric.wordpress.com/chi-siamo/.

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tà giardino’s promotion as a historic urban core by its main planning authority, the municipality of Venice, almost preceded its perception as such by its own residents.

Many among them still feel they belong to a borough of Venice, which for them embodies urban heritage while Marghera itself would be deprived of any significant character – contrary to what the urban plan amendment and vincolo endorsed.

At the same time, the industrial area of Porto Marghera, separated from the città giardino by a mere street, was losing its significance in the residents’ everyday lives, but for the risk of chemical hazard which will take a long time to eliminate. Industry will remain part of the città giardino’s heritage, be it only because they were born together, as part of the Grande Venezia project, a century ago. Celebrations of this anniversary (in 2017) certainly provide an interesting insight into how authorities and residents perceive this industry-related heritage. The role played by the public library in cultivating residents’ memory and making more and more of them aware of the città giardino’s tangible and intangible heritage is, in this sense, complementary to its preservation as a historic urban core.

Residents’ feeling of belonging to the città giardino, rather than its exemplification of the garden-city model or even what has been preserved of its past fabric, is grounded in qualities such as the omnipresence of trees and greenery, scarce traffic, accessibility and a general human-scale dimension. But in fact, these characteristics owe much to Pietro Emilio Emmer’s plan of the città giardino itself and what has been realised – and left – of it, so that the

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attachment many residents feel for their town is related to the preservation of its urban shape and characteristics.

In turn, such preservation, managed through the urban plan amendment and vincolo, is a result of the municipality’s capacity to apply standards like those which are effective in historic urban cores to the città giardino in the first case, and of a more comprehensive reform of the heritage administrations’ competences in the second one.

In more general terms, within planning reform the città giardino seems to have suffered from a rather ambiguous situation: not classified as a historic urban core by national and regional regulations until the mid-1990s, it is neither considered a periphery any more, while peripheries are receiving much attention through specific policies of the Italian government.

In this context, while the vincolo is perennial and thus the città giardino preserved, the urban plan amendment, as the main planning and management instrument still effective over the città giardino after two decades, probably needs updating and rethinking. The Venice città metropolitana, once it fully assumes its competence, might be the right place for a more comprehensive planning of its territory, and of a better articulation of the città giardino as an urban core to the rest of it.

Heritage, as a quality of urban space, can be perceived in almost opposite ways depending on the experience and sensibility of both citizens and experts. In Marghera, most residents’ sense of place has more to do with their everyday life and the uses of urban space than with their town’s heritage, of which they have little awareness. The conser-

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vation of the città giardino, though, has laid the bases for more awareness, which the public library and local associations patiently cultivate. Marghera, in that sense, is a laboratory in which the process of heritage-making infuses the space of everyday life, with concurrent roles being played by residents, experts and authorities. Still under way, and far from being linear, this process nevertheless plays a key role in shaping sense of place – which could surely be further enhanced.

Bibliography Bandarin F., van Oers R. (eds) 2014, Reconnecting the City. The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken.

Bandarin F., van Oers R. 2012, The Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritage in an Urban Century, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken.

Barizza S., Cesco L. (a cura di) 2007, Marghera 1917-2007. Voci, suoni e luci tra case e fabbriche, Centro Francescano di Cultura, Marghera.

Benevolo L., D’Agostino R., Toniolo M., Cervellati P.-L. 2007, Quale Venezia. Trasformazioni urbane 1995-2005, Marsilio, Venezia.

Cerasi L. 2007, Perdonare Marghera: la città del lavoro nella memoria post-industriale, Franco Angeli, Milano.

Gibson L. and Pendlebury J. (eds.) 2009, Valuing historic environments, Ashgate, Aldershot/Burlington.

Peghin G. e Sanna A. (eds) 2012, Modern urban heritage. Experiences and reflections for the Twentieth-Century city, Allemandi, Torino (It. ed. Il patrimonio urbano moderno: esperienze e riflessioni per la città del Novecento, Allemandi, Torino 2011).

Toppetti F. (a cura di) 2011, Paesaggi e città storica. Teorie e politiche del progetto, Alinea, Firenze (in collaboration with Associazione Nazionale Centri Storico-Artistici).

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part ii representing urban space: literature, film, photography

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the literary image of brunelleschi’s dome Francesca Mugnai, Serena Acciai University of Florence

Speaking about the Pyramids of Giza, Mario Praz states that each authentic architecture is the expression of a specific landscape (1982, p. 262).

Brunelleschi’s Dome, which has become an icon of Florence, is the product of a specific landscape and, at the same time, the origin of the shape and the space of the city, as well as its image. Thus, following the definition given by Praz, the Dome can be considered an ‘authentic architecture’, because it expresses the link between architecture and landscape in a very particular way.

For centuries the Dome had been able to command the design of the city, but from the end of the nineteenth century its power has weakened. It is interesting to trace this change using the descriptions given by travellers, writers and scholars. These accounts show how the perception of the Dome and its literary image have changed over time as a consequence of urban transformations, which unquestionably altered its meaning. In short, the Dome has lost its original value as a landmark, as a spatial reference.

The starting point of our study is art critic Carlo Ludovi-

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James Hakewill, Florence from Fiesole [A picturesque tour of Italy, from drawings made in 1816-1817], 1819 (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program).

co Ragghianti’s analysis and that by two Florentine town planners and architects: Edoardo Detti and Giovanni Michelucci. Their comments dating from the 1960s and ’70s concern the dialogue between the Dome and the hills: their description is not a perception, nor a vision, but a reflection on the value of the Dome in the past, and in the modern epoch. All three thinkers recognized the value of the Dome as a symbolic element, but each interpreted the development of the city in a different way.

To begin, Ragghianti, in his book Filippo Brunelleschi, un uomo, un universo, states that Brunelleschi made a refined calculation, referring not to the metrics of the Dome, but to a precise relation to the hills. The Dome is the same height as San Domenico in Fiesole, so that it is possible to draw a line connecting these two points.

This height made the Dome a landmark in the Florentine

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valley and joined Florence and Fiesole symbolically. In other words, this ‘modern’ dominating architecture, designed by Brunelleschi, revitalized the Roman history of Florence, represented by the village of Fiesole (Ragghianti 2013, pp. 302-306).

Ragghianti offers even more evocative images. The Dome, he writes, brought into the heart of the city the opportunity for an ancient experience, somewhat similar to the ascent of the Monte Ventoso described by Petrarch (2013, p. 277): that is to say, the Dome is like an artificial ‘mountain’. Moreover, just after the war in 1944, Ragghianti tells us that he needed to be sure that the Dome was still intact: “a maternal dome, the eternal mother of Florence” (1948, p. 20).

For Detti in Firenze scomparsa (1977, p. 20), the Dome represents a perfect yet lost equilibrium between architecture and nature, between the city and the surrounding hills; it is the symbol of the well-known harmony of the Tuscan landscape. The hills and the city, as well as the Dome, are parts of a whole entity that is based on a deep, complex dialogue between architecture and nature. With the demolition of the city walls and the rampant growth of the city, this dialogue has been interrupted and, paradoxically, the city has shut itself off from the hills.

Finally, Michelucci, in Brunelleschi mago (2011, pp. 1920), explains that the Dome has constructed an open landscape, without borders, because the city is symbolically projected beyond its medieval walls. This is the reason why he considers this Renaissance architecture a symbol of freedom. Michelucci also says that Brunelleschi is an urban

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A view of Florence from the Bobolino (photo by Edoardo Detti).

planner as well as an architect, because his buildings are never isolated and always linked to the urban fabric.

Going back to the first person to write about the Dome, in his dedication to Brunelleschi in On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti writes these famous words: such a large structure, rising above the skies, ample to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan people (Grayson, 1980).

Here the identification between the Dome and the territory is clear. The shadow of the Dome— its huge size— protects the city and the entire surrounding landscape.

The Dome is a reference, again a symbol of the identity of the Tuscan people.

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Undoubtedly until the end of the nineteenth century the Cupola is Florence, the city is identified by the Dome: evidently its shadow is still big enough. The sight of the Dome announced Florence to travelers from a great distance, so that the description of the amazing view they could get from the hills is a topos in the journey to Florence.

Arriving from the north at the beginning of the Nineteenth century, Stendhal writes: The day before yesterday on descending the Appennines to arrive in Florence, my heart was beating fast. So childish!

At last, after a turn of the road, my gaze dove into the plane and saw a dark mass, Santa Maria del Fiore and its famous dome, masterpiece of Brunelleschi (1974, pp. 226-228).

While Nathaniel Hawthorne arriving in 1870 from the South, gets the impression that Florence is floating on the waves of the hills: By-and-by we had a distant glimpse of Florence, showing its great dome and some of its towers out of a side-long valley, as if we were between two great waves of the tumultuous sea of hills (1871, p. 350).

His wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, in her book Notes in England and Italy, gave a romantic but accurate sight of Florence: In the afternoon we drove to Bellosguardo, to take tea with Miss Blagden at her Villa Brichieri. The balcony commands a magnificent view of Florence and the surrounding mountains. There blooms the Flower-City, with the Duomo in its chalice. The soft heights immediately around are crowned with castles, towers, and villas, like white and yellow lilies among the green foliage. Galileo lived in one of them, and in one Savonarola was imprisoned (1869, p. 402).

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And further on: After this very pretty shopping we parted, and U. and I took a carriage and drove to San Miniato. It was toward sunset, and when we arrived at the summit, by the aid of a donkey fastened to our horses, I was enchanted with the view of Florence, which is better than any other. The Duomo, Campanile, and Tower of Palazzo Vecchio, and the delicate Badia, take a beautiful relation to one another, grouping themselves in stately wise. I saw the grand proportions of the Duomo to advantage for the first time, and I have not before confessed to myself that is the grandest Dome in the world. (1869, p. 498).

In her sugary description, Sofia Peabody Hawthorne nonetheless grasps the role of the Dome in the valley, its function of pivot around which everything comes to life: the landscape, buildings and even both scientific and religious thought.

Moreover, Dickens while leaving Florence: Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining Dome is seen no more, go traveling through cheerful Tuscany, with a bright remembrance of it; for Italy will be the fairer for the recollection (1989, p. 215).

Symbol and ‘image’ of a whole country. A discordant opinion is given by John Ruskin (1881, pp. 158-159) in the middle of the nineteenth century. He really cannot stand the presence of the tram at the feet of the Dome.

This profanation makes the Dome drown in a Stygian pool, where nothing is sacred as it was in the past. This is not the usual complaint about Italian dirt: rather, it is the perception that something is lost.

In 1907, during his first days in Florence, Le Corbusier cannot grasp the greatness of the Dome, that he consid-

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The Dome among the ruins in 1944 (photo by Edoardo Detti).

ers only a shapeless heap of material (1907a). He needs to make an effort to understand it: he needs to climb the hills and even go on top of the Dome; only after that, he realizes that he had said a lot of ‘silly’ things (1907c). It is clear that something prevented him from perceiving the original value of the Dome at first glance, as earlier travelers were able to do. Only later will he write a letter to his teacher L’Eplattenier saying that finally he had the opportunity to see the Dome in the same way strangers in the Middle Age used to, arriving from the top of a hill. From here they could see the dome rising

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suddenly in the blue fog of the morning, like a monster of stone, a hill bigger than those around the city; bigger because it is designed (1907b).

A famous sketch by Le Corbusier, where the Dome is out of proportion, clearly expresses the architect’s feeling and thought about the hugeness of this man-made nature.

At around the same time, Henry James writes: Coming out of the Annunziata you look down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The cathedral stands up in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the bigger prodigy at Milan; only that, if we talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be linked to snow and ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers (James 1909, p. 422).

Here, again is the comparison with a hill, even if the subject is the Church more than the Dome. The Dome is not named, it seems to be conceptually faraway, maybe because James is disturbed by the “decay of the modern order” (p. 376).

The effect produced by the demolitions of the nineteenth century is evident by now. Those demolitions which presumed to put order into the city, made everything dull, uniform, blurred: even the Dome. In the postwar period, Vasco Pratolini, who sets many novels in the working class quarters of Florence, rarely refers to the Dome; nevertheless we can feel its magic presence. It is up there, distant from everyday life but still protective. On a September evening of the Rificolona feast, “The Cupola crawls with corpse-candles that the wind lights up and blows out”

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(Pratolini, 1985): a sanctified mother, similar to the one Ragghianti looks for in the ruins.

Ruins are not caused solely by the war. In the Sixties, Alberto Arbasino, in a caustic text on Florence, Due orfanelle, starts with these words: Suddenly something ‘goes to waste’ in the order that was Florence; for five centuries it was a ‘thirteenth century’ city: a very polished equilibrium, made of such static relations that the structure always prevails on the processes.

Those who arrive now in the town of the lily, will find a very graceful traffic island with the shape of the Baptistry, with the Dome and the tower (1968, p. 53).

Compared to other authors we have presented so far, Giorgio Manganelli in his book La favola pitagorica (2005, pp. 40-41) puts the Baptistry and not the Dome at the centre of the city. The fulcrum of the analysis is the relationship between the two monuments. He imagines a symbolic battle, where the geometry of terror rules the Baptistery and a geometry of angels rules the Dome. In this battle the cathedral must give up the façade but can rise with the dome; inside it angels can fly, he says. Therefore the Cupola is projected towards the divine sky rather than towards the landscape, since no hills are mentioned and no relation is explicated.

Marco Vichi is a contemporary Florentine writer. His novel Morte a Firenze (2011) is set in the city during the flood. The main character, commissario Bordelli, would like the Dome and other monuments to fall down in the flood. It is a sad, masochistic feeling at the sight of a city which is selling out its past. Further he says:

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Come here and spend all your money in the cradle of Renaissance, buy our nick-nacks, our artistic postcards, the statuettes of David (2011, p. 179).

The Dome is nothing more than a holographic picture: the rightful punishment for the Florentines is the loss of their heritage under the mud. Is this the Stygian pool Ruskin had imagined some decades before?

In this overview we have seen how the perception of the Dome has changed over time. What was once an architecture coinciding with the city and in dialogue with the whole valley, has become an isolated presence, beset by the city and deprived of its founding reasons. Aldo Rossi (1966) says that the city is made of a complex interweaving of relationships, not of single episodes, and when dialogues between them are interrupted, every monument becomes a solitary building. Following Rossi’s thought, Giorgio Grassi highlights the mutual necessity that connects the masterpiece and the city: If we consider architecture’s evolution in time, this is an extraordinarily unitary element. The masterpiece, namely the work able to make a mark in time, therefore contributes to the construction of the city (2003, p. 25).

In the case of the Florentine Dome we have witnessed a progressive weakening of this relation, from the alterations to the city structure introduced by the Poggi Plan.

The essence of Napoleon III’s urban reform, characterized by the theory nettoyer par le vide (Çelik, 1994, p. 90) and applied to Paris by Baron Haussman, was adopted indiscriminately in various cities, regardless of their structure and size. This is what happened to Florence, a

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city of medieval character in its profound structure (Detti, 1977 p. 23),

where the void created by the demolition of the walls and the subsequent creation of the viali (avenues) have altered the vision of the Dome, destroying the previous unity. Moreover, the creation of large squares (Beccaria and Cavour), dominated by the an ancient gate standing alone whose main purpose is scenographic, has increased the distance between the monuments and the urban fabric, definitively converting the gates from defensive instruments to vacuous symbols. Besides, the institution of the “view par excellence” of Piazzale Michelangelo has somehow concealed the multiplicity of extraordinary views that could be admired arriving from any road.

The image that is given from Piazzale Michelangelo is no more than a postcard that reduces its notable elements to mere figures instead of lived and living spaces.

Edoardo Detti, talking about the changes due to the Piano Poggi, wrote: If we exclude the viali created on the hills— a spectacular walk whose relationship with the walled city derived naturally from the hilly orography, a flat city was developing, spread out with the typology of the villino. And, if the old city was articulated on the nervous systems of the suburbs and open to the territory despite the walls, the new city is closed, without salient and meaningful relationships with the outside and with the country (1977, p. 93).

Later, in addition to the Piano Poggi, the city continued to grow without considering those elements that tied the Dome to the landscape: if we reflect on the development of Florence after the second postwar period, we see that

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Aerial view in the 1960s (photo by Edoardo Detti).

the city has extended in the east-west direction and particularly toward Pistoia, occupying the countryside between Monte Morello and the southern hills. However, this expansion, that according to Detti was the only one possible, considering the principle of safeguarding the hills, has occurred in an uncontrolled way. Currently, if we arrive in Florence from the southwest, we can see from Ginestra Fiorentina how the “Cradle of the Renaissance� and its western outskirts have become an indistinct, sprawling city.

A consequence of the saturation of many areas in the Piana (plain west of Florence), for example, is that the sys-

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tem of villas scattered all over the surrounding hills has lost some important components, like the fields and the roads that used to tie these buildings to the city center. In general, it would seem as if these castle-villas, like many other monuments, inevitably stand in ‘solitary’ form; their bond to the ground and to the territory still persists and is comprehensible in the sense of their setting and footprint, but those minute elements that allow the buildings and the landscape to co-exist in a unique composition— the rational design of the Renaissance— are definitively lost.

Again Detti has reflected upon the value and the role of the landscape around Florence, understanding its features and essential reasons: A new city has inserted itself as a parasite on the old one, where it grows and develops, operating all the possible transformations to adjust this hybrid organism to the new, different and always increasing needs of this modern addition. The hills, namely the whole organic complex surrounding the city, are a complement to Florence even merely from the panoramic point of view. And the city has that specific form (or at least it had), values, architectures, Dome and roads, because it was born within that spatial, light and environmental condition. In simple words the surrounding areas are the frame, or better the continuation or integration of this exceptional work that is the city.

But these surroundings do not have just value as a landscape. It is not country. It is a complementary urbanistic structure, with dimensions, density, centers, roads: an independent urbanistic entity, that has its own life and form by no means random: it is the product of an insightful and mindful human work, that integrally belongs to the same Florentine organism. The urban core and the environs are indeed forms of the same entity, and if the city is the highest human creation, the hills are also a substantial part of

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Florence as created by humankind. These lines, masses of green, profiles, fields, groups of houses, villas and villages and little roads are one of the most delicate concretions surrounding the city. This special landscape originates from an extraordinary interpenetration between countryside and city. Pivoting around the city center, it nevertheless articulates along a series of boroughs and villages surrounding it, in a perfect order of relations that only a work of art can embody (1954, pp. 161-177).

While reflecting on this, it is necessary however to note that not all of the 360-degree visual power of the Dome is lost. Arriving today in Florence from the north, the same direction from which Stendhal arrived, or from Bellosguardo and via San Leonardo to Arcetri, the Cupola still seems to belong to an almost intact landscape. If we reach Florence from the via Bolognese on a great curve dominating via Faentina, the city opens to us in its splendor, and today it still seems enclosed by a green belt of well-ordered and cultivated hills. This is possible because in this exact spot the view toward the Piana is covered by Monterinaldi, while on the left the hill of Fiesole harmoniously frames the landscape. But we cannot deny that the main reason for the survival of such a view is the political decision, promoted around the Sixties by Edoardo Detti himself, to preserve the hills from concreting. A measure that immediately gave rise to an ample debate, but later generated a sort of religious respect toward the hilly belt, shared by most citizens. Unfortunately, the Piana, suffering the consequence of that misunderstood provision, has been turned into an ‘escape valve’ for speculative appetites.

Time inevitably modifies places, and the resulting trans-

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Arriving nowadays from Prato (photo by Francesca Mugnai).

formations are a symptom of the vitality of the city. In contrast, immobility represents a pathological condition, that is found in deserted places, at least until time resumes its work of transformation and consumption. If we accept the principle, broadly recognized by many scholars such as Candau (2002) or Ricoeur (2012), that a bond exists between places and identity (both personal and collective) and that a landscape is the representation of a sequence of events (Turri, 2004, p. 11), it is difficult not to feel an urgent need to stop the destruction of the ancient structure that for centuries has been supporting the sense and the image of Florence, the creation of its ‘theater’ as a place in which to act and in which recognize oneself.

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Turri writes: The landscape is an interface between doing and seeing what we do [...]. According to the metaphor of the landscape as a theater, we can understand how the relationship of the human being with the land must not be reduced to his role as an actor— that is mainly to act, to transform nature or the inherited environment— but mostly include his role as a spectator. In fact, only in such a role can he find the measure of his actions, of his acting, of his being actor that modifies and activates new sceneries (Turri, 2006 p. 16).

Therefore, the first form of appropriation of a landscape is looking at it, which allows one to grasp the meaning of both visible and invisible signs and traces. Only through the comprehension of the places we live in, is it possible to continue inhabiting them, since the lack of recognition leads to eradication. This concept permeates the story of some devastated areas of the Belpaese written by Marco Revelli (2016) after his unconventional trip across an unrecognizable Italy. Regardless, this is a journey full of hope in which the “right to nostalgia” (Turri, 2006, p.

158) is sublimated in the search for people and facts struggling against cultural destruction.

It is exactly our “insensitivity toward the historical dimension” (Turri, 2004 p. 76) together with “the inability to live in the present time” (Candau, 2002 p. 198), that leads us, on one side to inexorably delete the traces of that which has been and on the other to the museumization of any trace. The recent history of Florence, in common with many other Italian cities, is characterized by this same ‘schizophrenia’, that hypocritically wants to preserve the

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conventional image of the city, but has emptied it of true substance. This is what led Paolo Rumiz, in his extraordinary account of the trip on the Via Appia, to affirm: Since the years of the Grand Tour urban planners, historians, archaeologists, photographers, writers, journalists, public administrators, have acknowledged Her [the via Appia]. But She was asking something more humble and modest. To be left alone. To be walked, lived (2016, p. 15).

Tuscany beyond Tuscany should be something different from the classic and conventional image which emerges from the Grand Tour literature, but we should all work to make this new image recognizable. Therefore the quotation from Mario Praz cited at the beginning could be read as: each authentic architecture is the disclosure of what already exists.

Bibliography Arbasino A. 1968, Due orfanelle, Feltrinelli, Milano.

Candau J. 2002, La memoria e l’identità, Ipermedium, Caserta.

Carbone E. 2016, Nordic Italies, representation of Italy in Nordic Literature between the 1830s and the 1910s, Edizioni Nuova Cultura, Roma. Çelik Z. et. al. 1994, Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Detti E. 1954, Dilemma del futuro di Firenze, «La Critica d’Arte», no. 2, pp. 161-177.

Detti E. 1977 (first ed. 1970), Firenze scomparsa, Vallecchi, Firenze.

Dickens C. 1989 (first. ed. 1846), Impressioni italiane, 1844/1846, Biblioteca del vascello, Roma.

Fonnesu I., Rombai L., Piussi P. 2005, Letteratura e paesaggio in Toscana da Pratesi a Cassola, Centro Editoriale Toscano, Scandicci.

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Grayson C. 1980, L. B. Alberti, De pictura, Laterza, Bari.

Grassi G. 2003 (first ed. 1975), L’architettura come mestiere, in Tessenow H., Osservazioni elementari sul costruire, Franco Angeli, Milano.

Hawthorne N. 1871, Passages from the French and Italian note-books, Strahan & Co., London.

James H. 1909, Italian Hours, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston-New York.

Le Corbusier 1907, Letter to L’Eplattenier, FLC E2(12)8.

Le Corbusier 1907, Letter to L’Eplattenier, FLC R1(4)25.

Le Corbusier 1907, Letter to parents, FLC E2(12)12.

Luti G. 1996, Cronache dei fatti di Toscana. Storia e letteratura tra Ottocento e Novecento, Le Lettere, Firenze.

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Michelucci G. 2011 (first ed. 1972), Brunelleschi mago, Edizioni Medusa, Milano.

Praz M. 1982, Il mondo che ho visto, Adelphi, Milano.

Pratolini V. 1985 (first ed. 1960), Cronache di poveri amanti, Mondadori, Milano.

Ragghianti C. L. 1948, Ponte a Santa Trinita, Vallecchi, Firenze.

Ragghianti C. L. 2013 (first ed. 1976), Filippo Brunelleschi. Un uomo, un universo, Edizioni Ghibli, Milano.

Revelli M. 2016, Non ti riconosco. un viaggio eretico nell’Italia che cambia, Einaudi, Torino.

Ricoeur P. 2012, Ricordare, dimenticare, perdonare. L’enigma del passato, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Ross M. L. 1994, Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice and Rome, Greenwood Press, Westport.

Ross S. 2010, Tuscan Spaces: Literary Constructions of Place, University of Toronto Press.

Rossi A. 1966, L’architettura della città, Marsilio, Venezia.

Ruskin J. 1881 (first ed. 1875), Mornings in Florence, George Allen, Orpington.

Rumiz P. 2016, Appia, I Narratori Feltrinelli, Milano.

Stendhal 1974 (first ed. 1817), Roma, Naples e Firenze, Laterza, Roma-Bari.

Talamona M. 2012, L’Italia di Le Corbusier, Electa, Milano.

Turri E. 2004, Il paesaggio e il silenzio, Marsilio, Venezia.

Turri E. 2006, Il paesaggio come teatro. Dal territorio vissuto al territorio rappresentato, Marsilio, Venezia.

Vichi M. 2011, Morte a Firenze, TEA, Milano.

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florence overexposed: early photography and the production of the cinematic city Donata Panizza Rutgers University

In 1852 Florence, thirteen years after the invention of photography and nine before the unification of Italy, the young engraver apprentice Leopoldo Alinari took on the burgeoning photographic medium and in 1854 founded one of the first and most successful professional photography studios in Italy (and Europe), soon joined by his two brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo. Year after year and decade after decade, Leopoldo and his brothers fixed a broader and broader portion of the peninsula in their photographs, producing a prominent and influential archive of images of Italian cities, monuments, and landscapes targeted at diverse audiences of Italian and foreign tourists, collectors, scholars, architects, and artists. Indeed, while during the first years of their enterprise the Alinari brothers limited their activity to cities in Tuscany, Umbria, and the Papal State such as Florence, Pisa, Siena, and Assisi, they progressively included Milan and Naples (1873), Rome (1876), Arezzo, Bologna, and Ferrara (1881), Genova, Padua, Turin, finally reaching Venice in 1887 (Maffioli, 2003, p.39).

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However, despite the ever expanding focus of their activity, Florence was the first and always remained the privileged subject of the Alinari brothers’ photographs, and the number of subjects representing the so-called ‘cradle of the Renaissance’ kept growing, going from 39 out of 84 in 1855 to 601 out of 2794 in the 1873 catalogue to 1694 out of 4060 in the 1887 appendix to the 1873 catalogue (Maffioli 2003, p.27; Tomassini 2003, pp.157, 172). As a result, the Alinari brothers’ deep engagement with Florence’s monuments and architecture provided them with the approach to urban space that they were to apply to all the other cities they captured within their photographs: for this reason, the Alinari photographs of Florence will be the object of the present essay.

From the beginning, the Alinari photographs stood out for their excellent quality both in terms of shooting and printing. Such high quality was the result of the Alinari brothers’ clever experiments with the lighting of the photographed scene, the use of different chemicals to sensitize the glass plate, and the fixing of the image on paper, for which they were in touch with some of the most advanced photographers in France and England. As a consequence, business flourished and as soon as 1855 the Alinari brothers presented their work in the World Fair in Paris, where they got recognition on an international level. Moreover, from the same year 1855 the Alinari photographs were sold in Paris through the Bisson Frères, Daziario, and Goupil (Maffioli 2003). The foreign markets were of the greatest significance for the success of the Alinari brothers, who sold most of their photographs abroad,

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especially to France, England, and Germany. The Alinari photographs also reached the United States, though indirectly, as some of the photographs sold to Britain were from there sent overseas.

Through their widespread diffusion, the Alinari brothers’ photographs established a set of photographic views of the Italian landscape whose influence was bound to last. In fact, according to cultural critic Giulio Bollati (1996), the Alinari photographs affected the way Florence (as well as other Italian cities) have been represented ever since: this happened to such an extent that the photographs ended up being a visual replacement of the very objects and places they show. Existing readings of the Alinari photographs tend to explain such a long-lasting influence through their straightforward, plain, and ultimately obvious nature: interestingly, Bollati himself mentions the photographs’ “upright neutrality” and “square obviousness” (1996, p.151). On the contrary, I argue that the Alinari photographs’ power of attraction stems from their complex and multi-layered relationship with the urban space, which was undergoing big and irreversible changes in the very same decades the Alinari brothers were taking their photographs. As the outcome of an unprecedented encounter between the burgeoning photographic medium and the rising modern city, the Alinari photographs represent a crucial threshold in the long-standing relationship between the urban form and visual media.

In the case of Florence, such processes of urban reconfiguration started in the 1840s and 1850s with the widening of streets for the improved traffic of goods, the construc-

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tion of new neighborhoods within the medieval walls, and the building of the first railroads to Livorno, Pistoia, and Arezzo. However, it is only after the capital of the newborn Italy was moved from Turin to Florence in 1865 (and until 1871), that the city took on a really different look. At that point, as a new housing system was necessary to meet the needs of fifteen to twenty thousand officials, bureaucrats, and courtiers moving to Florence together with the government and the court, Florence needed for the first time a comprehensive plan for its future growth (Kirk 2005, p.192).

Architect Giuseppe Poggi, appointed to design such plan in 1864, planned the demolition of the medieval walls and the consequent creation of scenographic squares connected by wide avenues that followed the walls’ perimeter all around the city. All along such avenues and beyond them the city suburbs popped up. The new neighborhoods created by the Poggi plan established for the first time the difference between the ‘centro storico’ (old city center) and its periphery, which was fatta tutta di palazzine ordinate ed uniformi suddivise in appartamenti di abitazione, contrapposta all’articolazione, all’intreccio e alle varietà funzionali e spaziali dell’edilizia e architettura della città pervenuta da secoli di storia (Petrucci 1986, p. 23)1.

As if trying to fill the gap between the city center and the suburbs, Poggi also planned the Viale dei Colli, an ave1 [composed of orderly and uniform apartment houses, in turn divided in apartments, as opposed to the organic, intertwined, and varied functions and spaces of the architecture of the centuries-old city].

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nue that crosses the hills around Florence and connects the old and the new part of the city. The Viale dei Colli was meant to provide Florence’s inhabitants with a modern version of the veduta from the hills, one that could be easily reached by omnibus from the train station. Halfway through the Viale dei Colli, and close to the church of San Miniato, a panoramic piazza rose, dominating the entire city center. The development of this part of the city also entailed a process of real estate speculation, as houses and villas sprung up all around the avenue.

During the last decade of the century Florence underwent another big change, when the so-called riordinamento del centro (reorganizing of the city center) completely changed the appearance of one of the most ancient areas of the city. The medieval areas of the Old Market and the Jewish Ghetto, densely populated by a mix of artisans, street vendors, beggars, and workmen, were demolished to give way to a large monumental square that replaced the old maze of narrow streets, alleyways, and squares. All around the square, wide orthogonal streets, majestic palaces, department stores, and cafes replaced the popular nature of the areas and made it suitable for the practical and representative needs of the ruling class (Cresti 1995).

These processes turned the city’s medieval structure into a ‘modern’ one and, for the first time in the history of Florence, produced an ambiguous and subtle distinction between center and periphery, business and residential neighborhoods, historical and new areas. The Alinari photographs were there to capture these irreversible if fleeting processes, fixing in place what Walter Benjamin

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famously called “the tiny spark of contingency, the here and now” (2008, p. 276).

The elusive and paradoxical nature of photography – halfway between contingency and persistence, presence and absence, technique and form, objectivity and subjectivity – found its perfect object in the Florence of the time, given its polymorphic status of as a city of residence, culture, manufacturing, tourism, and industry.

Even though the Alinari photographs focus on the historical and monumental parts of the city, the modernization process could not be left out of the frame, thus producing a fracture within the image even when the actual process of modernization is overlooked. The relationship between the past and modernity in the Alinari photographs is a complex and multi-layered one. In the oppositions between old and new, nature and culture, art and industry, and center and periphery, nothing is fixed and every element can take on different meanings in different photos: the historical monuments can play the role of culture in relation to natural elements, but they can also work as a sort of a codified nature in relation to new constructions, areas, and functions. It is precisely this proliferation of meanings, I contend, that has made the Alinari photographs so influential and their impact so lasting.

Some of the photographs from the first years of the Alinari brothers’ activity will show this process in action. One of these photographs shows the church of San Miniato al Monte, resting on the hill that was to give way to the above mentioned Viale dei Colli just a few years later (Fig.1).

The church is at the center of the image, surrounded on

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Figure 1 Alinari. Florence, Church of San Miniato al Monte. 1852-1855.

Albumen silver print. New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

both sides by other buildings and dominating the expanse of trees underneath it. As the church was built between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, the typically Romanesque Florentine marble façade with its geometrical pattern is the main point of attraction. At its side, the less-refined looking bell tower and Bishop’s Palace work as visual mediators between the façade and the hillside beneath it. As a consequence, an opposition between nature and culture is produced: while the shapeless and wavy expanse of trees is pushed on the side of nature, culture is embodied in the sharpness of the façade’s chromatic and geometric organization. Every photograph, says Roland Barthes, “tells me death in the future”, since what it shows is a fixed fragment from the past whose future has already happened in reality (1981, p.96). This photograph is no

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exception, as the presence of the faรงade imposing its assertiveness on the trees prefigures the changes that the hill was shortly going to undergo, as the soon-to-come modernization was going to disrupt the wild-looking appearance of the hill to replace it with an avenue and villas all around it. After the development of Viale dei Colli and Piazzale Michelangelo, the hill itself will take on a geometric feature, as later photographs the taken from the other side of the Arno River show.

When the actual process of modernization appears in the photograph, the image is organized in such a way as to efface its presence. Consider, for example, two photographs of Florentine bridges. One of them represents Ponte Santa Trinita and Ponte alla Carraia taken from yet another bridge, Ponte Vecchio (Fig. 2). The two bridges occupy the middle section of the image and, together with the lines of buildings at their side, produce a barrier that defines the space within which the gaze is allowed to linger. Beyond the enclosed space only the hills and a row of trees are in sight, while the suburban part of the city, located between the bridges and the hills, is overlooked.

The second photograph shows Ponte Vecchio and Ponte alle Grazie (Fig. 3). According to Arturo Carlo Quintavalle the Corridoio Vasariano, vertically crossing the image, leads the gaze towards the visual focus of Ponte Vecchio (2003, p. 157). However it can be argued that, just as in the previous image, a process of effacement and exclusion rather than one of underlining is at work here. In fact, the main bridge produces a barrier that is reinforced by the two following bridges and keeps outside whatever is

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Figure 2 Alinari. Florence, Santa Trinita and Carraia Bridges. 1852-1855.

Albumen silver print. New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

Figure 3 Alinari. Florence, View of Ponte Vecchio. 1852-1855. Albumen silver print. New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

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beyond them: in this case, an industrial area. The “second fusion iron Foundry”, also known as the Pignone Foundry was built in 1842 on the left bank of the river and, in 1856, its machine produced the first model of internal combustion engine. Notwithstanding such an accomplishment – or precisely because of it – the area beyond the bridges is blurred, faint, and hardly noticeable. Interestingly, an almost invisible smokestack – a cypher for the whole foundry – is unable to complete the sequence of two bell towers and a dome that starts in the left side of the photograph (see enlargement Fig. 4). After the long and pointy bell tower of Santo Spirito, the flat tower of San Jacopo Sopr’Arno, and the round dome of Cestello, the thin smokestack fails to assert its own particular and functional shape, almost dissolving in the air due to the smoke that comes out of it. The smoke, a result of the activity of the smokestack, is used to neutralize the appearance of the smokestack itself. The presence of the industrial area is denied not only through its location within the image, but also through its own product.

In other cases the opposition between the past and modernization takes place within the same building. Consider, for instance, a photograph of Palazzo della Signoria, also belonging to the first years of the Alinari brothers’ activity (Fig. 5). The photograph is taken from a slightly high and slightly oblique angle. It shows the entire Palazzo Vecchio and, on its right side, part of Loggia dei Lanzi and part of the Uffizi Gallery. Palazzo Vecchio is one of the symbols – maybe the symbol – of historical and monumental Florence. Ever since it was built Palazzo Vecchio

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Figure 4 Detail of Fig. 3.

has been the center of the city’s political power, even serving as the seat of the Italian Parliament during the years of Florence capital of Italy. However, it is crucial to remember that Piazza della Signoria was also the custom house for all the goods entering the city, while Palazzo Vecchio itself housed the offices of customs. This shows that Palazzo Vecchio was directly involved in the process of urban reconfiguration, the goal of which was to make the city suitable to the increasing traffic of goods.

The photograph apparently does not show any direct reference to this process. However, the renowned clarity of the Alinari photographs is here questioned by a huge, triangle-shaped shadow under Loggia dei Lanzi. Such a clear-cut shape works as an arrow: generically pointing at Palazzo Vecchio, on a closer look one cannot but pinpoint a lone cart right in front of the palace. One should not forget that, in the first years of photography, the long expo-

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Figure 5 Alinari. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio. 1852-1855. Albumen silver print. New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

sure necessary for the recording of the image on the sensitive glass surface made it very hard to take photographs of people, unless they were willing to stand still for some minutes. As a result, lone objects usually appear in the first photographs. While this is probably the reason why the lonely cart appears in this photo, it also metonymical-

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ly works as a reminder of goods and the commercial traffic that was rising in Florence in the same years as the photograph was taken. The cart’s location right in front of Palazzo Vecchio questions the status of the palace as a monumental symbol, while its insignificant size with respect to the building makes it possible to still represent it as such.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the cart, the presence of which is underlined by the shadow, is visually associated with darkness, while Palazzo Vecchio is merged in clear light. As if the cart represented a sort of dark side of Palazzo Vecchio, exactly at its foot, while the rest of it rises towards the sky, as far as possible from the cart.

One last photograph shows the left side of Palazzo Vecchio and the two wings of the Uffizi Gallery (Fig. 6), the latter serving the purpose of indicating the former. This way, the Uffizi Gallery’s wings are at once the arrows pointing at the center of the image, which is occupied by Palazzo Vecchio, as well as another monument that the photograph is meant to show. The presence of visual arrows in a photograph is something more than a mere accident and a clever use of casual urban elements. As Henry van Lier argues (2007), a photograph presents both indices and indexes. The indices are the elusive mass of information that comes from the represented scene, which the photographer is by all means unable to control due to the lack of actual connection between the represented objects and the film. Consequently, the photographer only has access to the indexes, which are the means to enhance or direct the indices such as the choice of the film, the framing, the depth of field, the brightening or darken-

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Figure 6 Alinari. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio from the Uffizi Loggia. 18521855. Albumen silver print. New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

ing of certain parts of the photograph, and so forth. In defining the indexes, van Lier points out that they indicate objects much in the same way the index finger or an arrow might point to an object (2007, p.17).

By using two of the main elements of the represented scene to point at another one, the Alinari seem to have

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tried to turn some indices into indexes. The pointed-at element, Palazzo Vecchio, is left to play the confused and vague part of the indices, successfully indeed. As a matter of fact, this photograph only shows a small section of its side, the oblique and dark façade, and the tower. While the tower visually escapes the space indicated by the Uffizi Gallery’s wings, the façade is more a disturbing and ambiguous appearance than an assertive presence. Furthermore, it does not occupy all the space highlighted by the arrows-wings, but it shares it with a blank and dull sky, which works less as a background than a void right at the center of the image. As it seems, in this photograph there is no contrast between modernization and the past. However, the void right at the center of the image, and the failed effort to use historical monuments both as tools and objects of a clear image, shows a confused and contradictory rendering of the monumental city rather than an assertion of clarity and order.

Such a complex city portrait, with its shifting notions of time, history, memory, and progress, works as a perceptual framework that still shapes contemporary representations of Florence. Three films produced between 1976 and 1996 – Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), James Ivory’s A Room with a View (1986), and Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) – will illustrate how postWWII international cinema both makes reference to and draws on the Alinari gaze on Florence to represent the contemporary city as the site of financial power, emotion, and metamorphosis.

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In all the films analyzed Florence holds the status of a city that attracts characters, but is in the end unable to keep them there. Indeed, the three films are only partly set in Florence, as the protagonists cannot resist its call, but end up leaving the city after a while. Cinematic Florence is un luog[o] elettiv[o] … chiamat[o] ad accogliere fughe internazionali e sfogare umori randagi (Frosali, 1994, p.62)2.

Such a turn however, rather than causing Florence’s power to diminish, only enhances the city’s influence on the characters’ lives. More specifically, Florence is the site where something happens that deeply affects the characters and sets in motion the course of the plot, which then happens elsewhere: even those who initially live or work in Florence are portrayed as travelers or tourists there.

Loosely based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Obsession is one of the films that deals with the second face of this Janus-like city that lurks beneath its artistic beauty (Holdaway, 2014, p.46),

just like anxieties about the ongoing modernization could be seen in the Alinari photographs of monuments.

The plot revolves around the successful New Orleans real estate developer Michael Courtland, whose wife and daughter are kidnapped and killed at the beginning of the film. Through snapshots of the couple’s history, viewers learn that the couple had met in Florence, precisely in the church of San Miniato al Monte. Fifteen years after his wife’s death, the protagonist goes back to the city on a busi2 [an intentionally selected place… in charge of hosting international escapees as well as giving vent to stray moods].

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ness trip and in the same church meets a young woman that looks like his dead wife. From this moment on, the story develops to uncover a plot that had been schemed against Courtland by his business partner in order to get his money. Before this happens, and right after the death of Courtland’s wife and daughter, a crucial scene revolves around the grave that Courtland builds for his dead loved ones, which is located on an undeveloped expanse of land that the protagonist and his business partner had planned to exploit for much more profitable buildings. As this scene starts, the camera follows a bulldozer arm putting the tympanum on the grave. As the grave is completed, it becomes clear that it is a replica of the San Miniato al Monte’s façade. Then the camera cuts to Courtland’s face, showing his apparent despair and grief. The following shot shows the passage of time as it encircles the façade: as sixteen years pass, the wild background of bushes and trees turn into a neat and tidy memorial garden. While the land has been minimally developed, it has not been used for its original purpose as a real estate enterprise.

As a sacrifice to his lost loved ones, Courtland has maintained the land as a memorial in the shape of the San Miniato al Monte’s facade. Interestingly, the grave only replicates the church’s façade, so that the architecture is actually only a two-dimensional surface. It is then possible to read the façade as a sort of objectified photograph, both built and experienced through cinematic means. Indeed, while this scene begins by showing the grave from a frontal angle, somewhat hiding its flat nature, the rest of it makes clear that the façade is only a surface, which the camera

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can easily turn around through its circular movement in space and time. As both a grave and an inaccessible flat surface, the façade alludes to the notion of photography as absence, famously articulated by Roland Barthes as “a reality one can no longer touch” (1981, p.87). Furthermore, the very presence of the grave/façade prevents the underdeveloped land’s exploitation, thus replicating the link between photography and absence. The camera mobilizes the tomb both through space and time, as to reveal the will to turn that area into something different.

The instability between an affective and a profit-based attitude in the perception of architecture – and its relationship with the natural landscape that real estate development is bound to destroy – brings to mind some of the issues raised by the Alinari photographs. In particular, the Alinari photograph showing the same façade of San Miniato al Monte has been discussed as producing a subtle opposition between nature and culture, the past and modernization, heritage and new architecture. In the photograph, the geometrical church’s façade works as a metaphor for the soon-to-come modernization, which entailed the construction of the Viale dei Colli and the subsequent real estate exploitation of the hill, as opposed to the presence of a wild and unorganized nature. In the film, the tomb/ façade works as a metonym, being that which substitutes the unbuilt new buildings, while Cortland’s lone car at once indicates and displaces the potential mobility associated with the rising of new suburban areas.

A Room with a View instead puts the emphasis on an emotional relationship with the city. Based on E. M. Foster’s

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1908 novel, it tells the story of a young British woman named Lucy, whose intense romantic experience in Florence will affect and direct the rest of her life. As the title reveals, the view from the windows of the room in the pensione Bartolini plays a significant role in the development of the plot. Indeed, the title implies a specific perspective from which one might experience Florence: the view that the protagonist enjoys from the hotel room implies the presence of the window as a threshold to the city itself, and allows her to enjoy it from a separate space. Consequently, the city itself is experienced as an image, which does not require any kind of interaction beside that of a detached, if aesthetically moving, contemplation.

However, Lucy’s exploration of the city will force her to take on a different approach to urban space. The scene that shows Lucy’s actual encounter with Florence starts with a visit to the church of Santa Croce and then Piazza della Signoria. Upon arriving at the square, Lucy picks out some postcards at a newsstand. While these photographs are never made visible to the viewer, they are presumably similar to the detached view of the city that Lucy saw through her hotel window3. As Lucy takes her postcards and passes through the square, the camera begins to zoom back, reducing her to just one of the minuscule characters walking underneath the Palazzo Vecchio, while an increasing portion of the square, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Loggia dei Lanzi become visible.

3 These postcards can be seen as a reference to the famous Alinari representations of the city, which at that time were sold to tourists throughout the city.

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While this scene has been read as a reference to the unseen postcards that Lucy has just bought (Gibson 2006, p.168), it is possible to argue that this shot intentionally evades a stereotypical, tourist-like view of the square.

Indeed, the camera stops zooming out before the viewer is able to see the entire Palazzo Vecchio and Loggia dei Lanzi, refusing to visually replicate one of the Alinari photographs. In doing so, the film subtly comments on the relationship between the view and the character, as I will now show.

Zooming back to encompass the almost entire monumental view of the Palazzo Vecchio, the camera detaches itself from Lucy, who becomes an indistinct black dot.

The new perspective seems to acknowledge the film’s inevitable choice between focusing on the view and following the inner life of the characters. At the same time, this shot also reveals Lucy’s involvement with the space of the piazza, since she is physically contained in it, no longer able to safely observe it from a distant point of view. Rather than just providing a substitute for the postcards, this shot is the first step in a process that will force her out of her former attitude as a sightseer. In fact, the rest of the scene unfolds to explicitly and dramatically impose a more involved interaction with Florence than Lucy would have experienced from her window, as the young woman is forced to witness a violent altercation between two Florentine men. In this scene, Lucy is “overwhelmed by the whole environment that surrounds her” (Ross, 2010, p.98), which forces her to take on a different attitude toward urban space.

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As the violent fight takes place, Lucy is rescued by George, a young Englishman who also stays at the pensione and who will become her husband at the end of the film. Through the newly established connection between the two characters the film explores the possibility of an affective relationship with the city, and this happens precisely through the reference to an Alinari photograph. Indeed, at this point in the film George and Lucy talk to each other for the first time, with the Arno River in front of them and the Uffizi Gallery behind them.

This shot closely evokes the Alinari photograph with the two sides of the Uffizi Gallery loosely pointing at Palazzo Vecchio discussed above. However, as Lucy and George cover the wings of the Uffizi Gallery, the tower turns into a permeable barrier that enables their relation. By marking the space that divides the characters, the tower announces that same space as one that can be crossed and lived, rather than just looked at from the distance. The reference to the Alinari photographs triggers a process of interaction between the monuments and the characters, which turns the view into a three-dimensional space that has relevance for the characters’ lives. The reference to the existing photograph sets this visual interaction into motion, as the characters act on an already established scene.

Finally, The Stendhal Syndrome deals with the power of (photographic) representation of the urban space to affect and direct human life. The film opens in Florence with the protagonist, Roman police officer Laura Manni, investigating reports of a serial rapist and killer named Al-

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fredo. While at the Uffizi Gallery, where an anonymous phone call locates the villain, she is tracked down and subsequently raped by him. The rest of the film, set in Viterbo and then Rome, follows the process that brings Anna to identify with Alfredo to the point of becoming a killer herself, as if contaminated by the interaction with him.

The first scene set at the Uffizi Gallery sets the conditions for such a process to begin. Indeed, the encounter with the museum paintings – and, as I will show, the city’s photographic representation – is what triggers the metamorphic attitude that interests the film at large. This happens on a metacinematic level as well, as the film engages with a “cross-contamination of genres” that span from horror to giallo to detective film, with elements drawn from subgenres such as slasher movie, rape-revenge film, and noir (Ross, 2014, p.113).

After following Anna’s walk from her hotel to the Uffizi Gallery, the camera shows her entering the museum. She distractedly glances at two marble sculptures and then shifts her attention to the frescoed ceiling. After looking at the ceiling, Anna goes to the glass wall to look at the city outside and underneath the museum. At this point, the camera momentarily detaches itself from the protagonist in order to show what is outside of the window, and lingers on the scene for a few seconds. The scene is a view of the Ponte Vecchio and the two bridges beyond it (Ponte Santa Trinita and Ponte alla Carraia): from the bottom left corner of the screen the roof of the Corridoio Vasariano leads to Ponte Vecchio. The famous bridge occupies the entire middle section of the images, beyond which the other

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bridges appears on the left, and the expanse of buildings of diladdarno (the part of the city beyond the Arno River) on the right. The angle is very similar to the one that the Alinari brothers used for one of their first and most famous photographs.

From this moment on, the protagonist becomes haunted by the presence and power of the artworks. From Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano to Piero della Francesca’s Double Portrait of the Dukes of Urbino, to Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Anna seems to be more and more unsettled by the barrage of great artworks around her. Her perturbation continues with Caravaggio’s Medusa and reaches its climax with Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus4, as Anna faints to the floor while dreaming that she is plunging into the water of the painting. Then Anna plunges back out of the water, and out of the dream. Alfredo comes to her rescue and as their first contact sets the process of fusion in motion.

It is now time to go back to the reference to the Alinari photograph. The view of Florence from the museum, while apparently casual, plays a crucial role in establishing and clarifying the film’s path. It appears as a transition from the sculptures and frescoed ceiling that Anna walks past in the Uffizi’s corridor to the paintings she subsequently focuses on. It is possible to read the presence of the city view as Anna’s effort to find a stable and firm ground to her perceptions and feelings, just before she engages with the perturbing artworks. As if in a last minute This painting is actually located in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

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effort to save herself from the power of the artworks, Anna looks out of the window to search for something that is supposedly neutral and anchored to reality: the city. This view shows that in actuality, the world outside the museum’s walls is no more real or stable than the artwork inside, as proven by the presence of so many frames within the museum— not only of the works of art but also the windowpanes and the doorways (Nerenberg, 2012, p.95).

Anna is soon to experience that even outside the museum, there is no escape from images, artworks, reproducible, and reproduced scenes.

The urban scene outside the museum’s window is not a casual scene but rather one that has already been seen, photographed, reproduced, and made famous by the Alinari brothers. It is just a demonstration that everything is (or could be) a picture, that the inside and the outside coincide, and could easily melt into each other. Just as the museum is a repository of paintings, the city is but an archive of already (or potentially) taken pictures. As discussed above, this Alinari photograph produces a subtle ambiguity between what the photograph includes and what it excludes even while representing it: the signs of modernization are left outside the visual barrier produced by the bridges, even while actually appearing in the photograph. Accordingly, this scene reveals the separation between the museum’s inside and its outside as a porous membrane that does not separate two completely different spaces, just as the rest of the film at large revolves around the fusion between Anna and Alfredo.

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The metamorphic attitude triggered by the reference to the photograph of Ponte Vecchio speaks to the Alinari photographs’ character at large. Indeed, as the photographs captured Florence’s polymorphic status at the time as a city of residence, culture, industry, commerce, political power, and tourism, they produced a subtle and protean city portrait that is still relevant to today’s discourse on urban space. As the analyzed films show, the Alinari photographs provide a crucial visual and conceptual tool for addressing a wide range of issues related to the contemporary city and its relation to subjectivity and identity. In Obsession, the memory of the Alinari photograph of San Miniato al Monte helps bring to the fore the opposition between a profit-based approach to architecture and one enabled by aesthetic and affective appreciation – a theme that interests the entire film, since the plot to seize the protagonist’s company share is what brings the plot forward. As for A Room with a View, the switch from a detached relationship to urban space to one that sees it as the permeable container of subjects’ feelings and thoughts is propelled by the characters’ interaction with the photographic view of the Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Vecchio. And finally, The Stendhal Syndrome employs the reference to the famous Alinari photograph of Ponte Vecchio to turn the city outside the museum into yet another form of representation, thus suggesting the fictional and mediated nature of any supposedly stable reality and identity: something that the rest of the film will explore through Anna’s process of metamorphosis.

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Bibliography Barthes R. 1981, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981.

Benjamin W. 1980, Little History of Photography, in A. Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography, Leete’s Island Books, New Haven, pp.199-216.

Bollati G. 1996, Il modo di vedere italiano (Note su fotografia e storia), in Id., L’italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione, Einaudi, Torino, pp.124-78.

Cresti C. 1995, Firenze capitale mancata. Architettura e città dal piano Poggi a oggi, Electa, Milano.

Frosali S. 1994, in L. Giannelli (ed.), La Toscana e il cinema. Le Monnier, Firenze.

Gibson S. 2006, A Seat with a View: Tourism, (Im)mobility and the Cinematic-Travel Glance, “Tourist Studies” 6, pp.157-168.

Holdaway D. 2014, Florence After Dark, in A. Zambenedetti (ed), World Film Locations Florence, Intellect Books, Chicago, pp. 46-47.

Kirk T. 2005, The Architecture of Modern Italy, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Maffioli M. 2003, I Fratelli Alinari: una famiglia di fotografi. 1852-1920, in A. C. Quintavalle e M. Maffioli (eds.), Fratelli Alinari: fotografi in Firenze: 150 anni che illustrarono il mondo, 1852-2002, Alinari, Firenze, pp.21-56.

Nerenberg E. V. 2012, Murder Made in Italy: Homicide, Media, and Contemporary Italian Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Quintavalle C. A. 2003, Gli Alinari, Alinari, Firenze.

Ross S. 2010, Tuscan Spaces: Literary Constructions of Place, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Tomassini L. 2003, L’Italia nei cataloghi Alinari dell’Ottocento. Gerarchie della rappresentaione del ‘bel paese’ tra cultura e mercato, in A. C. Quintavalle e M. Maffioli (eds.), Fratelli Alinari: fotografi in Firenze: 150 anni che illustrarono il mondo, 1852-2002, Alinari, Firenze, pp. 147-216.

Van Lier H. 2007, Philosopy of Photography, Leuven University Press, Leuven.

Ventura F. 1986, Le trasformazioni urabnistiche della Firenze pre-unitaria, in F. Petrucci (ed.), Il disegno della città: l’urbanistica a Firenze nell’Ottocento e nel Novecento, Alinea, Firenze, pp. 21-38.

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uncanny city: an exploration of milan and turin in the work of giorgio scerbanenco and fruttero & lucentini (1960s-1970s) Giulia Brecciaroli University of Warwick

In his study on the uncanny, Anthony Vidler argues that this “quintessentially bourgeois kind of fear” (1992, p.

4) has been at the heart of architectural representations since the late eighteenth century: while the haunted house is a recurring theme in Romantic literature, with the rise of the modern metropolis at the end of the following century, the uncanny moves from the home interior to the interior of the mind and gains further connotations, overlapping with “metropolitan illness” (1992, pp. ix-x, 4-6). Since Freud’s theorization in his seminal essay of 1919, the notion of the uncanny has retained a prismatic nature, comprising a range of feelings of unease and estrangement that relate to a fundamental insecurity brought about by “a lack of orientation”, a sense of something new, foreign, and hostile invading an old, familiar, customary world (Vidler, 1992, p. 11).

As an aesthetic of anxiety, the uncanny cuts across spheres of human activity and artistic modes of expression, and has

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been a source of creativity, especially for the avant-garde.

Taking the concept one step further, it can be said that the uncanny is deeply rooted in urban history as is crime literature. The latter was born out of the great city and the new concentration of people and things that leads to a rise in violent crimes and the constitution of an institutionalized police force (Pezzotti, 2012, p. 7). The aesthetics of fear and estrangement, a province of the uncanny, is also at home in mystery and detective stories. This essay will explore the connection between urban space, crime fiction, and the uncanny, in the frame of Italy’s post-war economic boom and accelerated urbanization. More specifically, it will concentrate on the representation of Milan and Turin in crime novels written between the 1960s and the end of the 1970s by Giorgio Scerbanenco and the two co-authors Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini1.

While the category of the uncanny belongs to urban experience tout court, I aim to situate it historically, as a feeling of existential unease that characterizes the postwar period in Italy: the extraordinary economic growth of the late 1950s and the subsequent crisis of the mid1960s, when the economy goes stagnant. In the considerably short period of time (conventionally dated 19581962) in which the boom takes off, urban experience and imagination evolve alongside the physical transformations in the landscape of the country. Milan and The texts examined are Scerbanenco’s novels centered upon the detective Duca Lamberti (Venere privata (1966), Traditori di tutti (1966), I ragazzi del massacro (1968), and I milanesi ammazzano al sabato (1969)) and Fruttero & Lucentini’s crime novels set in Turin, La donna della domenica (1972) and A che punto è la notte (1979).

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Turin grow in scale and complexity. As centers, with Genoa, of the so-called Industrial Triangle, the two cities lead the way for Italy’s economic development and are radically reshaped by mass internal migration, during the years in which some 25 million Italians change their domicile and relocate, mostly along the SouthNorth trajectory, attracted by the myth of economic progress (Crainz, 2003b, p. 14).

The dominant narrative of the time exalts the prosperity achieved, corroborated by changes in people’s lifestyle and the development of new leisure habits. Images of the past, and especially the enduring peasant culture of the Mezzogiorno, are thus removed from the official representations of the boom. As Minghelli has suggested, this “amnesiac culture of benessere” (2016, p. 386) betrays Italy’s problematic relation with the past and the inability to develop a critical sense of history and tradition. What fails to be elaborated and is ultimately repressed, in the Italian post-war period, is not only the recent past of Fascism and war, but also the early 1950s, which are characterized by conflict and violence (Minghelli, 2016, p. 388).

The transition of the 1950s is indeed more complex than the picture of widespread optimism suggests, and the tension that emerges between tradition and modernity, the new that irrupts into the habitual reality, does not offer a neat closure. Some of the pre-existing inequalities and territorial imbalances become deeper, for post-war productivity also depends on the large reservoir of cheap labor force and the growing economic gap between the North and South of the country (Ginsborg, 1990, pp. 214-17).

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Moreover, historian Guido Crainz identifies continuity between the pre-war and post-war governments in the persistence of conservative tendencies (2003a, pp. vii-viii) and argues that the State’s inability to encourage structural reforms and build a robust collective dimension in this crucial point of modern Italian history, was a missed political opportunity (‘riformismo mancato’) that partly accounts for the socio-political turmoil of the following decades (2003a, p. xiv).

Intriguingly, in the timeframe under scrutiny, the seeds for the development of a specifically Italian crime fiction tradition are sown. In the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly with the work of Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini, the Italian noir and giallo find their own voice, attaining definite recognition within the nation’s cultural panorama (Pezzotti, 2014, pp. 52-3). According to Crovi, with the publication of Scerbacenco’s Venere privata, il giallo made in Italy subisce [...] un vero e proprio terremoto 2 (2002, p. 21).

While Milan and Turin have been privileged locations for mystery stories from the early history of the genre in Italy (Pieri, 2011, p. 132; Pezzotti, 2012, p. 39), Scerbanenco and Fruttero & Lucentini establish them as the site for crimes and investigations, and the functional set for critical analyses of the underside of post-war modernization.

In the Lamberti novels, Milan ceases to be a mere backdrop to become

2 [the home-grown Italian giallo is shaken by an actual earthquake](my translation).

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the habitat which engenders, nurtures and occasionally overmasters the criminals and their crimes (Burns, 2011, pp. 31-2).

Scerbanenco shapes the identity of Milan as capital of crime, while Fruttero & Lucentini pave the way for the local tradition of gialli that look at Turin as the most enigmatic or least known of all Italian cities, and an extraordinary narrative object (Crovi, 2002, pp. 141-2).

It is not accidental that the Italian giallo develops during years of social upheaval and unprecedented urbanization. Although there is a tendency to think that crime literature asserts the power of reason, embodied by the detective who undertakes the enquiry, to shed light on the mysteries of the city and therefore maintain urban order, in fact modern crime fiction rejects the unitary perspective of the detective and distributes the meaning through a multiple narrative viewpoint that provides new insights into the city (Howell, 1998, p. 367). The so-called postmodern noir tends to reverberate doubt, rather than re-establish the violated order, by replacing the final revelation of classic detective stories with a problematic ending that withholds any satisfying solution and opens up to further possible interpretations and outcomes.

Giorgio Scerbanenco Similarly, the Lamberti novels seem to lack a universal sense of justice (Burns, 2011, p. 34). Let us take the example of Traditori di tutti. In a break from the investigation on the activities of an international drug-dealing network, Duca is spending an idle evening at home, solving cross-

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words and reading magazines. What he thinks about one of the headlines that he reads, is telling.

Su una rivista di attualità lesse il titolo “Le rivelazioni finali sul più grande traffico di droghe”, ma non lesse l’articolo perché lui non credeva alle rivelazioni finali, c’erano due buste di mescalina 6 in giro ed era stupido credere a qualsiasi rivelazione finale sulle droghe, che non finiranno mai (Scerbanenco, 1999b, p. 186)3.

Not only does Duca question the possibility, suggested in the captivating title, of eradicating international organized crime, but he also seems aware that case solutions are temporary and disclose further mysteries and further solutions, in a potentially endless search for meaning. Duca never entirely masters Milan, and the fact that his slightly neurotic, inner thoughts are revealed to us through free indirect speech, may be read as a sign of this predicament. As Vidler points out, a reality which is beyond comprehension and provokes bewilderment is in itself uncanny (1992, p. 23).

Scerbanenco’s novels generally end on a disquieting note.

They leave us with the uneasy feeling that the widespread corruption and criminality in contemporary Milanese society are having tragic consequences on the life of honest people who do not partake in the new culture of subjugation and violence. For order to be partially and momentarily restored, there is always someone who pays a high price. Tellingly, this is usually a woman. In Venere priva[In one news magazine he read the headline: The Great Drug-Smugglers. Full Story. But he did not read the article, because he knew that it could not tell the full story. There were still two packets of Mescalin 6 unaccounted for, and anyway the drug story was a running serial that would never end, and only a fool would believe that it could] (Scerbanenco, 1972, p. 165).

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ta, Livia Ussaro is disfigured by a gangster, while working undercover in Duca’s investigation on a prostitution ring; in Traditori di tutti, Susanna Paganica will likely face a life sentence for the killing of Turiddu Sompani and Adele Terrini, hardened criminals who betrayed and killed her father during the Second World War. The female characters are either presented as morally irreprehensible (as in the case of the young female teacher Matilde Crescenzaghi in Traditori di tutti) and, as such, somehow more likely to become victims, or they embody a model of modern and emancipated femininity (Livia Ussaro) that is potentially subversive in 1960s Italian society. The fact that, in the novels, women can easily be corrupted or find themselves in danger, is indicative of the “fatal inconsistencies” (Burns, 2011, p. 35) of the process of economic development in Italy, and of the inadequacy of Italian society to respond to rapid modernization. Scerbanenco’s portrayal of femininity also mirrors anxieties about a city that is becoming less controllable, for it is a disruptive force that challenges traditionally demarcated spaces.

The extreme violence that permeates the novels is a further indicator of the difficulty of making sense of the new Milan, since we see that the characters who are less able to benefit from the new opportunities offered by the modern city, are more likely to turn to crime or be lured into dangerous situations. In another scene from Traditori di tutti, Duca is reading the newspapers again, this time with his assistant Mascaranti. The front-page headlines and the local news in the inside pages, which report brutal crimes involving young people and vulnerable subjects,

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trigger Duca’s monologue about the reality of senseless violence in contemporary Milan.

Non portiamo più coltelli, sciabole, e spade, e allora ammazziamo con quello che troviamo a portata di mano, – disse Duca –, quando siamo in auto prendiamo il cacciavite dal cassetto del cruscotto e sfondiamo il collo di quello che ci ha sorpassato a destra. A casa, invece, nel sano ambiente domestico, tra gli utili arnesi casalinghi, scegliamo forbici e con cinquanta sessanta colpi, finiamo l’amico che non ci ha restituito del denaro prestato (Scerbanenco, 1999b, p. 118)4.

Duca describes a corrupt society in which people kill for petty reasons, using whatever is close at hand and readily available as a murder weapon. These are ordinary objects with a practical and banal use, such as a spanner and a pair of scissors: not what one would expect to find on the scene of a perfect murder, but rather a trivialization of it.

Scerbanenco’s murderers, mostly greedy, stupid people who become irrational for squalid and trivial reasons (Pezzotti, 2014, p. 68),

come to embody an economic growth that has deepened the discrepancy between the rich and poor, enhancing individualistic and competitive orientations.

In the same monologue, Duca compares Milan to Marseille, Chicago, and Paris, traditionally noir cities.

[We no longer carry daggers, swords and sabres, said Duca, so we kill with whatever comes to hand. When we’re in a car, we grab a spanner from the toolbox, and crack the skull of the man who passed us on the wrong side. At home, however, in our cosy, domestic surroundings, we look through the household equipment, and choose a pair of scissors with which to stab (some sixty times) a friend who has failed to return the money we lent him] (Scerbanenco, 1972, p. 106).

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C’è qualcuno che non ha ancora capito che Milano è una grande città, non hanno ancora capito il cambio di dimensioni, qualcuno continua a parlare di Milano, come se finisse a Porta Venezia o come se la gente non facesse altro che mangiare panettoni, o pan meino. Se uno dice Marsiglia, Chicago, Parigi, quelle sì che sono metropoli, con tanti delinquenti dentro, ma Milano no, a qualche stupido non dà la sensazione della grande città, cercano ancora quello che chiamano il colore locale, la brasera, la pesa, e magari il gamba de legn. Si dimenticano che una città vicina ai due milioni di abitanti ha un tono internazionale, non locale, in una grande città come Milano, arrivano sporcaccioni da tutte le parti del mondo, e pazzi, e alcolizzati, drogati, o semplicemente disperati in cerca di soldi (Scerbanenco, 1999b, pp. 118-9)5.

Duca mentions the pan meino and panettoni, traditional Lombard recipes, together with other elements of local color (brasera, pesa, and gamba de legn) to further emphasize the contrast between the past and the current situation of Milan as a great cosmopolitan city that attracts criminals and people of any kind, following the sprawling development of recent years.

The frequent car journeys, in Scerbanenco’s novels, are functional to root us in the Milan of the 1960s. To give 5 [There are still people who don’t realize that Milan is a great cosmopolitan city. They have failed to notice that the scale of things has altered.

They talk about Milan as though it ended at the Porta Venezia, and as though the people ate nothing but panettoni and pan meino. Mention Marseilles, Chicago or Paris, and everyone knows you’re talking of a wicked metropolis, but with Milan, it’s different. Surrounded as they are by the unmistakable atmosphere of a great city, there are still idiots who think of it in terms of local colour, looking for la brasera, la pesa, and magari il gamba de legn. They forget that a city of two million inhabitants is bound to acquire an international flavor. There’s precious little left nowadays of the old local colour. From all over the world, spivs and layabouts are converging on Milan in search of money] (Scerbanenco, 1972, pp. 106-7).

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an idea of Scerbanenco’s topographical accuracy, in Venere privata Milan is mentioned 80 times; streets and squares 81 times, some of them more than once (Pezzotti, 2014, p. 60). Traditori di tutti features a long car chase sequence starting from Duca’s flat in Via Imola 3, continuing across Milan’s city center and then outwards, towards the villages of the hinterland. We as readers are able to trace the itinerary as if on a map, thanks to the abundance of topographical details. While the attention to details of site and setting, such as street names and real public buildings, is the condition of verisimilitude to ground the shared knowledge of the city (Howell, 1998, p. 366), in the Lamberti novels precise urban descriptions have a counterpart in the abstract darkness with which places are suffused. Milan is often portrayed at nighttime, when familiar places appear strangely different and illegal actions take place more easily. In the extract below, Susanna Paganica has just been given a lift into town. She asks to be dropped off in a deserted service area in the periphery of Milan: from there, she will get a taxi to her hotel and then a second one to the airport, where she will board a flight bound for the US. Era stato un passaggio pericoloso, ma anche qui non poteva farci niente, sola nello smisurato piazzale all’estrema periferia di Milano, nel dolce ma un po’ freddo vento di fine aprile, ebbe paura (1999b, p. 15)6.

[It had been a dangerous ride, but she had had no choice. Only now, alone in this neat little square on the very edge of the city of Milan, did she realize that she was frightened. It was a mild night, towards the end of April, but there was a cool breeze blowing (1972, p. 14).]

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The description reflects Susanna’s subjective perception of the place: the qualities of emptiness and vastness, and the cool April wind that blows across the deserted square.

The uncanny is not an inherent quality of space, but “a representation of a mental state of projection” (Vidler, 1992, p. 11).

Furthermore, marginal and forgotten areas are more likely to become sites for the resurfacing of the underground and repressed life of the city (Lefebvre, 2011, p. 36), for, in the public mind, they are generally associated with anonymous places populated by transitory existences, and perceived as outside the society’s center. It is also interesting to note that the adjective smisurato [boundless] and, elsewhere, the analogous sterminato, as well as the suffix -one, as in “sterminati vialoni” (Scerbanenco, 1994, p. 266), hint at the difficulty of assimilating Milan’s new scaled spaces.

Scerbanenco’s descriptions highlight the unsettling aspects of city life. A further example is provided by the meteorological observations, which are linked to the inhospitable and invisible quality of the city (Pieri, 2011, p. 137).

Fog, in particular, has been a trademark of Milan as a bleak, industrial city in literary and cinematic representations, most notably Bianciardi’s La vita agra (1962), Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), and Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). In I ragazzi del massacro, Duca looks out of the office window to discover that the streets of Milan are covered in a blanket of fog. It is nearly dawn and he has spent the night at the police headquarters, interrogating the eleven students involved in the murder of their teach-

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er, while, at home, his little niece is unwell and will die of complications from pneumonia shortly after. The break of the new day seems to suggest that hope is still possible in such a difficult time. It is, however, just a feeble light that struggles to plough through the thick fog. Thus, here the presence of fog emphasizes the individual and moral isolation of the characters (Scerbanenco, 1999c, p. 55).

In the following passage, urban history makes one of its rare appearances in Scerbanenco’s novels, which generally represent a Milan “of the moment” (Burns, 2011, p.

33). However, the ancient buildings are mainly a reconstruction for tourists and the ghosts from the past contribute to evoke a feeling of spatial estrangement.

E la cavalcata nella notte continuò, dopo piazza Cinque Giornate la Giulietta uscì dai bastioni, chi sa perché, e prese Viale Montenero, viale Sabotino, resi teatrali dall’ora notturna, dalla vuotaggine, dai lampeggianti gialli agli incroci, dall’ultimo trani aperto con l’insegna luminosa Crota Piemunteisa che tremolava, priva delle spente lettere r u a, e poi viale Bligny e viale Col di Lana, e insomma tutta la cerchia della semiantica Milano coi pezzi ancora residui e architettonicamente conservati o spesso ricostruiti, per i turisti, dei bastioni dai cui spalti, un tempo, pare, vigilavano prodi armigeri (Scerbanenco, 1999b, pp. 53-4)7.

7 [The little cavalcade rolled on through the night. After the Piazza Cinque Giornate, the Giulietta, for some reason, left the ramparts, and drove by way of the Viale Montenero and the Viale Sabotino, dramatically silent and deserted at this hour. At the crossroads, a solitary night-club was still open. Yellow light streamed from its doorway, and a flickering neon sign above it read Crota … Piemunteisa, the letters rua having failed to light up.

They then went along the Viale Bligny and the Viale Col di Lana, in other words they circled the whole of the old quarter of Milan, where many ancient buildings still stood, some heavily restored for the benefit of the tourists. On either side there were bastions and ramparts, once, no doubt, manned by valiant soldiers] (Scerbanenco, 1972, pp. 48-9).

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In the night time, the presence of blinking yellow traffic lights and a flashing neon sign that is missing a few letters, make urban spaces seem oddly ‘theatrical’. The old quarter, “restored for the benefit of the tourists”, is emblematic of the process of derealization that urban space has undergone in contemporary society, where the traditional urban features have been replaced by and overlap with a new geography based on the immateriality of money exchange (Lefebvre, 2011, p. 53).

In the Lamberti novels, deserted streets, places that seem distorted in the darkness of the night, and anonymous buildings, are sites for the representation of urban alienation. A further example may be the modern apartment block outlined against the rural landscape of Lambrate in Venere privata: a twelve-story “deità di cemento” [concrete deity] (1999a, p. 198), that resembles a cathedral in the desert (Pieri, 2004, p. 150). Here, the mismatch between modernist architecture and rural features conveys a sense of inconsistency and disorientation. Space carries within itself inherent contradictions, for every spatial organization inevitably includes some elements and excludes others: the latter, as in the case of the countryside in contemporary societies, characterized by the receding of nature, are perceived as regret and nostalgia (Lefebvre, 2011, pp 51-53).

Fruttero & Lucentini Like Scerbanenco, Fruttero & Lucentini describe a city, Turin, which is difficult to penetrate. Turin’s “attitudine al segreto” [tendency towards secrecy] (Crovi, 2002, p. 143), has traditionally inspired the crime narratives set

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in the Piedmont capital. Indeed, Turin is an emblematic and in some respects anomalous Italian city. It has been the seat of the Italian monarchy and the first capital of the country in 1861; in the course of the twentieth century, it has developed into a major industrial center and the home of the Italian automotive industry. In the public mind Turin is therefore linked to values of work ethic and rationality. The city, however, has traditionally been considered also a mysterious place, associated with black and white magic. As Pezzotti has commented, industrialization, immigration, and magic are an unusual mixture that may provide a fertile ground for detective fiction (2012, p. 40).

In La donna della domenica, Turin’s impenetrability is mirrored by the indirectness of its inhabitants and especially of the upper classes, which are referred to as “l’ambiente” [the milieu or inner circle]. The specular relation between the city, a fully-fledged character in the story, and its inhabitants, recurs throughout the novel. Much like the aristocratic milieu, Turin is dangerously masked, conspiratorial and treacherous, while it pretends to be sober and detached.

Inspector Santamaria, Fruttero & Lucentini’s investigating hero, possesses the right blend of confidence, tact, and charm to feel perfectly at ease in the company of Turin’s high society. Moreover, Santamaria fought in the Resistance in Piedmont: he is therefore both an insider and outsider (as a Southern immigrant, police officer, and non-aristocrat) with “a particularly lucid perspective” on Turinese society (Manai, 2008, p. 91). This is why his su-

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periors appoint him to investigate the murder case of architect Garrone, an unusual individual that is somehow attached to Turin’s beau monde. Santamaria’s superiors share the idea that relations between Turin’s social strata are regulated by a specific code of conduct which seemingly does not apply to any other Italian city, and that, in Turin, it takes extra precaution and diplomacy to navigate the pitfalls of public city-life.

La donna della domenica documents an urban landscape that is under development and in which diverse spaces have come to interact, as a consequence of industrialization and mass internal immigration. Turin is captured in a time of transition, in which boundaries within the city are being renegotiated. Arguably, nowhere do urban transformations manifest themselves more evidently than in the areas of intensive apartment buildings for the lower-middle-classes, such as the Santa Rita district, where the character of Oreste Regis lives. Regis works as a civil servant and has been the accomplice in Garrone’s plan to blackmail Mrs Tabusso, as we shall see in more detail later. In the novel, Regis is described as one of the countless men born without a future, just to take up space, to figure in the statistics of influenza epidemics, of consumptions goods, of electoral trends (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1974, p. 379).

He is a petty bourgeois clerk and lives in a neighborhood that mirrors the monotony of his existence, in the uniformity of the modern apartment blocks set down in a rigid grid.

Pretending to be the spokesman of a local group for the protection of urban green spaces and with the actual intent of interrogating him to have a confession, Santama-

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ria meets Regis in the Santa Rita apartment. Regis grasps the opportunity to complain about the recent construction frenzy that, in his view, has undermined the livability of the neighborhood.

Qui, comunque, siamo arrivati al punto di rottura, non è più ammissibile che questi mostruosi casermoni soffochino ogni possibilità di una vita sana, bella, armoniosa! Lei ha visto: questa non è più una via, è un tunnel, è un cunicolo […]. [Regis] si sbracciava in ogni direzione, estendendo l’anatema a tutto il quartiere, di cui s’intravedevano all’ingiro i blocchi scaglionati in file implacabili. Sporgendo la testa, il commissario scorse sulla sinistra, così vicino che quasi la poteva toccare, un minuscolo terrazzo trapezoidale messo di sghimbescio in una rientranza della facciata: sopra ci stavano a stento una sedia pieghevole e un tavolino di giunco (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1972, p. 457)8.

The image of the anthropomorphized apartment blocks delineates a modernist uncanny. These “monstrous barracks” convey a sense of claustrophobia and suffocation, as they loom over what appears to be not a street anymore, but a tunnel and a straight line. Likewise, the emphasis on geometrical architecture (implacable rows of buildings, minuscule trapezoidal terrace), suggests that all the available space has been rationally and densely built out. By

8 [Here, in any event, we’ve reached the breaking-point. It simply is not conceivable that these monstrous barracks should be allowed to stifle every possibility of beautiful, harmonious, healthy living! You can see yourself. This isn’t a street anymore. It’s a tunnel, an alley. […] He waved his arms in every direction, extending his anathema to the whole neighbourhood, whose great blocks could be seen all lined up in implacable rows. Sticking out his head, the Inspector glimpsed, to the left, so close he could almost touch it, a minuscule trapezoidal terrace set obliquely in an indentation of the façade: it could just contain a camp chair and a little wicker table] (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1974, pp. 377-8).

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means of a functional architecture that does away with the past and is open instead to values of mobility and efficiency, Modernism seeks to hide and contain the archetypical struggle between the forces of order and disorder within the city (Lehan, 1998, p. 98). The result is the “presence of an absence”: that of the traditional city, which is negated but lives on in the urban unconscious, presenting itself “as a haunting absence” (Vidler, 1992, pp. 182-3).

The description of Turin’s ancient center apparently celebrates the benign aura of authenticity, but contains key references to elements of ‘disorder’. Massimo’s walk in the old center reveals unexpected insights into the transformations that are affecting this part of the city.

[Massimo] se ne andò, tutto felice, fra le ghiotte bottegucce dove non aveva messo mai piede […]. Tutto gli si ricostruiva soavemente intorno: droghieri in camice grigio, garzoni in grembiule bianco arrotolato alla vita, donnone con la sporta, suore bisbiglianti, striminzite beghine, pensionati col mezzo sigaro, mamme che gridavano dagli ammezzati. A ogni cantonata sostava una prostituta grassa. Non era ‘proletariato’, questo, era ancora ‘popolino’, e Massimo, crogiolandosi nel suo sdoppiamento, vi si aggirava come in una festa in costume una volta tanto riuscita, insensibile ai fumi d’auto e motociclette, ai juke-box e ai dialetti meridionali che (il maestro di cerimonia non poteva aver pensato proprio a tutto!) sgorbiavano ogni tanto la composizione (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1972, p. 228)9.

[He went off, completely happy, among the seductive shops where he had never set foot […]. Everything fell gently into place around him: grocers in white smocks, butcher-boys with aprons hitched up at their waists, housewives with shopping bags, murmuring nuns, withered churchmice, old men smoking half-cigars, Mammas yelling from balconies. At every corner a fat prostitute was stationed. This wasn’t the ‘proletariat’: this was still the ‘populace’, and Massimo, reveling in his split person-

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To Massimo, this pre-industrial scene looks like a costume ball staging the traditional types of the ‘populace’: artisans, grocers, butchers-boys, women yelling at their children from balconies, prostitutes waiting for customers. On closer view, however, every appearance of authenticity turns out to be a simulacrum, in a sort of slippage between reality and dream, and the old center is changing as rapidly as the rest of the city. This is confirmed by the references to new lifestyles and ways of mobility (the fumes from cars and motorcycles), cultural and leisure habits (the jukeboxes), and by the jarring presence of Southern immigrants. Immediately afterwards, Massimo blames himself for having indulged in regret for the old days and in the sentimental celebration of an order that has probably never existed.

Turin’s transformations may also be read as one of the motives for the murder case that gives way to the plot. After learning about Mrs Tabusso’s plan to turn her lawn into building slots, Garrone presents an alternative project to the official one, drawn up by a distinguished architecture firm, for he is aware of a building restriction that can block the application. He is therefore in a position to blackmail Mrs Tabusso, asking her to pay for his project. Mrs Tabusso is described as an old Turinese lady with her back to the wall, bullied by new people, new customs, new laws, new vices (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1974, p. 415). ality, wandered as if through a costume ball that had, for once, succeeded, insensitive to the fumes from cars and motorcycles, to the jukeboxes and the Southern dialects that (the master of ceremony couldn’t think of every little thing!) occasionally marred the composition.] (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1974, p. 188).

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She is convinced that the only solution to her situation is killing Garrone: as in Scerbanenco’s crime stories, those people who are not able to take advantage of the new reality brought about by post-war economic changes, are more likely to be lured in dangerous and illegal situations. The episode is illustrative of “the struggle between old and new, between ‘old money’ and ‘new money’”, of “the conflict between the aristocratic past and the middle-class present”, which is taking place in Turin (Manai, 2008, p.93).

In A che punto è la notte, Fruttero & Lucentini’s focus shifts significantly towards suburban Turin and more specifically the municipalities of the urban belt. The novel is literally framed by Turin’s modern peripheries: it begins with the description of the Brussone housing project, developed in the hinterland during the 1960s, while the final police chase takes place in a discharged industrial area awaiting redevelopment.

The emphasis on the precariousness of the housing projects and urban interventions that were carried out only a decade before, and therefore on the sense of incompleteness and urban decay (scalcinato moderno, [decrepit Modern], 1979, p. 352) that characterizes the hinterland, bears witness of Turin’s abrupt development in the aftermath of the boom. As Lobsinger points out, the spread of a ‘burgeoning periphery’ was the result of the rapid rise in population, due to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants that put pressure on Turin’s infrastructures (2004, p. 79). In the novel, Graziano’s and Thea’s car journey is the pretext for the authors to take the reader on a tour across the ghostly eeriness of the urban belt,

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where neon-lit furniture workshops, shabby motels, and night clubs, remind us that the uncanny erupts in empty parking lots around abandoned or rundown shopping malls [...] in the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture (Vidler, 1992, p. 3),

In describing the impersonal buildings and places of the urban belt, the authors also hint at the fact that post-war rapid economic growth has sacrificed the local features.

La Porsche correva tra gli innumerevoli misteri della periferia. Alti edifici nudi, resi più simili gli uni agli altri da differenze irrisorie, bordavano lunghi viali senza fine, ormai identici in tutte le città del mondo. (…) una vittoria dell’anonimo, del piatto e uniforme plurale (Fruttero & Lucentini, 1979, p. 100)10.

The globalized space of capitalism tends towards homogeneity and erases distinctions (Lefebvre, 2011, p. 49), In the cited extract, the anonymous buildings embody, in their replicability, the figure of the double and the uncanny effects of disorientation and getting lost in the city, as shown by Freud.

This essay has offered an interpretation of the interplay between crime fiction and urban renewal in post-war Italy, arguing that the former can be read as an aesthetic response to urban changes. The texts capture the changing face of Milan and Turin in the aftermath of the boom, [The Porsche went fast across the many mysteries of the periphery.

Bare, tall buildings, made more similar to each other by negligible differences, bordered long endless avenues, now identical in every city in the world. (…) a victory of the anonymous, of the flat and uniform plural] (my translation).

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and document the difficulty of grasping the logic of radical transformations. Scerbanenco’s books mirror this uncertainty through a problematic ending, a representation of the city that emphasizes the qualities of the urban environment which elicit uncanny feelings, and by registering Milan’s increasing violence. Fruttero & Lucentini portray a city that is difficult to navigate and in which the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar is embodied by the double nature of the city itself, both elusive and charming. The discourse on Turin is created through the shared knowledge of the characters, who are representatives of the city’s inhabitants from different social strata, even though their description is filtered through Fruttero and Lucentini’s marked degree of irony. In both La donna della domenica and A che punto è la notte, the multiple viewpoints result in a dynamic sketch of Turin’s evolving social geography. While the texts confirm that urban reality can only be understood partially and in a fragmentary manner, they also create a genuine epistemology of the city and shape an original account of the boom years and their legacy, through the representation of urban transformations.

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Bibliography Burns J. 2011, Founding Fathers: Giorgio Scerbanenco, in G. Pieri (ed.), Italian Crime Fiction, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, pp. 27-47.

Coverley M. 2010, Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials, Harpenden.

Crainz G. 2013, Storia del miracolo italiano: culture, identità, trasformazioni fra anni cinquanta e sessanta, Donzelli, Rome.

Crainz G. 2013, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni Ottanta, Donzelli, Rome.

Crovi L. 2012, Tutti i colori del giallo: il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri, Marsilio, Venice.

De Certeau M. 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Freud S. 2003, The Uncanny, Penguin, London.

Fruttero C., Lucentini F. 1972, La donna della domenica, Mondadori, Milan.

Fruttero C., Lucentini F. 1974, The Sunday Woman. Translated from the Italian, by W. Weaver, Collins, London.

Fruttero C., Lucentini F. 1979, A che punto è la notte, Mondadori, Milan.

Ginsborg P. 1990, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988, Penguin, London and New York.

Howell P. 1998, Crime and The City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography, «Antipode», vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 357378.

Lefebvre H. 1991, The Production of Space Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge.

Lehan R. 1998, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley and London.

Lobsinger M. L. 2004, Architectural Utopias and La Nuova Dimensione: Turin in the 1960s, in R. Lumley, J. Foot (eds.), Italian Cityscapes: Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter.

Luckhurst R. 2002, The contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the Spectral Turn, «Textual Practice», vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 527-546.

Manai F. C. 2008, La donna della domenica and the Italian Detective Novel of the 1970s, in M. Cicioni, N. Di Ciolla (eds.), Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction, The University of Delaware Press, Newark, pp. 83-97.

Minghelli G. 2016, Icons of Remorse: Photography, Anthropology and the Erasure of History in 1950s Italy, «Modern Italy», vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 383407.

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Pezzotti B. 2012, The Importance of Place in Italian Contemporary Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison; Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham.

Pezzotti B. 2014, Politics and Society in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview, McFarland & Company, Jefferson.

Pieri G. 2004, Crime and the City in the Detective Fiction of Giorgio Scerbanenco, in R. Lumley, J. Foot (eds.), Italian Cityscapes. Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy, University of Exeter Press, Exeter, pp. 144-55.

Pieri G. 2011, Milano nera: Representing and Imagining Milan in Italian Noir and Crime Fiction’, in Id., Italian Crime Fiction, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, pp. 132-150.

Pistelli M. 2006, Un secolo in giallo. Storia del poliziesco italiano (18601960), Donzelli, Rome.

Scerbanenco G. 1972, Duca and the Milan Murders. Translated from the Italian, by E. Ellenbogen, Corgi, London.

Scerbanenco G. 1994, Il Cinquecentodelitti, Frassinelli, Milan.

Scerbanenco G. 1999a, Venere privata, Garzanti, Milan.

Scerbanenco G. 1999b, Traditori di tutti, Garzanti, Milan.

Scerbanenco G. 1999c, I ragazzi del massacro, Garzanti, Milan.

Scerbanenco G. 1999d, I milanesi ammazzano al sabato, Garzanti, Milan.

Vidler A. 1992, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in The Modern Unhomely, M.I.T. Press, London and Cambridge.

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natalia ginzburg and gendered space: country, city and house between fascist womanhood and feminist liberation Silvia Ross University College Cork

The analysis of the use of rural or urban space in the novel serves to shed light on key textual dynamics and important themes which relate to the context and culture in which the work itself is produced. Narratologist Mieke Bal explains the crucial role of spatial setting to the text: In many cases […] space is ‘thematized’: it becomes an object of presentation itself, for its own sake. Space thus becomes an ‘acting place’ rather than the place of action. It influences the fabula, and the fabula becomes subordinate to the presentation of space. The fact that ‘this is happening here’ is just as important as ‘the way it is here,’ which allows these events to happen (Bal, 1985, pp. 95-97).

An exploration of a literary text through the filter of space, rather than being prescriptive, can provide access to insights that might otherwise remain less evident, can aid in undermining commonly-held assumptions about a work, and ultimately, I maintain, strengthens its critical interpretation. Natalia Ginzburg’s writings reveal a strong connection to spatial setting. This essay focuses on two of Ginzburg’s texts which exemplify country/city and do-

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mestic/public spatial dichotomies in two distinct chronological periods of her oeuvre: her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City, 1942) and her last, La città e la casa (The City and the House, 1984). Ginzburg’s fascination with the relationship between the city and the countryside manifests itself in the very titles of these two, representative novels, set in two very different historical moments, periods which affected women’s rights and the Italian family structure acutely: the first, during the Fascist regime, and the second, in the 1980s, in the wake of the student movement and second-wave feminism.

La strada che va in città (1942) Ginzburg’s debut novel tells the story of a young woman, sixteen-year-old Delia who lives in an unnamed rural town with her parents and siblings. Her sister, Azalea, is married and has a house in an unspecified, nearby city: Azalea leads a superficial, bourgeois existence, forever preoccupied with her latest lover. Delia’s brother, Giovanni, enters into a relationship with Antonietta, a widow with two children who has a flat in the city. Their cousin, Nini, the most intellectual figure of the group, who spends his time reading when not working in a factory, also moves to the urban center. As the story progresses, he and Delia clearly become attached to each other, although no amorous relationship is established. The protagonist, however, flattered by the attentions of the local doctor’s son, Giulio, starts seeing him and becomes pregnant with his baby. As a result, Delia is sent to her aunt’s house in a remote rural village, where she is to see out the

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pregnancy so as not to cause a scandal in her hometown, while Giulio seemingly becomes more distant. Despite Giulio’s family’s reluctance to let him to marry a girl of such modest social standing and her father’s anger at her situation, the two eventually wed at the end of the novel and their baby is born. But the novel closes with Delia learning that Nini—who in his despair had turned to alcoholism—has died of pneumonia.

Ginzburg’s first novel concerns themes typical of her prose, primarily centred on family relationships, where parents and children are unable to communicate and the older generation appears uncaring towards its offspring; young people are affected by melancholy and existential apathy and relations between the sexes are characterized by power imbalances. Throughout this short novel, the city constitutes the longed-for locus of activity and entertainment, and contrasts with the tedium of the rural/domestic environment. The narrator explains how she, her brother and their cousin Nini, head into the nearby city on a regular basis: Giovanni e il Nini dormivano nella camera accanto alla mia e la mattina mi svegliavano battendo tre colpi nel muro, io mi vestivo in fretta e scappavamo in città. C’era più di un’ora di strada. Arrivati in città ci si lasciava come tre che non si conoscessero. Io cercavo un’amica e passeggiavo con lei sotto i portici (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 6)1.

[Giovanni and Nini slept in the room next to mine and woke me up every morning with three knocks on the wall. I would get dressed in a hurry and we would all three set out for the city, which was an hour’s walk away. When we got there we lost no time in separating, as if we were total strangers. I usually went to see a friend and strolled with her under the arcades (Frances Frenaye, trans. pp. 9-10)].

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Thus the two young men go off on their way, and Delia enjoys the freedom to meet with her friend and wander through the urban sphere unchaperoned. The protagonist also visits her sister Azalea who is lounging in bed, speaking on the phone with her lover. Delia then meets up again with Giovanni and Nini in the evening, on the way home: Li ritrovavo fuori di città, sulla strada polverosa, mentre le case s’illuminavano dietro di noi e l’orchestra del caffè suonava allegramente e più forte. Camminavamo in mezzo alla campagna, lungo il fiume e gli alberi. Si arrivava a casa. Odiavo la nostra casa. Odiavo la minestra verde e amara che mia madre ci metteva davanti ogni sera e odiavo mia madre. Avrei avuto vergogna di lei se l’avessi incontrata in città. Ma non veniva più in città da molti anni, e pareva una contadina (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 7)2.

Thus, in this text, the city is conceived as a space of action, sophistication and vitality more generally; it also constitutes the locus where Delia and Giulio go as a couple, including the hotel Le Lune, the venue for their sexual encounters (cfr. Ginzburg, 1986, p. 20). In contrast, the rural, domestic context is rejected outright by the young protagonist. Indeed, F. K. Clementi observes, As an alternative to the claustrophobic family circle, physically represented by the house, the city streets and urban venues offer meaningful moments of reprieve and freedom to women (2014, p. 135).

2 [I was sure to meet them later on the dusty road, outside the city, while the city lights went on behind us and the café orchestra struck up more gaily than before. We walked silently along the country road, between the river and the trees, until we reached home. I hated our house. I hated my mother and the bitter sorrel soup that she set before us every evening. If I had met her in the city, I should have been ashamed. But she had not gone to the city for years, and now, with her unkempt grey hair and missing front teeth, she seemed for all the world a peasant (Frances Frenaye, trans. p. 11)].

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The critic also posits that the production of the three Jewish-Italian women writers (Ginzburg, Sereni and Levi) examined in her essay aims at demasculinizing the city space, turning it from ‘urban monster’ into a positive locus for women’s self-determination and action outside the confines of the home (p. 133).

While this first novel of Ginzburg’s emphasizes the vitality of the urban sphere, the spatial descriptions remain relatively generic and devoid of topographical specificity, making it difficult to identify the city in question with a high degree of certainty. That said, Ginzburg’s primary urban reference point would have been Turin, as she had lived there from the age of three3. La strada che va in città, however, was written in 1941, while Ginzburg’s husband, Leone—who was Jewish and a noted anti-Fascist— was in confino, that is, exiled to the countryside, to a town called Pìzzoli in Abruzzo, in 1940. Natalia moved to Pìzzoli with their two small children so as to be with him and gave birth there to their daughter, Alessandra, in the summer of 1943 (Clementelli, 1986, p. 27, p. 29). Thus, the text produced in this period can be seen to reflect this experience of the confino and Ginzburg’s scoperta della campagna, della vita e della gente di paese, di un mondo fino allora del tutto ignoto alla scrittrice, abituata alla città4.

3 “She was born in Palermo in 1916 but grew up in Turin, and it is this city in Piedmont, with its strong intellectual Socialist and Communist traditions, which has provided the backcloth to the greater part of her work” (Wood, 1995, p. 137).

4 [discovery of the countryside, of village life and its people, of a world which up till then had been unknown to the writer, who was accustomed

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The Flâneuse That said, this novel, while partially set in a rural context, portrays the countryside as an undesirable locus for the young characters concerned. Depicted as tedious, fixed, static, the countryside stands in direct contrast to the city as a vibrant place of activity, work, entertainment and modernity, where the characters wander without restrictions.

Indeed, as Nels Anderson notes, the city is more mobile, mobility being a characteristic of its life just as stability is characteristic of rural life (1998, cited in Cresswell, 2006, p. 18).

Ginzburg’s first novel would seem to reflect this characterization of metropolitan life, as the main female protagonist displays great freedom of movement in the city during her habitual visits.

Geographer Tim Cresswell—in the wake of other theorists—reminds us of the rise of the flâneur—a bourgeois man who moves on foot through urban streets in the early twentieth century, taking in his surroundings—as a key figure for urban space and modernity5. In 1985 Janet Wolff argued in a key essay, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity”, that a (sociological) theorization of modernity as linked to the public sphere (for instance, the industrial city etc.) reflects essentially a male-centred vision, as from the 19th Century onwards common opinion relegated women to the domestic to the city] (Clementelli, 1986, p. 29).

5 As Wolff explains: “The flâneur is the modern hero: his experience […] is that of a freedom to move about in the city, observing and being observed, but never interacting with others” (1985, p. 40).

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confines, ignoring in the process their actual presence beyond the four walls, reiterating “the invisibility of women in the literature of modernity” (p. 43) and privileging instead the male flâneur. For Wolff, the figure of the flâneuse was non-existent6. However, since her cornerstone essay, scholars have sought to problematize Wolff’s interpretation, calling for a re-examination of the multifaceted existence of women in urban space in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the result that the term flâneuse has been productively used to explore the mobile woman’s role in the city 7.

In this vein, I posit that the more appropriate interpretive figure to be adopted for this novel by Ginzburg, then, is the walking woman, or flâneuse, given Delia’s frequent forays into the city streets and her desire to transcend her family home. Deborah Parsons, in her monograph, Streetwalking the Metropolis, argues for the rise of the urban female figure: A female observer corresponding to the social figure of the flâneur can be found in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women were achieving greater liberation as walkers and observers in the public spaces of the city (2000, p. 6).

6 In her discussion of George Sand’s cross-dressing in order to wander the streets of Paris, Wolff remarks “The disguise made the life of the flâneur available to her; as she knew very well, she could not adopt the non-existent role of the flâneuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city” (1985, p. 41).

7 Wolff concludes by rejecting the alternative notion of the flâneuse to represent women’s experience of modernity, saying “the essential point is that such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century” (1985, p. 45). Scholars after Wolff, however, have convincingly argued for the concept of the flâneuse; see Parsons, 2000; Elkins, 2016; Wilson, 1992; D’Souza & McDonough (eds.), 2006, among others.

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Lauren Elkin, too, emphasizes the flâneuse’s problematization of public space through her capacity for mobility: the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk (Elkin, 2016, pp. 22-23).

In La strada che va in città, Delia repeatedly walks from her home in the country to the city—likely meant to be l’Aquila, given its proximity to Pìzzoli where the Ginzburgs were exiled, but in reality probably modelled on Ginzburg’s own native Turin8—in order to socialize, to work, and to meet her fiancé for their romantic encounters.

Delia thus demonstrates a high degree of autonomy in her city walks. But for the protagonist’s mother and aunt, her urban mobility is unacceptable. In fact, her mother calls her a ‘vagabonda’ and, in her aunt’s opinion, Delia’s “Va però notato che anche se il settembre dell’Abruzzo sembra essere stato l’occasione che, sotto molti punti di vista, ispirò questo romanzo, la città è più Torino che l’Aquila: Torino, carica di un peso dolce e amaro, insieme, di nostalgia, è il pungolo vivo nella fantasia creatrice della Ginzburg che da troppo tempo ne è lontana e vive inoltre in condizioni così diverse da quelle cui è abituata. Una Torino che rappresenta la libertà, la gioia di vivere, l’evasione, tutti quei simboli che si configurano come altrettante illusorie porte d’accesso alla città” [It should be noted that even though that September in Abruzzo seems to be the event which, in many ways, inspired this novel, the city is more Turin than l’Aquila: Turin, loaded by a weight both bitter-sweet and nostalgic, is the stimulus for Ginzburg’s creative fantasy, she who for too long had been living far away from Turin and, furthermore, in conditions so different from those to which she was accustomed. A Turin which represents freedom, the joy of living, escape, all those symbols which are presented as equally illusory means of access to the city] (Clementelli, 1986, pp. 57-58).

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‘wandering around’ has resulted in her unplanned pregnancy, and she describes her niece as morally lax: Non faceva che scappare in città, fin da quando era piccolina, e così ha perso la vergogna. Una ragazza non dovrebbe metterci piede in città, quando non l’accompagna la madre (Ginzburg, 1986, pp. 43-44)9.

In fact, as a result of her pregnancy, Delia is forced into her own equivalent of confino or exile, in the home of her aunt in a stifling rural village, where she longs for her previous existence and yearns for the road which leads to the city: Pensavo alla mia vita d’una volta, alla città dove andavo ogni giorno alla strada che portava in città e che avevo attraversato in tutte le stagioni, per tanti anni. Ricordavo bene quella strada, i mucchi di pietre, le siepi, il fiume che si trovava ad un tratto e il ponte affollato che portava sulla piazza della città. In città si compravano le mandorle salate, i gelati, si guardavano le vetrine, c’era il Nini che usciva dalla fabbrica […] (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 41)10.

Indeed, Delia shows great awareness of the draw of urban space and its effects on her, reminiscing about the pleasure of encountering crowds on the bridge as she traverses the river, the foods she buys and, significantly, her meet-

9 [She’s run away to the city, even when she was a little girl, and that’s how she lost all shame. No girl should go the city, unless her mother goes with her (Frenaye, pp. 41-42)].

10 [I thought back to the life I had led before, to the city where I had gone almost every day, and the road I had travelled for so many years and in every kind of weather. I remembered every inch of it, the heaps of stones, the hedges, the sharp turn revealing the river, and the crowded bridge that led directly to the central square. There in the city I had eaten salted almonds and plates of ice cream and looked at the shop windows. There was Nini coming out of the factory […] (Frenaye, p. 39)].

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ing Nini when he finishes his shift at the factory. Her reflections on a rare visit to the city while pregnant in order to convince Giulio that they need to get married also illustrate the attraction of the urban streets: Per tutto il tempo che fui sul postale non facevo che pensare alla città, che non rivedevo da un pezzo, e mi piaceva anche guardare dai vetri e guardare la gente che saliva […]. Era sempre più bello che in cucina […]. Mi rallegrò vedere la città, con i portici e il corso (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 58)11.

In these few sentences, Delia contrasts the public space of the vehicle, along with the urban landscape, against the private sphere of the kitchen, clearly privileging the former as a realm of escape.

La strada che va in città thus presents a case of remarkable female mobility for its time, as Delia enjoys relative freedom of access to both rural and urban spheres before and after her pregnancy, a socio-spatial mobility which runs counter to the kind of Fascist rhetoric typical of the Strapaese movement which prized healthy rural values and peasant life, propaganda resonant with Nazi dogma on the concept of Heimat. In this novel, the countryside is depicted as oppressive and stifling for young women (not to mention young men) and can be interpreted as undermining Fascism’s extolling of rural virtues. Indeed, on the first page of the novel, the narrator-protagonist openly 11 [I was happy all the way, thinking of the various parts of the city that I hadn’t seen for so long, looking out of the windows [and watching the people who were getting on] […]. It was a lot more agreeable than my aunt’s kitchen. […] I was thrilled to see the city streets and arcades.

(Frenaye, p. 53, slightly adapted by the author)].

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voices her dislike of her rural family home, where she lives as one of five children: Si dice che una casa dove ci sono molti figli è allegra, ma io non trovavo niente di allegro nella nostra casa. Speravo di sposarmi presto e di andarmene come aveva fatto Azalea (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 5)12.

This remark in itself can be interpreted as an authorial critique of Fascist pro-natalist policy and the regime’s privileging of rural life. At the same time, however, Delia’s aspirations seem consonant with Fascist ideals of domesticity, whereby she wishes to find herself ensconced in a comfortable, middle-class home. The novel concludes with the protagonist having reached the goal of marriage and a bourgeois apartment in the city, where she finally resides with her new husband, Giulio, who is now besotted with her, after the arrival of their baby.

Despite this, it cannot be said that Ginzburg is presenting a case of a canonical happy ending in domestic bliss.

Delia, upset by Nini’s demise and apparently uninterested in the baby, seems poised to perpetuate the cycle of Ginzburgian neglectful parents. Adalgisa Giorgio rightly observes: In La strada che va in città, in which the protagonist marries her seducer, Delia shows indifference, if not dislike, towards both her child and her husband, despite the fact that he now loves her (1993, p. 879)13.

[They say that [a home with many children is a happy one], but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours. Azalea had married and gone away at seventeen, and my one ambition was to do likewise (Frenaye, p. 9, slightly amended)].

13 Giorgio talks of “alienated women who populate Ginzburg’s early works and are invariably the victims of their marriages and families. Mar12

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We can also read this ending as a rejection of stereotypical roles deemed appropriate for young women under Fascist propaganda, which valued women above all as procreators and awarded prolific mothers14.

That Ginzburg, of a notoriously anti-Fascist family, should write in such a manner as to undermine the Fascist agenda and yet, simultaneously, uphold certain aspects of the regime’s patriarchal dogma, is perhaps not all that surprising. Coburn, for instance, in her discussion of Lessico famigliare, notes the text comprises “a catalogue of the infiltration of fascism within the family” (2007, p. 759).

The critic continues, I believe that this catalogue is, first of all, an examination of the depths to which Fascist ideologies may be imbedded within society (2007, p. 759).

Thus, Ginzburg, while expressing anti-Fascist sentiment (having paid the price of racial persecution directly), at the same time, as the product of the Italian patriarchal culture which was upheld by the regime, cannot help but have been influenced in some ways by its dogma, a situation reflected in her texts’ representation of gender roles and the family.

riage is never the result of love, but of succumbing to a mixture of social pressures and conventions and dark forces which rule the protagonists’ lives. Motherhood, like marriage, is hardly ever a source of joy for Ginzburg’s characters, who become mothers either because society expects a married woman to have children, or from accident, from lack of alternatives, or in an attempt to give themselves an aim in life” (1993, p. 879).

14 See for instance De Grazia (1992), in particular chapter 3, “Motherhood”, pp. 41-76.

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La città e la casa (1984) This analysis now moves across the full arc of Ginzburg’s literary production to concentrate on her last novel, a work also deeply preoccupied with the urban sphere and one that is set in an Italy which has undergone enormous changes in the areas of women’s rights and the structure of the family. La città e la casa appeared over forty years after Ginzburg’s first novel, and, like so much of her oeuvre, is centred on family dynamics and fraught relationships between parents and children. That said, this mature text reflects different and in many ways much more complex spatial preoccupations from her first work: the country/ city dichotomy exists here, too, but there is a fixation with real estate and an insistence on domestic spaces inhabited by diverse groupings.

The book can be classified as belonging to the epistolary genre, as it consists of frequent correspondence by letter between a wide cast of characters across a period of two years. The exchange is triggered by Giuseppe’s move from Rome to Princeton, in order to live with his older sibling, Ferruccio. Shortly after his arrival in Princeton, Giuseppe’s brother dies. Giuseppe remains there, however, as he has a job teaching Italian literature, and he starts a relationship with and eventually marries his brother’s widow, Anne Marie. The remaining characters write back and forth to him from Italy. A key female correspondent is Giuseppe’s former lover, Lucrezia, who is married to Piero and has five children. But Lucrezia leaves Piero for Ignazio Fegiz, who in turn is in a longstanding relationship with a woman nicknamed Ippo; Lucrezia’s new rela-

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tionship is destined to fail from the outset, and ends shortly after she gives birth to Ignazio’s baby, who lives only two days. The various letters exchanged involve Giuseppe and Lucrezia’s circle of friends, including Egisto, Albina, and Serena, as well as his sister Roberta, and his son from a previous marriage, Alberico, who is establishing himself as a film director and lives with his partner, Salvatore, as well as a friend, Nadia, a single mother, in Rome.

While this novel is set primarily in a named city, that is, Rome, it, too, sets up a contrast between urban and rural spaces. Initially, Lucrezia and Piero’s house, called Le Margherite, in the countryside near Perugia, functions as an idealized luogo d’incontro where convivial gatherings take place amongst their circle of friends. Giuseppe writes to Piero, in fact, urging him never to sell the house: Porto stampata nel cuore la vostra casa, grossa, gialla e vecchia, che voi chiamate “Le Margherite”, chissà perché. Il portico, la legnaia, il piazzale davanti alla casa e le due magnolie. Porto tutto stampato nel cuore. Lucrezia qualche volta dice che è stufa di quella casa. È stufa di stare in campagna, e vorrebbe che vi trasferiste altrove. Ma ha torto. È una bella casa e a comprarla avete fatto bene, dieci anni fa o quando è stato. Restateci, non andate mai via di là (Ginzburg, 1987, pp. 1402-03)15.

However, both Lucrezia and Piero’s marriage and the regular gatherings of friends disintegrate, thus, we can in[Your large, old, yellow house which you call The Daisies (who knows why) is etched on my heart. The portico, the woodpile, the drive in front of the house and the two magnolia trees. It’s all etched on my heart.

Sometimes Lucrezia says she’s sick of that house. She’s tired of living in the countryside and wishes you’d move somewhere else. But she’s wrong.

It’s a beautiful house and you did well to buy it, ten years ago or whenever it was. Stay there, don’t ever leave that place. Translation mine].

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terpret the sale of the idyllic rural home as a commentary on the reconfiguration of the traditional family. Furthermore, it is the female figure, Lucrezia, who, tellingly, voices her discontent with the rural domestic idyll, rejecting it in favour of an urban existence. Le Margherite nevertheless remains a nostalgic space for many of the characters, who long for the kind of community that is now clearly lost.

In contrast, the novel’s Roman cityspace involves intergenerational and diverse identities and non-standard living arrangements. There is no emphasis on a main female character as flâneuse here; instead, friendships, alternative families, untimely deaths and orphaned children dominate the text. These non-canonical figures meet and intersect within domestic spaces, primarily in urban apartments. The novel reveals a near-obsession with the notion of the ‘casa’ and the domestic sphere, but not as one would expect in typical narratives of female oppression in the house. Lucrezia, for example, rejects the normative lifestyle typified by Le Margherite and longs to move, not letting herself be bogged down by household chores.

In fact, in an arrangement which reflects new migratory patterns to Italy, she and Alberico share domestic help, a woman called Zezé, of Cape Verdian origin (Ginzburg, 1987, p. 1506).

Furthermore, the various characters indicate a bourgeois obsession with the real estate market, as seen in Egisto’s letter to Giuseppe, late in the novel: Lucrezia adesso pensa molto alle case e ne parla molto, perché dall’appartamento dove sta se ne dovrà andare via

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fra poco. […] Legge sempre gli annunci sul «Messaggero» (Ginzburg, 1987, p. 1534)16.

This intense interest in real estate can perhaps be interpreted as a reflection of the optimism resulting from the upsurge in the Italian economy which, by the 1980s, had transitioned from the rural sphere to the post-industrial17.

At the same time, place attachment clearly is an important feature for the characters, and Giuseppe himself articulates this, in his re-evocation of his Roman apartment which he has sold, after his move to the United States.

Giuseppe explains his feelings in a letter to Egisto: è stata menzionata la mia casa di via Nazario Sauro. Io la considero sempre la mia casa, anche se l’ho venduta. Questa in cui vivo ora, qui a Princeton, non so perché ma non la considero altrettanto mia. Mi sembra sempre che sia la casa di mio fratello e di sua moglie. Mio fratello è morto e sua moglie si è risposata con me. Però la mia prima impressione è stata quella, che io fossi un forestiero nella casa, e le prime impressioni a volte sono indelebili. (Ginzburg, 1987, p.

1536)18.

Giuseppe’s mixed feelings about his new home reflect his own sense of awkwardness with his marital situation, af[Lucrezia thinks a lot about houses at the moment and talks about them a lot, because she will soon have to give up the apartment she’s in. […]

Lucrezia reads the advertisements in Il Messaggero, Dick Davis, trans.].

17 Mudu explains that in Rome of the 1970s-1980s the “cost of an apartment remained relatively stable […] requiring an average investment of approximately seven years’ of an individual’s income” (2014, p. 70).

18 [my house in via Nazario Sauro was mentioned. I still consider it my house, even if I have sold it. I don’t know why, but I don’t consider the house I’m living in now, here in Princeton, mine in the same way. It still feels as though it’s the house of my brother and his wife. My brother died and his wife got remarried to me. But that was my first impression, that of being a foreigner in this house, and sometimes first impressions are indelible.]

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ter marrying Anne Marie. Indeed, the houses in this text illustrate the re-elaboration of family and community as a product of post-1970s Italy, after the divorce referenda (1970, 1974): a wider spectrum of identities, behaviour and relationships is accommodated (for instance, queer and migrant identities, open marriages/relationships, drug use etc.). The influence of second-wave feminism is evident, with some characters (Serena, Albina) participating in a Centro donna or feminist theatre 19. These socalled alternative lifestyles dominate the text, where heteronormative conceptions of the family are undermined throughout and the variety of domestic arrangements is symptomatic of changing values for women and Italian society in the 1970s and1980s more generally20. Sharon Wood comments: Ginzburg’s nostalgic sense of family as community finds itself repeatedly tested over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, as the culture and values of youth protest against the bourgeois culture in which she believes so firmly (Wood, 1995, p. 150).

Scholarship has examined the thematic primacy of the family in Ginzburg’s literary production, and Giorgio comments, Critics such as Giorgio (1993) have commented on Ginzburg’s lack of endorsement of the feminist movement, despite the fact that her work regularly concerns the role of women within the family structure and Italian society more generally.

20 Regarding family units and dwelling spaces in Ginzburg’s later novels, Parisi observes “L’Italia però è cambiata: negli anni ’70 e ’80 le famiglie non hanno più un luogo che le contenga stabilmente […] e i rapporti al loro interno sono irregolari” (2002, p. 115). [Italy has changed however: in the 1970s and ’80s families no longer have a stable place that contains them […] and the relationships within them are irregular].

19

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Ginzburg’s whole oeuvre exposes the happy Italian family as a myth and an illusion, and suggests that the institution of the family itself is in danger of extinction (1993, p. 880).

Laura Salsini, in her discussion of La città e la casa and another of Ginzburg’s epistolary novels, Caro Michele (1973), notes that [t]hrough the narrative structures of these novels, Ginzburg points to the difficulty in developing and maintaining those fundamental relationships that would offer the most solace in a world she felt marked by social isolation. She saw the family institution as particularly threatened by an increasingly busy and modern society (2010, p. 83).

Ginzburg herself acknowledged her fascination with the topic in an interview with Peggy Boyers, I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute (Boyers & Ginzburg, 1992, p. 147).

In this same interview, Ginzburg discusses how the institution of the family has changed in recent times: Society is different now. By now the family is so disintegrated and isolated (p. 147).

Historian Perry Willson points out that the family in fact remained a strong institution in Italy in the late 20th century, at the same time observing: Dynamics within the family, however, changed (2010, p.

180)21.

Willson continues: “The old idea of the authoritarian pater familias, with great power over his wife and children, was now virtually gone. Indeed, the role of fathers became somewhat unclear and ambivalent. In-

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These transformations in the family structure noted by Ginzburg have repercussions, too, in spatial terms, especially for women. In her socio-historical study of women and domestic space, Tracce silenziose dell’abitare. La donna e la casa (1995), Gisella Bassanini observes: L’abitare femminile ancora non si legge come modello compiuto ma piuttosto come una scomposizione dei modi di abitare del passato sia all’interno della famiglia tradizionale che al di fuori di essa: nelle ‘nuove famiglie’ o nella scelta della solitudine. Unitamente all’emergere di una nuova coscienza di sé da parte della donna si assiste nella società post-industriale (o telematica) al diffondersi di nuovi modi di abitare […], quindi nuovi rapporti sociali, nuovi modelli culturali, nuovi significati (1995, p. 108)22.

Both novels discussed involve tense family relationships and even tragic deaths: that of Nini in the first; those of Giuseppe’s brother Ferruccio; of Lucrezia and Ignazio’s newborn baby; of Nadia, Alberico and Salvatore in the second.

Interestingly, though, already in La strada che va in città, the protagonist Delia does not fully identify with motherhood, reflecting ambivalence about a role so prized by the Fascist regime23. In contrast, Lucrezia, while embracing stead Italian families, if anything, became more centred around the figure of the mother, the new ‘supermother’ who, juggling the many balls of family responsibilities and employment, was determined to prove that she could cope” (2010, p. 181).

22 [Women’s dwelling cannot be read yet as a finished model but rather as a deconstruction of past modes of dwelling, both within the traditional family as well as beyond it: in ‘new families’ or in the choice of solitude.

In our post-industrial (telecommunications) society, along with the emergence of women’s new self-awareness, we are witnessing the dissemination of new modes of dwelling […], that is new social relationships, new cultural models, new meanings].

23 Feminist criticism has of course served to dismantle idealized visons of motherhood and has recognized that many women indeed experience

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her own role as mother (and a prolific one at that) loses the child who was a product of her new relationship and sets herself up as a single mother in an urban setting. We can read this final novel of Ginzburg’s as one which presents a wider spectrum of gender and non-normative relationships, in a quasi post-feminist vein, I would argue, where paradigms not only of femininity are explored and undermined, but also modes of masculinity and sexuality are investigated and problematized, illustrating the author’s nuanced understanding of gender roles and relationships in modern Italian urban space and society.

By examining the treatment of urban space in both Ginzburg’s earliest and latest texts, which between them span over forty years, we can gain greater understanding of her representation of women as subjects in a changing Italian society. In La strada che va in città, the protagonist is subject to fascist mores regarding female behaviour and ambitions, yet it is through her walking in the city, as a flâneuse, that Delia savours a sense of freedom and independence, only to be confined to the domestic sphere in a stereotypical bourgeois family at the novel’s conclusion. Delia’s ambivalence about her own state of motherhood, however, reflects Ginzburg’s nascent exploration of female liberation, as well as the reconfiguration of the family, themes which run throughout her oeuvre. Indeed, Ginzburg’s interest in family dynamics peaks in her final novel, La città e la casa, where the characters’ near-obsession with real estate is matched by the predominance of ambivalence about the role; see for instance Paula Nicolson (1993) and Andrea O’Reilly (2006), among many others.

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unconventional families and living arrangements, symptomatic of transformations in Italian society in the wake of second-wave feminism. Reading these works via the prism of urban public space and the private domestic sphere thus serves to unpack the complex and multiform gender and family dynamics illustrated in two of Ginzburg’s texts which depend so heavily on their setting.

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Mudu P. 2014, Housing and Homelessness in Contemporary Rome, in I. Clough Marinaro, B. Tomassen (eds.), Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Nicolson P. 1993, Motherhood and Women’s Lives, in D. Richardson, V. Robinson (eds.), Introducing Women’s Studies: Feminist Theory and Practice, Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 201-223.

O’Reilly A. 2006, Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Feminism, Motherhood and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering, Demeter, Bradford.

Parisi L. 2002, I romanzi di Natalia Ginzburg, «Quaderni d’italianistica», vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 107-120.

Parsons D. L. 2000, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Salsini L. 2010, Addressing the Letter. Italian Women Writers’ Epistolary Fiction, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Willson P. 2010, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Wilson E. 1992, The Sphinx in the City. Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Wolff J. 1985, The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity, «Theory, Culture and Society», vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 37-46.

Wood S. 1995, Italian Women’s Writing 1860-1994, Athlone Press, London.

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urban space as cognitive metaphor? suggestions from alessandro baricco’s ‘city’ Marzia Beltrami Durham University

Most of the essays collected in this volume – and presented at the Crossdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Space Conference – draw on literature to shed some light on the representation and perception of urban space. In the present chapter, I adopt the opposite perspective, as I suggest that in the novel City, published by Alessandro Baricco in 1999, the author encourages the reader to draw on urban space and the idea of city in order to make sense of the narrative as a whole.

I offer an alternative interpretation of City based upon the assumption that the ‘city’ evoked by the title does not actually indicate the theme of the novel but rather works as a cognitive metaphor. This metaphor indicates how readers should make sense of the narrative as a whole. By arguing this, I account for the presence in Baricco’s novel of several of what Marc Augé (2008) has described as ‘non-places’; yet I claim that considering these through Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia is more suited to the overall reading of the novel, and endorses the interpretive shift from ‘city’ as a theme to ‘city’ as a cognitive metaphor. This contribution opens up an innovative

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interpretive path in geocriticism by incorporating a cognitive perspective and thus suggesting that more abstract narrative elements, such as plot, might also be understood and explored as spaces.

Extant Scholarship: the City as a Theme Why should Baricco choose the term ‘city’ as the title of his novel? The immediate explanation would be that the novel is set in a city and somehow aims at capturing its paradigmatic features – which is indeed the interpretive line adopted by the majority of the extant scholarship.

Critics such as Rorato (2001), Rorato and Storchi (2004), and Nicewicz (2009) advance an interpretation of City as a critique of the postmodern urban reality. Rorato and Storchi, for instance, suggest that the choice of an English title indicates that the traditional concept of città, where space and time form a harmonious and meaningful entity, is no longer suitable to express the globalised, metropolitan reality of many Italian cities (2004, p. 251).

To defend this point, critics have stressed this polarisation between città and city, and with it the features that allegedly typify the postmodern metropolis. In particular, the belief that the metropolis should be characterised by a sense of loss and displacement led scholars to overemphasise the indeterminacy of time and space, to the extent that some critical observations even seem to stand in contradiction to the text. Rorato and Storchi (2004, p.

252) observe that Baricco’s representation of the city corresponds to a process of ‘etherealisation’, and that “no in-

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dications of space or time are provided�. However, even though the narrative is not set in a real city, it is undeniably a verisimilar one, reminiscent perhaps of a North-American town: the protagonist Gould goes to college and will go to Couverney University, his father works at the Arpaka military base (p. 33 [p. 25])1; most of the names would not look out of place in an American context. The fact that the location is fictional does not per se imply any geography of “loss and displacement�. Temporal signposts are also clearly offered: the novel opens by specifying on the very first page that the narrative begins in October of 1987, while halfway through the story the narrator points out that it is now September 1988 and that Gould is celebrating his fourteenth birthday (p. 135 [p. 136]); a few pages later, the narrative recounts an important academic achievement of Gould, dating it in February 1989. It follows that, although interspersed with many conversations that may indeed make the reader lose track of time, time is definitely not annihilated.

In fact, when we try to summarise what City is about, it would appear that this narrative is hardly about space or urban reality at all. The novel tells the story of Gould, a thirteen-year-old child prodigy who is attending college in order to receive an education that is expected to gently lead him to his destiny, the award of the Nobel prize.

Being a genius, however, has its major side-effects: Gould is an extremely lonely and isolated boy, socially awkward, When not accompanied by any author or year, the page number refers to Baricco (1999). The first page number refers to the Italian original, the second page number in square brackets refers to the American translation.

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who spends his free time wandering around with his two imaginary friends, the giant Diesel and the mute Poomerang. His life, though, is changed by his friendship with a young woman, Shatzy Shell, who works as Gould’s governess for two years, a period covered by the main part of the narrative. In the final pages, the narrative stretches to six years in the future, accounting for Gould’s whereabouts: the boy has ultimately decided to flee his own destiny and abandon an academic career, now working as a cleaner in a shopping mall, presumably happier than he would have been had he pursued the life originally set out for him.

Paradoxically, even this reliable summary of the novel somehow fails to account for what typifies this story the most. In order to propose a hypothesis about how this specific “narrative machinery” works – to use Eco’s terminology (1979, p. 24) – I will move my focus onto the novel’s narrative structure. With this shift, I intend to look at the structure of the story from the perspective of its reception and comprehension on the reader’s part. In other words, I shall consider what textually encoded cognitive strategies are designed by the author to encourage the reader to make sense of the narrative during the reading process. By his principle of hermeneutic composability, Bruner advocates that, whatever the elements in the narrative box, as long as the reader ‘has’ the rules – which are partly cognitive and partly culturally-based – she will make sense of the whole by using the elements at her disposal. Since the reader knows that she is expected to find a meaning in the whole, she will arrange the interpretive

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grids at her disposal in order to make them fit so as to endow with sense the elements to which they are applied.

It is with this perspective in mind that I offer an innovative reading of City, provided that this process cannot be unaided, and the text should somehow guide the reader’s cognitive effort.

City’s narrative structure is made of several narrative strands that in fact do not always directly add to the story I just recounted: a large part of the novel consists of the descriptions of Gould’s wanderings, often with his two imaginary friends, of some of Gould’s lectures, his conversations with Shatzy, his father or his professors, the boxing adventures of Larry Gorman (who Gould invents and re-interprets to entertain himself while he sits on the toilet), and the Western story invented by Shatzy. What is more, these storylines do not all belong to the same ontological level, since some of them are either imagined or recounted by real characters such as Gould or Shatzy. The novel, therefore, has a fragmentary nature which may initially confuse the reader, as the shifts from one storyline to the other are often quick and minimally signalled. Nicewicz (2009, p. 163), endorsing the view of City as a narrative disruptive of time and space as knowable dimensions, argues that le immagini si accavallano l’una sull’altra, come fluire dei pensieri, senza nessuna logica. Anzi, a volte troviamo pezzi di storie, là, dove meno ce li aspettiamo2.

[images overlap onto each other, as a flow of thoughts, without any logic. Sometimes we find pieces of stories, there, where we expect them the least, Translation mine].

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However, if we look at these ‘pieces of stories’, we see that they are pieces of a limited number of intertwined narrative strands; furthermore, the structure underlying them is not chaotic at all.

As soon as the narrative proceeds, the reader realises that there are characters that surely belong to the actual (fictional) storyworld3: Gould and his family, his professors, and Shatzy. Then, from these centres, we have several departing narrative strands, whose ontological boundaries sometimes seem to be blurred but are clarified by the end.

In other words, as soon as she proceeds in her reading, the reader is given more and more clues that clarify what stories and characters are imagined by Gould or Shatzy and what events are real, such as the lectures or the conversations between real characters. If in the first chapter, for instance, Gould tells Shatzy about Diesel and Poomerang as if they pertain to the same realm of fictional actuality, later on another character will clearly state their fictional nature: [Gould] «Ecco, mi faccia un favore, si dia un’occhiata intorno.» […]

[Shatzy] «Qui?» «Sì, lì, nella stanza, mi faccia questo piacere.»

«Okay, sto guardando.»

«Bene. Vede per caso un ragazzo rapato a zero che tiene per 3 According to Herman, a storyworld is the mental model produced by the text and co-constructed by readers by means of textual cues (2002, p.

6). Herman argues that ‘storyworld’, rather than ‘story’, “better captures what might be called the ecology of narrative interpretation. […] More generally, storyworld points to the way interpreters of narrative reconstruct a sequence of states, events, and actions not just additively or incrementally but integratively or ‘ecologically’” (2002, pp. 13-4).

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mano uno molto grande, ma veramente grande, una specie di gigante, con delle scarpe enormi, e una giacca verde?» (p. 11) «Lei non trova spaventoso che un bambino giri tutto il tempo con due amici che non esistono?» (p. 250)4

All doubts, however, are ultimately swept away: the reader is not left to deal with an ontologically subverted narrative world by the end of the novel.

So far I have attempted to make a point of how City is not actually concerned with the representation of a urban space (in fact, only one scene is set in a typically urban context, pp. 23-28 [pp. 17-21]). Yet my reading of Baricco’s novel does concern the issue of space in another sense, which has more to do with the narrative strategy implemented by Baricco, and less with the semantic content of the novel. I noted earlier that City is made up of several narrative strands and that the focalisation quickly shifts from one to the other. To ensure the readability of a text that is fragmented and multifarious, Baricco designs his narrative in such a way that the reader can learn quickly to recognise to which storyline the upcoming passage belongs, and thus to distinguish one storyline from the other. With this purpose in mind, the narrative strands are set in extremely recognisable sites or communicative scenarios, which readers are likely to have experienced themselves: the shopping mall, the fast food or Chinese restau4 [«Then do me a favor and take a look around.» […] «Here?» «Yes, there, in the room, please do me this one favor.» «OK, I’m looking.» «Good. Do you by any chance see a guy with a shaved head who’s holding the hand of a big guy, and I mean big, a kind of giant, with enormous shoes and a green jacket?» (p. 5)] [«You don’t find it frightening that a child spends all his time with two friends who don’t exist?» (p. 253)].

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rant, the museum, the lecture theatre, the Ideal Home exhibition, the Western setting, the boxing match, the running commentary.

It should be noted that intelligibility stems from the recognisability not simply of the physical setting, but – above all – of the sets of actions and possibilities that such settings enable. As Herman points out, this is because narrative comprehension relies on a combination of propositional information, directly conveyed by the text, and readers’ world knowledge, prompted by a specific situation (2002, p. 270). This type of interactive and dynamic information attached to a scenario is expressed by the concept of script – and it is on the strong employment of scripts that Baricco relies in order to make his narrative machinery work.

First coined in schema theory5, the notion of script has been developed within research on artificial intelligence to designate a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation. Scripts allow for new references to objects within them just as if these objects had been previously mentioned (Schank & Abelson 1977, p. 41).

Activating a restaurant-script, for instance, implies the possibility of referring to a waiter or to a burger without having to explain why these elements should suddenly appear, while when a phone call-script is instantiated the interacting characters can refer to different environments around them without the reader being puzzled, since she 5 Schema theory is a branch of cognitive sciences initiated in Gestalt psychology during the 1920s and 1930s, and then revived and further expanded in the 1970s within AI research (Gavins, 2005).

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is aware that two people communicating on the phone are likely to do so from different places. Scripts contribute to readers’ engagement by triggering their immediate response to a well-known scenario. More importantly, however, Baricco heavily capitalises on scripts and headers (that is, elements that can activate or be activated by a script) to guide his readers through a fragmented narrative, full of quick shifts in context and perspective. The Prologue exhibits more than twenty changes of scene over nineteen pages: here, sparse yet carefully designed references to the elements of the restaurant-script play a fundamental structuring role. A passing enquiry on the quality of the meal (“Buono l’hamburger?”, p. 23 [“Is the hamburger good?”, p. 17]) and a short exchange at the end of the Prologue (“Finito?” “Sì.” “Com’era?” “Insomma”, p.

29 [“Done?” “Yes.” “How was it” “All right”, p. 22]) frame all the narrative passages in-between within a conversation between the two main characters, Shatzy and Gould, which presumably takes place at the fast food mentioned

by Gould during their first telephone conversation. Without the connections provided by the restaurant-script, most of the scenes recounted in the Prologue would remain disconnected from the broader narrative, leaving readers unaided in the process of comprehending the unfolding narrative.

Non-Places vs. Heterotopias These places fictionally conjured up by Baricco are not only characterised by the immediate connections they prompt via the readers’ world knowledge: they are also sig-

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nificantly associated with the concepts of non-place and heterotopia, elaborated in the fields of anthropology and human geography by Augé and Foucault respectively.

Critical reference to the notion of non-place does not seem surprising, if we think that Augé identifies non-places as the typical products of the contemporary age (or, as he calls it, ‘supermodernity’) and includes among them sites such as the shopping mall, the fast food restaurant, and the museum. All these places are indeed present in Baricco’s novel, and it could well be argued that among the author’s intentions there is also a certain criticism (though not thoroughly negative) of some aspects of contemporary society6. Illustrative in this respect, is the episode at the fast food restaurant, where Shatzy finds herself entangled in an exponentially nonsensical conversation, epitomising the excesses and paradoxes of consumerism (pp. 10612 [pp. 104-11]). Likewise, the employment of the concept of non-place is aligned with the interpretation adopted by most other critics. For Augé, a non-place is a space For the ambiguity of City’s criticism, in opposition to the episode referred to later, consider Shatzy’s attitude toward the scene at the diner (or toward the Ideal Home Exhibition): “io guardai tutto quello ed è chiaro che c’era solamente da pensare che vomito, ragazzi, una cosa da vomitare tanto era triste, e invece quello che mi successe fu che […] io pensai Dio che bello, con addosso perfino un po’ di voglia di ridere, accidenti com’è bello tutto questo, proprio tutto, fino all’ultima briciola di roba schiacciata per terra, fino all’ultimo tovagliolino unto, senza sapere perché, ma sapendo che era vero, era tutto dannatamente bello. Assurdo, no?”, (p. 14) [“I looked at all that and it was clear that the only thing you could think was How disgusting, folks, something so sad it would make you puke, and instead what happened was that […] I thought Lord, how lovely, with even a sort of desire to laugh, My goodness, how nice all this is, all of it, down to the last crumb crushed into the floor, the last greasy napkin, without knowing why, but knowing that it was true, it was all amazingly nice. Absurd, isn’t it?”, p. 8].

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that complies with the sense of displacement, of “blurred, distorted, [or] artificial” identity (Rorato & Storchi 2004, p. 253), a view that corresponds to the portrait of the postmodern metropolis that the novel is supposed to represent according to current scholarship.

However, it cannot be ignored that the first and main definition of a non-place is a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity (Augé 2008, p. 63).

As I argued above, Baricco’s employment of non-places is closely linked to the instantiation of scripts, in order to ensure narrative comprehension. If it is true that City features settings that are the same as those Augé identifies as non-places, it cannot be ignored that in doing so the narrative design does not rely on their lack of identity but rather on the strong recognisability of these places and scenarios. In other words, the novel exploits their strong identity and cognitive accessibility, their capability to quickly project the reader into an easily imaginable fictional environment. It follows that even though the fast food or the shopping mall could be regarded as non-places, they are employed with an opposite effect to that posited by Augé.

As an alternative to Augé’s concept of non-place, Foucault’s notion of heterotopia seems better positioned to describe effectively the mechanisms at work in City. In spite of the fact that they are often recalled together – as indeed happens in scholarship on City –, Dehaene and de Cauter (2008, p. 5) suggest that, to some extent, heterotopias could be almost regarded as the opposite of non-places. Presented during a series of lectures deliv-

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ered by Foucault in 1967, the notion of heterotopia has sparked much discussion because of its effectiveness and wide applicability, also partly encouraged by its loose definition in the first place. According to Foucault, heterotopias distinguish themselves from utopias and are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted (1986, p. 24).

In their subsequent re-visitation of the concept, these two scholars seek to acknowledge the ‘otherness’ inherent to heterotopias (hence their recognisability) and, at the same time, the fact that they are now embedded in everyday life (and therefore likely known by readers). In this sense, Foucault’s heterotopia – updated according to its later reformulations – appears more compatible with Baricco’s narrative because it does not assume an interruption of normality but rather simulates a common experience of places (Dehaene & de Cauter 2008, p. 5). By arguing this, Dehaene and de Cauter intend to account for a development in the conceptualisation of heterotopic places since Foucault’s formulation in 1967. They observe that, in our contemporary world, heterotopias are no longer places of crisis (through which people pass) or deviance (to which people are relegated): rather, they are places with recognisable and strong identities that can be accessed in everyday life (e.g., the theme park or the festival market). It follows that, by combining the ordinary and the extraordinary, the concept of heterotopia does not overlap with that of non-place, but rather embodies the tension between

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place and non-place (2008, p. 5). In doing so, it also accounts for the ambiguous attitude toward these sites that critics working on City have reported and yet not fully explained (Rorato & Storchi 2004, p. 253).

There is another point that encourages us to privilege the concept of heterotopia over that of non-place in relation to this specific narrative. Following Faubion’s interpretation, Dehaene and de Cauter point out that: Heterotopic [spaces] are not spaces of the erasure of the normative. They are instead places and spaces in which the ordinary normative order is modified, or rather more precisely, where certain of the norms of everyday life are under suspension (2008, p. 22).

Along these lines, Cenzatti (2008, p. 75) suggests that, in its contemporary reformulation, the concept of heterotopia serves to question binary divisions such as normality vs. deviance, or health vs. sickness, by adding the middle-ground of ‘difference’. Heterotopias do assume the presence of a social norm, but also contemplate a range of ways of adhering to it. Rather than a place devoid of identity, heterotopia holds the possibility of accommodating the other’s identity too.

From this perspective, it could be argued that a concept which problematises the issue of normality better suits a novel where the difficulties of integrating into society are undeniably brought to the fore. Ultimately, City’s narrative aims to map out the conditions of Gould’s existential and psychological impasse rather than following the development of a situation. Conventionally, the breach of an equilibrium starts the narrative, which finishes with the

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restoring of a new equilibrium; in City, instead, the point is to elucidate Gould’s static situation, therefore his decision to respond to life actively and to step out from the destiny set out for him as a child prodigy marks the breach of the extant equilibrium and the end of the narrative7.

«Sì,» disse piano Gould.

Era una risposta a un sacco di domande.

L’autista del pullman arrivò a qualche metro dal ragazzino. […]

«Allora, sei completamente pazzo o cosa?, ehi, tu, cos’è, sei pazzo?»

Il ragazzino si voltò a guardarlo.

«Non più, signore.» Disse. (p. 225)8.

For my last point in this regard, I return the focus of the discussion onto narrative comprehension and onto the strategies adopted by Baricco to guide the reader through the understanding of City. On the one hand, Augé remarks that the elements making up non-places play no part in any synthesis, they are not integrated with anything; they simply bear witness, during a journey, to the coexistence of distinct individualities, perceived as equivalent and unconnected (2008, p. 89).

On the other hand, the notion of heterotopia does not imply total displacement, nor completely undermines the possibility of a synthesis: deviance – or better difference,

A more comprehensive discussion of this aspect is included in Chapter 2 of my doctoral thesis The spatial dimension of narrative understanding, Durham University, 2017.

8 [«Yes,» Gould said softly. It was the answer to a whole lot of questions.

The bus driver came up a few feet away from the boy. […] «Are you completely out of your mind or what?, hey you, what is it, are you nuts?» The boy turned to look at him. «Not anymore, sir.» He said. (p. 227)] 7

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as suggested by Cenzatti (2008) – characterising each heterotopia is what ensures its strong internal identity, its immediate recognisability. The complexity of the whole – the whole being a narrative as well as a city – ceases to be a threat and opens up to richness: the identification of heterotopias emerges as a strategy to scale down the process of comprehension, a way to offer to the reader (or to the urban inhabitant) manageable units with which one might interact. Most importantly, I contend that heterotopias maintain their own identity and recognisability by simultaneously maintaining innumerable connections with other spaces.

The City as Cognitive Metaphor Given they have both been called upon in the extant scholarship, privileging either the notion of heterotopia or that of non-place is not an idle debate. It is worth stressing that I do not intend to question the general validity of these concepts, but the aptness of their employment in relation to City, inasmuch as they arguably endorse two different readings of Baricco’s novel. Augé and Foucault capture different features of the fictional places that are conjured up in this novel. It is my contention that the aspects emphasised by heterotopias may work better to illuminate the interpretive shift for which I argue: from the city as a theme, to the city as a cognitive metaphor.

If urban spaces are hardly the subject of City’s narration, the question arises of what is, then, the reason for such a title. Let us take a look at the blurb of the novel, written by Baricco himself:

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This book is built like a city, like the idea of a city. […]

Its stories are neighbourhoods; its characters are streets 9.

My suggestion is that the reference to the city should not be intended as a thematic pointer, an indication of the object of narration. Rather, the image of the city works as a cognitive metaphor: the narrative is not meant to represent a city, but it is constructed like one. The idea of the city is offered to the reader to provide her with the best way to make sense of the narrative as a whole, as a mental image to refer to when it comes to connecting the parts of the narrative together. The city works as metaphor because understanding is indeed enabled by the process of “conceptual cross-domain mapping” that is proper of this technique (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, p. 70); the metaphor is cognitive because it concerns the way the narrative is cognized, or made sense of.

The metaphor, in this case, does not express a similarity of entities – e.g., ‘John is a lion’ means that the features of the lion are cross-mapped onto the features of John – but rather a similarity between modes of sense-making. To put the same concept another way, through the title the reader is invited to make sense of the narrative in the same way the traveller/walker makes sense of a city. Hence, it is no longer a matter of words – words that would belong to one domain but can be used to describe another – but of forms of reasoning, which are normally

Translation is mine, as this passage does not appear in the American book. The Italian blurb reads: “Questo libro è costruito come una città, come l’idea di una città. […] Le storie sono quartieri, i personaggi sono strade”.

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used to reason out a city (that is, a space) and can now be used to reason out a narrative.

Tutte quelle storie sulla tua strada. Trovare la tua strada.

Andare per la tua strada. Magari invece […] sono gli altri le strade, io sono una piazza, non porto in nessun posto, io sono un posto (p. 186)10.

Also in the narrative, Baricco explores the metaphor from an unprecedented perspective: instead of equating characters’ lives to roads – which would imply a transformation and a developmental trajectory – he suggests that characters can be static places instead, like squares. In other words, entities that have to be explored in order to be comprehended.

In advancing the notion of cognitive metaphor, I am referring to the theoretical framework of phenomenological embodiment initiated by Varela and his colleagues (1993) and then further explored by Lakoff and Johnson (1999).

By introducing the notion of conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson intend to challenge the idea, substantially ingrained in most of Western thought (epitomised by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum), that our reason exists independently from our body. On the contrary, they argue for a notion of reason as embodied (or mind as embodied).

Such a view wishes to account for the fact that the human cognitive ability to comprehend abstract concepts – such as, for example, the high-level cognitive operation of understanding a narrative as a whole – ultimately builds [All that nonsense about your road. Finding your road. Taking your own road. Maybe […] others are roads, I am a plaza, I lead nowhere, I am a place (p. 189)].

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on our sensorimotor experience, which in turn shapes the way we elaborate these abstract concepts and our subjective experience11.

In the present contribution, I argue that the spatial relations between the various narrative strands that compose City impact more significantly on the understanding of the meaning of the narrative, than the temporal relations of cause-and-effect. As a city can be known only piecemeal, by means of individual practice and exploration, so a narrative such as Baricco’s City is to be understood by comparing and contrasting its characters and their stories. Despite being often unrelated, the storylines mirror each other and are all variously related to the same centre, the protagonist Gould. The lectures, Shatzy’s stories, Diesel’s and Poomerang’s wanderings or Larry’s boxing matches, are never directly interacting with each other: yet each one of them epitomises a different aspect of Gould, and it is by exploring them that the reader manages to map out Gould’s existential situation and its development.

The storylines of the characters imagined by Gould, for instance, are particularly important in order to understand his inner life, as they capture and dramatize his reactions to the world around him, at a stage where he is not ready yet to let them impact on reality. The episode when 11 A quick but effective example from Lakoff and Johnson (1999): at the first step of the process that connects our sensorimotor experience with our capability to elaborate abstract thought, there are primary metaphors, such as Affection is Warmth. Affection is a subjective experience that we make sense of by drawing on our sensorimotor experience of warmth, which is something understood by and through the body.

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Gould is interviewed by a television broadcaster is especially representative: the pages from 114 to 121 [pp. 11320] report a direct dialogue that the reader reads as a series of eccentric answers to the interviewer’s questions, delivered by either Diesel or Poomerang in turns. While the awkward reactions of the interviewer are initially ascribed to the imaginative answers given by the two characters, as the narrative proceeds it becomes increasingly clear that the interviewer does not even perceive their answers, and what has actually happened is that the interviewer is asking a set of questions to which Gould responds with a solid silence. This clarifies the imaginary nature of Diesel and Poomerang and, at the same time, it sheds some light on Gould’s thoughts and personality, which he lends to his imaginary friends. In a similar way, the reader can indirectly follow the sequence of Gould’s emotional states in the vicissitudes of Larry the boxer. Larry’s training before the final match with Poreda, which would mark his definitive entrance to the world of professional boxing, occurs exactly when Gould is uncertain about whether to accept the place offered by the prestigious university of Couverney, which would amount to embracing his destiny as child prodigy (pp. 180-3 [pp. 182-5]): in a threepage stream of consciousness, Larry’s thoughts exhibit a mix of pride, ambition, childlike desire for approval, and fear of failure, which corresponds exactly to Gould’s feelings about his own future. Along the same lines, Larry seems to finally win when Gould is on a train running toward an unknown destination, away from Couverney (p.

240 [p. 243]).

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However, the situation designed in City is made even more complex by the fact that the relationship between storylines is not always so straightforward. The stories imagined by Gould do not serve to understand Gould only, just as the Western invented by Shatzy serves less to illuminate the character of Shatzy and more to shed new light on Gould and on his mother Ruth. Shatzy’s Western tells the story of Closingtown, a windswept town on the edge of the desert, where none of the inhabitants can die because their destinies are stuck and Time has stopped. The city’s destiny is closely intertwined with that of a not-working giant clock – the Old Man – that has been built by the city’s founders; however, as the watchmaker Phil Wittacher discovers, the clock is not broken but rather stopped (p. 275 [p. 281]). In the final part of the novel, the reader finds out that the narrator of Shatzy’s Western is actually Gould’s mother, Ruth, hospitalised in a mental healthcare institution where Shatzy has worked for a few years as a nurse after Gould’s disappearance. During one of the breaks from the telling of Shatzy’s Western, Ruth admits to seeing a certain parallel between Closingtown and her own mental situation: Lo stesso prof. Parmentier, una volta, mi disse che, se questo mi aiutava, potevo immaginare quello che mi succedeva in testa come qualcosa di non molto diverso da Closingtown. Succede che qualcosa strappa il Tempo, mi disse, e non si è più puntuali con niente. […] Diceva che questa era la mia malattia, volendo. Julie Dolphin la chiamava: smarrire il proprio destino. Ma quello era il West: si potevano ancora dire, certe cose [p. 260]12.

12

[Prof. Parmentier himself, once, told me that, if it was helpful, I could

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The story of Closingtown, as the epitome of a state of existential impasse, can be related to both Ruth and to her son Gould. Baricco stresses the difference between being broken and stopped, and his emphasis suggests that the same difference should be applied not only to the clock, but also to the characters.

Returning to the notion of heterotopia and to its suitability within a critical discourse on City, Foucault’s original definition stresses another feature that is particularly interesting as far as Baricco’s narrative is concerned. In addition to a strong identity, heterotopias are characterised by an inherent mirror-relation with the surrounding places.

The mirror itself is also a heterotopia in so far as [it] does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy (1986: 24).

Baricco’s storylines, anchored to specific contexts that are heterotopic in nature, are woven together exactly by means of these mirroring relationships. In this sense, City’s storylines are themselves heterotopic as their meaning emerges from their comparison and juxtaposition.

Achieving a comprehensive understanding of Gould’s situation without losing sight of its complex and contradictory aspects, I suggest, is indeed the point of the narrative.

Understanding this, therefore, equates to understanding its plot because it means to grasp the governing principle think of what was happening in my head as something not very different from Closingtown. Something tears Time, he said to me, and you are no longer punctual about anything. […] He said that that was my illness, if you like. Julie Dolphin called it: losing your own destiny. But that was the West: certain things could still be said. (pp. 264-5)]

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behind the presence of certain storylines in relation to the narrative as a whole.

Conclusions In my discussion, I refer to narrative understanding as synonymous with plot understanding. This is because by narrative understanding I refer to the high-level cognitive activity performed by the reader in order to make sense of a story, both step by step during reading and of the narrative as a whole, according to a process that Bruner describes as a hermeneutic circle (1991, pp. 7-11). The same twofold focus on both local and global meanings is precisely what underpins the process of plot understanding13, hence the claim that plot is the narrative element that better captures the understanding of the overall narrative. Although classical definitions of plot are variously but fundamentally action-based14, over the last thirty years theorists have sought to refine the concept, prompted by the feeling that plot should not simply consist in sequences of actions but it somehow ought to designate the point of a narrative; that is

This distinction between local and global level is formulated by Herman also in terms of micro-designs and macro-designs (2002, p.

6). In order to co-construct the narrative storyworld, the reader has to look firstly at a local level, in order to understand narrative microdesigns (i.e., states, events, actions); secondly, the reader should read for the macrodesigns, that is the large design principles “determining not so much the individual constituents or localized features as the overall contours, the dominant ‘feel’, of the storyworld being mentally modeled” (2002, p. 7). Macrodesigns includes issues of temporalities and spatialisation.

14 See Bremond (1980), Chatman (1978), Greimas (1977), Prince (1982), Propp (1958).

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the way [in which] the story indicates its aim, purpose, meaning

and turns sequences of events and states into a structured, closed, and complete whole (Ronen 1990, p.

819, p. 828)15.

In this light, narrative and city share a major critical property: on the one hand, they can only be understood by means of practice, which means via reading for a narrative and via exploration for a city; on the other, throughout their experience and retrospectively, a narrative and a city can be conceptualised as unitary wholes. Because of the features illustrated earlier, the notion of heterotopia might be better positioned to carry out an exploration that equally depends on the specificities of the parts and their interconnectedness as a whole. The relationship between city and heterotopias, and between the narrative as a whole and its only seemingly unrelated storylines, could be aptly described by the following proportion: city: heterotopias = novel: storylines

The image of the city is overtly referred to in the title precisely to point at the wholeness that includes and depends on the irreducible internal difference of its components.

To conclude, I would like to draw attention to two main points that have emerged from this essay and make a case for the profitable relationship between literary criticism and cultural geography, as broad areas. First, I sought to illustrate how the employment of heterotopias could act 15

See Kukkonen for an overview of the concept of plot.

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as an effective strategy to support narrative understanding.

Second – although this suggestion is far less conclusive – from my reading it seems to follow that, while scholarship still tends to associate the image of the contemporary city with a sense of loss and displacement, in this novel the concept of city is actually used to epitomise the possibility of an integrated sense-making process that is prompted and not hindered by engaging with the fragments, which mimetically represent reality. If any, it accounts for the fact that, already in the late 1990s, some authors arguably believed that their readership could find the idea of the city as something usefully employable in this activity of sense-making. In other words, the interpretation I endorsed in this paper suggests that making sense of an urban space could be regarded as an experience basic and common enough, as well as practiced enough, to function as a guiding scheme for readers when they have to make sense of something equally complex and internally diverse, as a fragmented narrative.

Bibliography Augé M. 2008, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Howe J. (transl.), Verso, London (first ed. English 1995; first ed.

French 1992).

Baricco A. 1999, City, Rizzoli, Milano [Goldstein A. (transl.) 2001, City, Vintage Books, New York].

Bremond C. 1980, The Logic of Narrative Possibilities, Cancalon D. E. (transl.), «New Literary History», vol. 11, n. 3, pp. 387-411 (first ed. 1966, La Logique des possibles narratifs, «Communications», vol. 8, pp. 60-76).

Bruner J. 1991, The Narrative Construction of Reality, «Critical Inquiry», vol. 18, n. 1, pp. 1-21.

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Cenzatti M. 2008, Heterotopias of Difference, in M. Dehaene, L. De Cauter (eds.) Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in the Postcivil Society, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 75-86.

Chatman S. 1978, Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Dehaene M., De Cauter L. 2008, Heterotopia in a Postcivil Society. in M. Dehaene, L. De Cauter (eds.) Heterotopia and the City. Public Space in the Postcivil Society, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 3-10.

Eco U. 1979, Lector in fabula, Bompiani, Milano.

Foucault M. 1986, Of Other Spaces, Miskowiec J. (transl.), «Diacritics», vol. 16, n. 1, pp. 22-7 (first ed. 1984; first lecture 1967).

Gavins J. 2005, Scripts and Schemata, in D. Herman, J. Manfred, M-L. Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Routledge, New York, pp. 520-1.

Greimas A. J. 1977, Elements of a Narrative Grammar, «Diacritics», vol.

7, n. 1, pp. 23-40.

Herman D. 2002, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Kukkonen K. Plot, in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg University, < URL: http://www.lhn.unihamburg.de/ article/plot > (04/15).

Lakoff G., Johnson M. 1999, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, New York.

Nicewicz E. 2009, Nei labirinti dello spazio cittadino: City di Alessandro Baricco, «Etudes Romanes de Brno», vol. 30, n. 1, pp. 159-69.

Prince G. 1982, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, Mouton, New York.

Propp V. 1958, Morphology of the Folktale, Research Centre Indiana University, Bloomington IN (first ed. 1928).

Ronen R. 1990, Paradigm Shift in Plot Models: An Outline of the History of Narratology, «Poetics Today», vol. 11, n. 4, pp. 817-42.

Rorato L. 2001, La realtà metropolitana del duemila. Ambaraba di Culicchia e City di Baricco: due opere a confronto, «Narrativa», vol. 20, n.

1, pp. 243-61.

Rorato L., Storchi S. 2004, Città versus City: the Globalised Habitat of Alessandro Baricco, «Romance Studies», vol. 22, n. 3, pp. 251-62.

Schank R., Abelson R. 1977, Script Plans Goals and Understanding, Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale NJ. Varela F., Thompson E., Rosch E. 1993, The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

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turin: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;narrating architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Meris Nicoletto Indipendent scholar

Introduction Since the dawn of cinema, the Savoy capital has always been at the heart of the seventh art: Turin was immediately inspired, given its geographical proximity to France, by the art of the Lumière brothers. Turin has often been perceived as the Italian Paris for its refined, majestic squares, its austere buildings and its elegant, seemingly endless portico lined streets. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Turin became one of most active Italian movie-making centres rivalling even Rome, where the film industry was flourishing, and easily surpassing Milan, Naples and other Italian cities (Rondolino, 2001, p. 29).

Among the many film-makers, we find producer Arturo Ambrosio and director Giovanni Pastrone whose blockbuster Cabiria (1914) is one of the seven wonders of the world of the cinema (Brunetta, 2001, p. 175),

and also the operator and distributor Stefano Pittaluga1.

1 First Italian tycoon who, in Milan 1926, together with other producers, gave birth to an autonomous association, the SASP, the first national association of cinema. He will be the owner of the first Cines and the creator of the most modern film studio, Cines-Pittaluga.

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The winds of war, however, would mark the end and the beginning of a crisis that affected local film production: in fact, with the advent of Fascism, documentaries and newsreels would be used to convey Mussolini’s words and ideas. Films were channelled for the regime, and aimed at creating an Italian alternative to Hollywood productions. Mussolini revitalized cinema with the creation of the following important organizations: Cinecittà (1937), the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (1935) and the Venice Film Festival. Turin, which had remained on the periphery for many years, was now gaining relevance by representing itself as a laboratory for the seventh art, with producers such as Riccardo Gualino, the founder of Lux, and Luigi Rovere, the founder of Rovere Film, and Dino De Laurentis who targeted the city in order to produce low-budget films.

In the 1930s, Turin provided a backdrop for films such as Addio giovinezza! (Goodbye Youth!), directed by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, as well as other works by Mario Soldati, Goffredo Alessandrini and Mario Mattioli. Turin, as depicted by Poggioli, was a place where university students fell in love with seamstresses with whom they shared a brief part of their youth and then inevitably parted. The urban dimension of Mario and Dorina’s romance is made up of endless walks through Valentino Park, heroic rescues on the banks of the Po River, and the various escapades of university students.

Contessa di Parma (The Countess of Parma-1936) by Alessandro Blasetti was also shot in the Fert studios. The film, which was produced in a moment of absolute rule, was

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meant to promote Italian fashion. It was no coincidence that from 1933 on Turin was the headquarters of the Ente nazionale della moda (National fashion association). The young mannequin Marcella, played by the Turin-born Elisa Cegani, appears in the most exclusive venues in the city, from the Carignano Theatre, to the Mirafiori Racetrack, to the fashion show in Sestriere, places for the upper classes, places in which to promote Italian ‘haute couture’ (Nicoletto, 2014).

At the end of the war, Neo-realism found its maximum expression in the urban realities of Northern Italy. Again, Turin was chosen as the setting for such films as Il bandito (The Outlaw-1946) by Alberto Lattuada with Amedeo Nazzari, Anna Magnani, and Carla Del Poggio, and Fuga in Francia (Flight into France-1948) by Mario Soldati with Pietro Germi and Folco Lulli. Most of the actors belonged to the pre-war star system and had to adapt, in order to perform, to distinctly different roles.

In the 1950s, Turin also set the backdrop for films such as Le amiche (The girl friends-1955) by Michelangelo Antonioni, and, in the Sixties, I compagni (The organizer-1963) by Mario Monicelli. Like the cities in the industrial triangle (Milan and Genoa), Turin played a role in the development of a popular genre called ‘poliziottesco’ which, in the Seventies, was the stage for successful works such as Torino nera (Black Turin-1972) by Carlo Lizzani, Un uomo, una città (City under siege-1974) by Romolo Guerrieri, Quelli della calibro 38 (Colt 38 special squad) by Massimo Dallamano and Italia a mano armata (Special cop in action-1976) by Marino Girolami, and

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Torino violenta (Violent Turin-1977) by Carlo Ausino.

Dario Argento, too, was fascinated by the haughty shades of Turin, making it the backdrop to nine of his films: Il gatto a nove code (The cat oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; nine tails), Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, aka The hatchet murders), Non ho sonno (Sleepless), Ti piace Hitchcock? (Do you Like Hitchcock?), La terza madre (Mother of tears), and Giallo. The film director exploits the special architectural features Turin offers and makes that place an almost metaphysical space in which to set his visionary stories (Rondolino, p. 29).

In recent decades, the variety of architectural styles and the diversified locations have made Torino a very attractive set for many filmmakers. In fact, it offers glimpses of unparalleled beauty, especially for period films. These include Elisa Rivombrosa, a television series which aired for two seasons from 2013 to 2015, and Centovetrine, an Italian soap-opera produced from 2000 to 20152. The remodelling of the city for the Olympic Games in the year 2000, and the birth of the Turin Piedmont Film Commission, in 1995, undoubtedly facilitated the relocation of film productions, leading to a growing interest in the city. Proof of this fact can be found in works such as La migliore gioventĂš (The Best of Youth), a masterpiece by Marco Tullio Giordana. The series was created in 2003, and traces 2 Broadcast on Channel 5 from January 8, 2001 to December 5, 2014 and on Channel 4 from December 8, 2014 to March 10, 2015, this soap opera is set in Turin and traces the lives and personal relationships of several families linked to the chain of stores Centovetrine and the company Ferri.

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forty years of Italian history through the vicissitudes of an Italian family: from the flood in Florence in 1966 to student marches in 1968, from terrorism to the Basaglia law, from the Tangentopoli scandal to Mafia bombings. Giordana chooses a long shot of the Mole Antonelliana as the symbol of Turin. The years of student protest marches, the armed struggle and the Basaglia reform all take place on the Po River, as if it were a tale narrated by the river itself.

Turin was also chosen by filmmakers for stories actually set there: stories or novels, but also pieces of Italian history, the parable of the automotive giant FIAT, the struggles of its workers, and immigration from Southern Italy. We find, for example, Così ridevano (The Way We Laughed-1998) by Gianni Amelio, Tutti giù per terra (We all fall down-1997) by Davide Ferrario, Signorina Effe (Miss F-2007) by Wilma Labate, Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child-2007) by Daniele Luchetti, Torino è la mia città (Torino is my town-2007) by Mimmo Calopresti, Morire di lavoro (Dying of work-2008) by Daniele Segre, just to name a few of the most renowned works.

Likewise, Turin is a favourite setting for directors who were born and raised there before leaving for Rome, as is the case with Guido Chiesa (Non mi basta mai – I just can’t get enough), Daniele Segre, Gianluca Maria Tavarelli (Un amore, Qui non è il paradiso; One love, This is not heaven). Increasingly, in the name of a sort of intellectual independence, young Italian filmmakers produce the films themselves. This has become the trademark of many younger filmmakers. It certainly does not,

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however, guarantee high levels of visibility. In any case, Turin continues to be a laboratory, a city in which the debate and interest in filmmaking is more intense than in any other Italian city (Della Casa, 2001, p. 24).

Ferrario and Turin Turin is Davide Ferrario’s adopted city. He moved there from Bergamo in the Seventies with the intention of running Lab803 Distribution and becoming a film critic4.

The filmmaker considers Torino extremely varied, often contradictory perhaps, but above all a ‘narrating city’ (Ferrario, 2001, p. 143).

It was for this reason that he chose it as the setting of his three films: Tutti giù per terra (We all fall down-1997), Dopo mezzanotte (After Midnight-2004) and La luna su Torino (The Moon over Turin-2013). With Tutti giù per terra5, released in 1997, Ferrario created a work that set an ‘unpleasant’ novelty, made of beautiful landscapes, decorated interiors, futile dialogues and theatrical servitude, in the field of prevalent minimalist film (Pellizzari, p. 60).

He proposes a language that had already been used in Materiale resistente (Durable Material-1995) and Estate in città (Summer in the City-1996), namely, an innovative technique based on abrupt cuts, editing with a lack of con-

Lab80 film is a film cooperative founded in 1976 in Bergamo.

He writes for the magazine «Cineforum».

5 It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was presented in 1997 at the Locarno Film Festival where Valerio Mastandrea won the “Pardo d’oro” as best actor.

3 4

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tinuity, and acceleration (Maraldi, 2007, p. 32)6. Through his lens, Turin becomes a city which tells the tale of the endless wanderings of his anti-hero, a disarmed rebel, a new-age flâneur who lacks any stability. This is why he uses a visual patchwork to portray a split urban landscape in which the outskirts blend with the centre, lower class tenements blend with historical monuments, factories with universities (Uva, p. 172).

The result is a hostile territory where encounters take place haphazardly, and where human relationships are doomed to fail. The urban jungle of signs is eventually saved by the countryside and lower-class neighbourhoods like Falchera.

The second film, Dopo mezzanotte, fully expresses Ferrario’s idea of the urban landscape as ‘narrating architecture’.

The Mole Antonelliana is the magical centre of gravity from which the characters’ stories originate and end. At the beginning of the film, the wounded character, nicknamed the Angel, finds his own diegetic justification by identifying himself with the ‘winged genius’, who plummeted from the roof of the Mole Antonelliana. The building becomes both shelter and home, as if it were the Jewish ghetto, demolished the same year the synagogue was built. At the same time, it provides a visual experience, because the Mole Antonelliana has recently become the seat of the National Museum of Cinema.

In La luna su Torino, the post-industrial urban landscape is again a silent protagonist, capable of expressing the sense Tutti giù per terra (interview with the director), in Il cinema di Davide Ferrario (edited by Antonio Maraldi), Cesena, Società editrice “Il Ponte Vecchio”, 2007, p. 32.

6

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of instability that is typical of those who live on the 45th parallel, a metaphor for existential pain and loneliness in an urban environment. The imaginary line passes through the Po Valley, which Ferrario, being himself a Lombard, loves to portray in his films. Turin, thanks to its urban contradictions, provides a continuous dialectal interplay between old and new, between the centre and the outskirts.

A ‘Narrating City’: Tutti giù per terra The story of the protagonist, Walter (Valerio Mastandrea), could be set in any Italian city, the location was not so specific that it couldn’t be set elsewhere. After all, Walter, the protagonist, experiences almost archetypal situations, which could have possibly taken place in any urban context (Ferrario, p. 143).

The filmmaker, however, chooses Turin, the “silent protagonist”, and then adds: [...] just take the number 3 tram from the centre of the city to the Vallette, and the simple act of filming the journey, from the former capital to the Fiat-Nam, tells its own story (Ferrario, p. 143).

Therefore, Ferrario considers Turin a ‘narrating city’, seen through the eyes of the young unemployed student of Philosophy as he wanders through the city. Walter lives with his father, former FIAT worker, and aphasic mother, in an apartment in the lower class district of Old Falchera, which was built in the Sixties. The home is essentially a place of marginalization and conflict, dominated by the figure of his father, staunch supporter of the myths of success and economic well-being, which Walter duly offsets with his apathetic and defeatist attitude. Other such settings, also places of marginalization, are, for example, the

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C.A.N.E., the centre that offers hospitality to nomads and immigrants in Falchera Vecchia, in which Walter carries out his Civil service as a conscientious objector; the Palazzo Nuovo, which houses his University; the Central Hall of Torino Esposizioni, where the state exam is held; the International Book Fair, at the Lingotto Fiere Convention, and Exposition Centre, where the young man is hired to work at the reception desk; and “Philadelphia” stadium in the neighbourhood of the Lingotto, where he is going to live.

If the interiors are a source of frustration, outdoors we find a chaotic jumble of ‘visions’ of modernity that blend with the architecture of the historic centre without creating any peculiar dissonances. These are created, on the one hand, by using an innovative technique with angle shots taken from the ground up, from marching feet that cross sidewalks, or shots directed upwards that include patches of sky between rows of endless anonymous buildings (Pellizzari, 1997, p. 61)7,

or, on the other hand, the use of, in the beginning of the film, frames with advertising that are edited to flash quickly. The impression one gets is that of a progressive fading from past to present, as if the city of Turin were a sort of visual symphony, fragmented and broken up into images.

Walter, from a modern flâneur who wanders through this metropolitan space, especially its ‘non-places’—from the stations to the streets or city squares, by bus or tram— (Augé, 2009) becomes a voyeur, forced to decode the cha7 Just to mention a few of the locations where Ferrario shot his films (for a total of about 60 different spots).

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otic flow of images, objects, and news that the modern city presents. The end of the story sees Walter employed in a mall, yet another ‘non-place’, which exemplifies the precariousness of modern man and the necessary awareness of the human condition as the only form of survival.

The ‘Narrating Architecture’ Dopo mezzanotte (After midnight) Martino (Giorgio Pasotti), too, roams and observes the streets of Turin. He is the main character in the film Dopo mezzanotte (After midnight-2004). The real protagonist of the film, however, is the Mole Antonelliana; and it tells a tale that is already comprised in its architecture, as Silvio Orlando, states in the voice over: Today, in movie theatres, spectators are only interested in stories about the protagonists. And yet, once, there were no characters in the opening shots of shop windows and magic lanterns. People were thrilled by the view of landscapes and city skylines. Maybe it really is the place that narrates the story properly.

If in Tutti giù per terra (1997), the Mole Antonelliana was a site in construction – the Risorgimento Museum was, in fact, being made into the National Museum of Cinema – in Dopo mezzanotte (2004) that transformation is complete. The Mole Antonelliana becomes the tallest building in the old city and the symbol of Turin. It stands 167.50 meters high, breaking the absence of “an obvious imbalance between the districts”, the striking contrast between the old and the new town (Prono, 2001, p. 59),

which is so apparent in other Italian cities.

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Moreover, this former Jewish synagogue8 became ‘narrating architecture’. Based on the very ambitious 1962 design by the renowned architect Alessandro Antonelli, the Mole Antonelliana was to become the centre of Jewish life: Antonelli proposed a square-planned stone structure that could accommodate not only a main sanctuary that seated 998 men, but also the requisite women’s gallery with 426 seats, rabbi’s residence, school, bakery, ritual bath, offices, storages spaces and designated areas for lectures and ceremonies (Lerner, 2010, p. 648).

Indeed, the Mole Antonelliana becomes a dwelling place9 for Martino, the night watchman. The young man, in fact, creates a tiny apartment under the pavilion that he furnishes himself by copying from Buster Keaton’s ingenious stratagems. Buster Keaton, he himself laconic, shy and awkward, turns out to be Martino’s alter ego. Martino moves through the Mole Antonelliana several times a day, from the bottom to the very top and back down again, thanks to the panoramic elevator. The camera frames the inside of the squared cupola, the walls with the displays, and the museum with many small domestic corners. Martino is a character in search of his inner stability, which he seems to have found inside the Mole Antonelliana, a

The Mole, in the intentions of both Turin’s Town Hall and the Jewish community, was meant to be the Jewish religious headquarters. In 1873, however, it was purchased by Turin Town Hall, which gave the community another site to build their synagogue. The imposing monument, completed only in 1961, is 167.50 metres highToday the Mole Antonelliana hosts the National Museum of Cinema, as shown in the Film Tutti giù per terra.

9 L. Scott Lerner argues that Ferrario transformed the Mole into a house, neglecting that in Antonelli’s project the building had been meant to absorb at least in part the ghetto’s social function.

8

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sort of ivory tower, as we can see from the model of the building which is set in a fishbowl in his bedroom, and on which the camera likes to linger.

Whether he is patrolling the museum, repairing an old projector, or editing a film—or even making the most of the living space in the converted warehouse he turned into his mini-apartment—Martino almost always knows what to do (often the suggestions come from the movies he has been watching) (Orsitto, 2010, p. 63).

Martino is, like Walter in Tutti giù per terra and Ugo in La luna su Torino, a sort of flâneur/voyeur10, who films, using a crank camera, the outside world almost as if he were afraid to live in it, preferring the protective and familiar world of the Mole Antonelliana. Sometimes he goes to the Po River bank by bike and pays a brief visit to his even more laconic grandfather, who fishes there. He might meet his talkative cousin in a bar, or enter a fast food restaurant before his next shift, with the excuse of buying a hamburger, but really just to see Amanda (Francesca Einaudi), with whom he is secretly in love. Martino attends the ‘non-places’ (Augé, 2009), or places-in-passing, where interpersonal relationships are complex, if not impossible. In these environments, outside the Mole Antonelliana, he finds it difficult to communicate his feelings. The outside world is also a place to cultivate his passion for film, of which the Mole Antonelliana is the symbol. After midnight, Martino loves to watch the films of his beloved directors and actors and edit his own film, shot during the day.

The difference between ‘flâneur’ and ‘voyeur’ is that the second is as invisible as the eye of the camera with which it can be identified.

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The story of Martino is intertwined with that of Angelo (Fabio Troiano), whom we find lying wounded in front of a Jaguar car dealer. Angelo comes from Falchera, one of the lower-class suburbs of Turin. Silvio Orlando, the speaker, spends a few words on Falchera and the characters: He works as a car thief, comes from Falchera, a neighbourhood that most people in Turin consider disreputable, even if they don’t have a clue where it is. At Falchera everyone calls him the Angel. He is one of those people who is successful with the ladies. Surely this cannot be described as the best night of his life.

In order to understand what happened to him—says the voice over—you have to weave his story with Martino’s and, therefore, with the Mole Antonelliana. The Mole Antonelliana thus becomes the “real centre of gravity” (Uva, p. 173) around which the other two protagonists, Amanda and Angelo, gravitate, both of whom come from the outskirts of the city, Falchera. The young woman has quite a difficult life given her uncertain job situation (she distributes flyers in a shopping centre in Falchera; after losing her job in a fast food restaurant, she will be employed in a gas station). A sudden event changes the course of events: after wounding her employer with hot oil in the restaurant, she takes shelter inside the Mole, where Martino also lives.

The former synagogue becomes a home for her as well: she sleeps in Martino’s bed; she lays her clothes out to dry on the railing overlooking the main hall; she watches movies with him, as if she were in her own living room.

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Angelo’s story is also intertwined with that of the Mole.

He is shot outside the building by Bruno, the security guard, after he realizes that Amanda, his girlfriend, is in love with Martino. The ‘narrating architecture’: angels are supposed to fly – says the car thief, while standing in front of the ‘winged genius’ inside the Mole. In fact, the angel placed on the spire in 1889, in honour of the brilliant genius of the Savoy dynasty, fell over in 1903, after a hurricane. It hung there quite a while until it was replaced with a five-point star. Similarly, the fate of the young man is sealed: like the ‘winged genius’, he, too, would have to fall to allow Amanda and Martino to be together. The ménage à trois11 ends with Angelo’s fall, recalling the history of the former construction. But the story of the young thief from Falchera does not end here.

The urn containing his ashes accidentally slips from Martino’s hands, while he is in the highest part of the dome. It inevitably falls, as in the best of Buster Keaton’s comic shots, into an open porthole and onto the ground in front of the ‘winged genius’, situated in the central hall. The ashes create a spectacular scene right before the eyes of a child.

The Mole is not only a ‘narrating architecture’, but it is also an icon of the seventh art, tracing its evolution: Ferrario has fun overlapping ‘shots’ of a pre-cinematic Turin with frames of the city with the Mole Antonelliana. The shots There are several references to Jacques Truffaut’s Jules et Jim: a woman —in this case Amanda—who is not able to decide between two men. Also, when Martino is led by Angela and a few friends to a garage to apparently settle a score, the two young people outside quote some lines from the masterpiece by the French director.

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of the city as it is today remind the audience of the past, of earlier slides and magic lanterns12. Just think of Amanda who, while sitting on a motor bike behind her boyfriend, Angelo, stares at a fellow who, projected above the city as though by a magic lantern, suspended with the planets and the stars, watches over the city like a guardian angel (Lerner, p. 652).

The play of light on the ground in Piazza Palazzo di Città forms wonderful visions of the present: the square hosts the City Hall, where Amanda meets her friend Barbara.

The installation of water tanks, which are lit red, in Piazza Giambattista Bodoni, is deeply evocative, since that is the place where Angelo and Barbara go out on a date in the evening. There is a constant reference, in the movie, to the ‘magic lanterns’ of the present, seen through the lens or the eyes of the protagonists, and the earlier ‘shots’ scanned by the pre-cinema lenses or home movies by the Lumière brothers13.

Turin rewrites its own history as the capital of cinema not only through these cinematic references but also using light, which adds and subtracts meaning to the urban layout, creating an evocative and allusive picture. As Amendola writes: In the darkness, the play of light allows the city to emphasize and de-emphasize or even to exist or disappear in A few other metacinematic references are iris diaphragms or stopdowns and the use of captions.

13 The National Museum of Cinema houses several multimedia and interactive stations, very rare pre-cinematic optical cameras, equipment and materials from Italian as well as international film sets and a large collection of movies, books, prints, posters, paintings and photos.

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parts. With a flick of a switch entire neighbourhoods vanish, leaving others the possibility of becoming, by contrast, the entire city (p. 75).

The film also tells the story of a city through its buildings, among the highest in Europe: a frame projects how it was in the early 20th century, as different from what it is today with the light installation by Mario Merz; on one of the sides of the dome, Il volo dei numeri duplicates the original sequence by Fibonacci, a 13th century mathematician from Pisa14. The Mole Antonelliana is, therefore, not only a movie theatre with armchairs and screens, but also a magical place where a continuous exchange between past and present, reality and fiction takes place.

As the symbol of the seventh art, the Mole Antonelliana teaches Martino to move in the world through the eyes of the cinema; and he has learned how to be a voyeur. In the happy ending, somehow reminiscent an old Chaplin film, Martino is filmed outside the Mole Antonelliana with Amanda as they walk off into the future together.

He has introduced the Fibonacci sequence in his films since 1970 and made it an emblem of the energy inherent in matter and in organic growth. That’s why he placed the figures made of neon lights in both his own works and the exhibition areas, as was the case with the 1971 spiral in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, or with Turin’s Mole in 1984, or, also, with the Manica Lunga at the Rivoli Castle in 1990. The other chosen spots were the chimney top of the Finnish power company in Turku in 1994, and a spiral shaped neon light on the Vanvitelli metro station ceiling in Naples. In 2000, the installation by Merz was placed on one side of the Mole’s dome as part of the “luci d’artista” project.

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La luna su Torino Turin is a ‘narrating city’ in La luna su Torino, a self-produced film with a screenplay by no means traditional, and widely reliant on editing. Shot in four weeks, the film revolves around the metaphor of a border which, placed along the 45th parallel, runs through the Po Valley from the North Pole to the Equator. Presented at the Rome Film Festival, the film was not well received by critics, because of both a too elusive a screenplay and an invasive presence of the voice-over with redundant quotes. In this full-length film, the director adopts several narrative voices belonging to the three protagonists, Ugo (Walter Leonardi), Dario (Eugenio Franceschini) and Maria (Manuela Parodi).

Turin also acts as a ‘narrating city’ in the opening sequence: an aerial take of the city at night with shots of specific locations; a huge hall in the Royal Library where Dario studies; Ponte Umberto I; the Po River; an aerial shot of the 45th Nord shopping centre15, in which Maria works; an igloo whose cardinal points are lit up by neon lights, created by Mario Merz; and the extravagant Teleriscaldamento Iride Energia. The effect these buildings, both ancient and modern, and the moon, produce in one of the final frames of the sequence, a clear reference to Leopardi, is suspension.

Apart from the excessively didactic references to Leopardi, the film opens with a surreal, dreamlike quality. Residing on the 45th parallel, although an imaginary line, 15

Ferrario made use of drones.

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means living in a state of discomfort with the fear of falling, even when you are sleeping or dreaming, states Mary’s voice-over16.

And Ugo’s words add: at night, in the city of the 45th parallel, one person, searching the dark, tries to remember when he was happy; another wonders if he will ever be happy, and, if should this happen, where that happiness will be found.

There are several quotes from Leopardi, an expression of the difficult existential stability of our times, a theme that is dear to Ferrario. He assigns a performative function to urban architecture, especially in frames where the buildings are shot from strange or unusual angles – perfectly in line with the director’s anti conformist view.

Every frame calls to mind other places, places that we have already seen or visited. Therefore, the ultra-modern architecture has added meaning, because they are old buildings which have been dismantled, in part or entirely, to make room for buildings that are almost futuristic, science-fiction-like. By moving from present to past, we get a sense of uncertainty, an instability that underlines the lives of Ferrario’s characters. The characters living on the 45th parallel are: Dario, an insecure student whose job is in the bizarre Biopark “Zoom” in Cumiana; and Maria, an aspiring actress, who works in a travel agency in the 45th Nord shopping centre in Moncalieri. Ugo, a slacker who lives in a beautiful house on the hills that he inherited from his parents, and which he sublets to Dario The film director had already dealt with the same theme in the documentary called On the 45th parallel (1997).

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and Maria, travels along the 45th parallel on his bike. He will stop to try to climb the Palavela, failing time and time again until the very end of the film. Ugo’s wanderings take him through new developments that were once the Fiat and Michelin factories. He crosses a metal bridge over the Dora Riparia River, moving towards 30 meter high orange pillars that spoil the harmonious view of the outdoor garden17. He travels to Falchera Vecchia, also found in the film Dopo mezzanotte. The lower-class neighbourhood is a place from Ugo’s past, where he goes to try to ease his loneliness.

By grafting the old city of Turin with ultramodern structures, for example those built for the XX Olympic Winter Games and those built on redeveloped industrial sites, Ferrario contributes, on an iconological level, to eliminating the traditional divide between past and present, between truth and fiction: In the new city, the difficult relationship between reality and imagination is surmounted by dream-like, desirable urban scenarios to which citizens of the real city have daily access (Amendola, p. 41).

In this regard Ugo, in his periodic and perhaps foolish efforts to climb the building on the 45th parallel, is moved by a playful, almost childlike instinct. However, when he finds a way to reach the top of the building, he can satisfy his desire, and he experiences a kind of happiness that is not guaranteed by the myths of post-modern society, but by the goodness of fate and momentary emotional imThe delimited space set among pillars is intended to be used as a recreational centre, for concerts and parties.

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pulses. When, because of his debts, Ugo’s villa is repossessed, the three friends must look for a new life, and a new stability must be found. Therefore, Maria leaves on a last-minute trip to Istanbul with a girlfriend, and Dario gets involved with a girl he meets in the “Zoom” Park.

The city is again a place of chance encounters, of ephemeral relationships, and missed opportunities, but it is also a place where one gets “new breaks, material, intellectual, and formal” (Piccardi, 2014, p. 43).

Turin rewrites its own history as the capital of cinema not only through these cinematic references but also by the use of light, which adds and subtracts meaning to the urban setting, creating an evocative and allusive picture.

Conclusion For Ferrario, therefore, Turin is, through its architecture, a narrating city, but not only this: it is a land that transforms the flâneur into voyeur, or rather, a man who sees the outside world as an assortment of signs to be deciphered, as complex places that have ulterior meanings, especially with the development of the architectural history of the city. In the trilogy about Turin, in fact, we find buildings that were restored or repurposed (ex. Mole Antonelliana) or more recent ones (built for the XX Winter Olympics). Everything has a dialectic rapport with the protagonists, introducing new perspectives, both visual and existential.

The characters are in search of internal stability, although precarious, that they find among the many stimuli the city has to offer, or that its buildings have to offer: for Walter

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the city is a maze of encounters, precarious experiences and conflictual relationships; Martino uncovers his natural habitat in the Mole, which becomes his home, a shelter that contrasts everyday ‘non-places’ (bars, fast-food restaurants, etc.). The building, however, is also the National Museum of Cinema, a window on a world that tells stories, starting with its own architecture. The buildings, new and old, which are at the heart of the third film, are in synch with the layout of the city, expressing the pulsations and desires of the individual (Ugo makes it to the top of the Palavela, an existential but also physical feat). Thanks to Ferrario, the city of Turin receives a new semantic value through the seventh art: The architecture shapes lives in time. It is the evolution of society itself, of urban fabric, of living space, accelerated by revolutions and social or cultural changes, and thus “receives a new semantic value” and re-contextualizes forms and space [...]. Cinema also has the ability to intervene, at various levels, in the instability and mutability of the meaning of architectural shape (Costa, 2002, pp. 103-104).

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Bibliography Augé M. 2009, Non Luoghi. Introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità, Elèuthera, Milano, pp. 75-102.

Amendola G. 2003, La città postmoderna. Magie e paure della metropoli contemporanea, Editori Laterza, Roma-Bari.

Brunetta G. P. 2001, Storia del cinema italiano. Il cinema del regime (1895-1929), Editori Riuniti, Roma, p. 175.

Ceretto L. 2007, “Sporcarsi le mani” con la vita vera. Conversazione con Davide Ferrario, in Declinazioni del vero. Il cinema di Davide Ferrario, Daniele Luchetti e Daniele Vicari (a cura di Ceretto L., Morsiani A., Edizioni di Cineforum, Bergamo, pp. 16-25.

Costa A. 2002, Il cinema e le arti visive, Einaudi, Torino.

Ferrario D. 2001, Così ridevano, così piangevano, in Torino città del cinema (a cura di Bracco D., Della Casa S., Manera P., Prono F.), Il Castoro, Milano, pp. 142-145.

Lerner L. 2010, The narrating architecture of Dopo mezzanotte, «Italica», vol. 87, n. 4, pp. 646-671.

Maraldi A. 2007, Il cinema di Davide Ferrario (a cura di), Società editrice “Il Ponte Vecchio”, Cesena.

Nicoletto M. 2014, Donne nel cinema di regime fra tradizione e modernità, Falsopiano, Alessandria.

Orsitto F. 2010, Torino: città personaggio, «Annali d’Italianistica», vol. 33, pp. 57-65.

Pellizzari L. 1997, Tutti giù per terra, «Cineforum», vol. 37, n. 3, pp. 5962.

Prono F., 2001, Una città-personaggio invisibile, in Torino città del cinema (a cura di Bracco D., Della Casa S., Manera P., Prono F.), Milano, Il Castoro, Milano, pp. 57-64.

Piccardi A. 2014, La luna su Torino, «Cineforum», vol. 54, n. 4, pp. 4143.

Rondolino G., 2001, La nascita del cinema a Torino, in Torino città del cinema (a cura di Bracco D., Della Casa S., Manera P., Prono F.), Il Castoro, Milano, p. 25-32.

Uva C. 2010, Davide Ferrario. Profilo critico, «Quaderni del CSCI», 6, pp. 171-173.

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naples in antonella cilento’s narrative: “un corpo di animale antico” [“an ancient animal’s body”] Assunta De Crescenzo Federico II University (Naples)

In Le città invisibili, Calvino’s novel of 1972, the Tartar Emperor Kublai Khan talks about the “Infernal city”, which is like a dangerous whirlwind, causing much trouble and sucking in everybody and everything. Marco Polo replies: L’inferno dei viventi non è quello che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e che cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio (Calvino, 2016, p.

164; emphasis added)1.

1 [The Inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the Inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the Inferno and become such a part of it, that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the Inferno, are not Inferno; then, make them endure, give them space (Invisible Cities, William Weaver trans., 2016, p. 158)].

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“Constant vigilance and apprehension” (in the sense of ability to understand): these are two words of paramount importance for us, in order to understand what kind of poetics lies behind Antonella Cilento’s book or, in other words, her point of view relating to Naples. The final passage from Le città invisibili we have just read is the epigraph with which the author opens her story, Napoli sul mare luccica (2006). Her reference to Hell is certainly not a good start2, but the readers, before going through the book and despite their suspicion, might still think that every metropolis could be defined as Hell these days – this is true in a general sense. But I will return to the substance of the statement quoted above later.

The book series, “Contromano”, in which the novel is included, is dedicated to describing Italian cities such as Turin, Palermo, Trieste, Florence, and Naples (Naples has been illustrated not only by Cilento, but also by Massimiliano Virgilio, in his book entitled Porno ogni giorno. Viaggio nei corpi di Napoli, 2009)3. This book series, “Contromano”, focuses on the cultural connections between prose narratives, especially autobiographical nov2 The notion of “Inferno” is suggested by the title of a previous novel of Cilento set in Naples, Non è il paradiso (2003); it seems to refer to another famous title, Un paradiso abitato da diavoli, i.e. the text of a lecture presented by Benedetto Croce at the Società napoletana di storia patria in 1923 (actually, he wanted to reject the title’s proverbial assumption). See Galasso’s preface to Croce 2006.

3 Davide Papotti wrote a specific and very detailed essay on this particular book series; see Papotti, 2014, pp. 35-57. As for Naples and its representations, see also Perrella, 2006 and, related to this, Papotti, 2011. For insightful studies of the literary representation of urban spaces, see for example Ross & Honess (eds.), 2015; Fraticelli, 2015; Edwards & Charley (eds.), 2012, esp. pp. 1-18, 167-177, 213-226; Ross, 2010; Lumley & Foot (eds.), 2007.

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els, and a range of urban environments; it also aims at exploring how the themes of memory and identity have changed in the past few years, as well as how the cultural movement of Postmodernism and contemporary sensibility have affected notions of canonicity and genre in the creation of urban space narratives.

A few words about Antonella Cilento: she was born in 1970 in Naples, where she now lives and works as a renowned, award-winning journalist and writer; she collaborates with Il Mattino, the main local newspaper (some parts of the book are revised short stories and articles published in Il Mattino between 2004 and 2005) and L’Indice dei libri del mese. She teaches creative writing all over Italy – “La linea scritta” is a permanent writing workshop (see Amato & Cilento [eds.], 2006). She is the scientific director of the Creative Writing Laboratory “Le scimmie” in Bolzano. She also writes for the radio and collaborates with film directors, such as Mario Martone and Sandro Dionisio, adapting screenplays from successful novels.

In Napoli sul mare luccica, the protagonist (the writer herself) wanders the streets of her city like a contemporary flâneuse4, reflecting on its history, tradition, and current state – her childhood memories mix with today’s busy urban life. Her agile and direct prose is stimulating, the texture of her page is rich and wittily thought-provoking.

The city’s different areas, each with their own set of social and linguistic codes, are absorbed by the global meFor an in-depth discussion of the topic, see especially Elkin, 2016; Nuvolati, 2011 e 2006; Careri, 2006; Parsons 2000.

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tropolis, without ever losing their essential characteristics. Therefore, to the reader’s eye, Naples is the real protagonist, with its geomorphic configuration and urban structure, with its peculiarities, limits, and huge potential. Thus, literary space is urban space, and urban space is life space, a sort of mirror which reflects people’s thoughts and feelings from a millenary tradition, with its problems, struggles, defeats and successful results.

Cilento’s work elicits not only solid, rational considerations, but also an emotional response, by deconstructing Naples’ oleographic images and, at the same time, revealing a new symbology, a mixture of anatomy, geology, and alchemy, if I may say so, based on the metaphor of an animal body and, at the same time, on the four elements – fire, water, air and earth, according to the Greek philosophers of the “arché” (an ancient Greek word which stands for ‘origin’, ‘beginning’).

The title of Cilento’s novel comes from the lyrics of a renowned Neapolitan song, belonging to the classical tradition, Santa Lucia, which is a part of the city from where it is possible to enjoy an impressive view of a wide area of the Neapolitan bay5.

In this song it is the moon, “the silver star”, that shines upon the sea; the waves are gentle and the wind is mild and prosperous: On, passengers, come aboard, sail with me on my small boat; Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!.

5 Written by Teodoro Cottrau (Naples1827-1879), the Neapolitan song Santa Lucia was published in 1849 and later translated into Italian by the same composer.

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At the beginning of the book Cilento remembers how she used to sing this song out loud with her sister Iole, when they were little, going on holidays by car with their parents. But they did not catch the correct words and transformed them as follows: Sul mare luccica / L’astro d’argento / La Cirelonda [with capital letter] sospira il vento / Venite all’accide [instead of ‘agile’] / Barchetta mia / Santa Luciiiiiiia… Santaaaaaaaa Lucia! (p. 5).

The lines “placida è l’onda / prospero il vento” were misunderstood by the narrator as a child, and “Placida è l’onda” became “la Cirelonda”.

What was this Cirelonda, the author asks herself; a cliff, a rock, a fish? It was certainly a personal interpretation of the changing sea, of the marine environment. The Cirelonda was a mysterious city, a hidden entrance; she and her sister “were citizens of the invisible city of Cirelonda”, born from “a strange mixture of words” (“un inguacchio linguistico”, p. 6)6. It “was one of the mysteries of my childhood” (p. 6), she adds; a mystery in which André Breton and Gianni Rodari dance together, considering how deep and fertile the human mind is, by creating and recreating words and sounds, meanings and signifiers.

There are different layers of interpretation which give an idea of the density and complexity of the text. From “childhood mystery” one passes to “mysterious city”; thus Cirelonda is a city, an invisible one, seeing that it exists only in the imagination of the two girls, but at the same time

6

My translation, unless otherwise specified.

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it refers to the epigraph from Calvino at the beginning of the book. The connotation of Calvino’s passage is unsettling as it refers to Hell, and is only mitigated by the dual behavioural option proposed by Marco Polo. Therefore, Hell is mixed with the magical atmosphere of childhood, open to wonder and surprise, unconscious and playful; a particular attitude towards ambivalent scenarios emerges, that has something of both the unheimlich of romantic memory and postmodern displacement. My position will be made clearer further on, through the author’s arguments.

Moreover, there is the word-play (of which Rodari was a master), as if to say that it is the playful aspect that prevails in the reinvention of a place, a refusal of the oleographic stereotypes of interpretation, by stopping at the immediate aspect and enjoying the musicality of the prose, as Breton and the Surrealists did; by enjoying the sound of the words stripped of any meaning, in order to discover the creative flexibility of language. The frequent recourse to regional Italian (at times idiomatic dialect, written in italics, as Verga used to do in his Veristic years) reveals a sense of rootedness and belonging to her city (“To my city” [p.

149] is the phrase that the author uses significantly at the end of her book)7.

Reading between the lines, Cilento has the feeling of belonging to an incorrectly named place, as happened in the song Santa Lucia; she thinks of living in her city “with dis7 An entirely different emotional reading was given by Fabrizia Ramondino, who did never feel the sense of belonging to Naples; see Giorgio (ed.), 2013.

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traction” (p. 6), while observing it every day, often writing about it in articles and books. There is nothing more difficult, in fact, than trying to reconstruct an image of Naples, since its image and imagery are saturated. Therefore, the writer explores it from within, through a subjective filter much more felt and savoured – the city is perceived in its nature as a prismatic mirror, which splits light and multiplies all descriptions, returning to the observer a multifarious myriad of images and definitions that all belong there.

She tranforms what she feels as a limit – the myopia of a reading of the city seen from the inside – into a kind of consent to use the privilege of “forbidden access” (p. 6) which was hers since childhood. Naples, in fact, despite appearances, is not open to anyone and one must ask permission to enter, as the ancients knew all too well. Along with the most obvious entries, Cilento suggests, we also have to consider “the imaginary entrances, or those which appear by mistake” (p. 7). At this point, the ambivalence of emotions comes back, the unheimlich resurfaces and broadens, beyond discomfort and even ‘fear’, which takes over ‘distraction’: one must resist the Siren song, exorcise Hell with jokes and the lightness of play, which for children, though, is the most serious thing in the world: If a place is scary we can get in joking, without nostalgia, without fear or bias. Or, maybe, saying meaningless magical words (p. 7).

There seems to be a true statement of intent – it informs the mental attitude which animates the route. Magic has an effect (and here Breton crops up again) when we release images (what we see) and words (with which we rep-

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resent, to ourselves and to others, what we see) from sense superstructures; the more we get rid of clichés, stereotypes, prejudices, the more we get closer to reality and its representation. A magic word from childhood becomes the formula to make Naples yield and reveal itself: “Cirelonda!” – exclaims Cilento – “It might just work well” (p. 7).

The principle behind the description of the city is the same as that of the depiction of a body: shoulders that stand out, the ‘rear’, a ‘marine brow’, a substantial interior, composed of many neighbourhoods, of which “it is said that we should be afraid” (p. 7). In this sense, Naples is “a rather strange body”, as “it perhaps resembles a primitive marine organism, all mouth, fringe and excretory organ” (p. 7). Furthermore, this body has some womanly characteristics. Thus, Naples “is a woman”, states Cilento: long hair falls from the volcano toward the shoulders and breasts, emerging timid from the water (p. 7).

We would expect to see the mythological image of Parthenope emerging from the water; but, much to our surprise, it is not she who swims towards us, but an ambiguous figure, with disturbing and vulgar traits, which combines lowbrow local culture with the fascinating religion of India: Ha bracciali di corallo – gli stop delle auto nel traffico – e cinture di teschi alla vita8, lunghe chiome corvine irte di antenne televisive, candide zanne, un sesso scuro di polpo e occhi che, per fortuna, non apre, perché sarebbero rossi di braCilento refers to the Cimitero delle Fontanelle, a place in Naples where, according to a very old tradition, one can adopt a skull to get protection and help from the dead. As for mythological images and Neapolitan curiosities, see Croce (19996), Palumbo & Ponticello (eds.), 2016; Cilento, 2015; Nicolella, 2012.

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ce. È Kalì dalle molte braccia e dai molti seni. È la bellissima dea che uccide danzando a ritmo di reggae e sul suono delle tammorre 9 (p. 8)10.

Kali, the most terrifying Hindu goddess, wife of Shiva, commonly presented as dark and violent, is the goddess of death and destruction, and Naples, in Cilento’s opinion, kills and destroys.

“Ma l’ombra è fugace” [but the shadow is fleeting], Cilento goes on, subito la sagoma torna a incarnare la sbiadita ma gentile cartolina di un golfo che la speculazione edilizia ha sfigurato. Oppure diventa la Napoli giapponese dell’inverno, con il vulcano imbiancato e le petroliere che prendono il largo […]. O anche la Napoli estiva e deserta, la Napoli sfrenata e sporca che gli abitanti non guardano e non conoscono più, poiché ne sono prigionieri (p. 8)11.

The relationship that a large part of the Neapolitans have with their city is not so positive: odi et amo, hate and love at ‘Tammorra’ or ‘tammurro’ (from ‘tamburo’) is a large Neapolitan lambskin leather hand drum, with pairs of small metal jingles that hang around its frame, used in traditional folk music (a sort of tambourine).

The English translations unfortunately do not do justice to the complex and often multifaceted prose of Cilento, which is the stylistic equivalent of the chaotic complexity of Naples.

10 [She has coral bangles – the taillights of cars in traffic – and belts of skulls around her waist, long dark locks spiked with tv aerials, white fangs, a dark octopus sex and eyes which, fortunately, she does not open, because they would be as red as burning embers. She is Kali, with her many arms and many breasts. The beautiful goddess who dances to the rhythm of reggae and the sound of drums].

11 [immediately the silhouette returns to embody the pretty but faded postcard of a gulf which urban development has disfigured. Or else it becomes a Japanese Naples in winter, with its whitened volcano and the oil tankers going off to sea […]. Or even a deserted Naples in the summer, or an uninhibited, dirty Naples, which the inhabitants no longer notice or are familiar with, because they are its prisoners.]

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the same time, Cilento seems to whisper, in the same way as Catullus. It is impossible to observe and capture the essence of the city from a single point of view; and it is impossible to conceive Naples as a whole – our mind cannot comprehend the entire universe, as well. Therefore, the Neapolitans prefer to stay in their own neighbourhood; it often happens that they even ignore the toponyms of the rest of the city. In other words, to Cilento’s mind, they ‘refuse’ what they feel are alien areas of the city. The author’s statement seems to be somewhat hyperbolic, but perhaps she is trying to say that, as we are talking about bodies, we have to be ready and waiting for surprise – no one can say how the human body lives and when it is to die, even with the help of medicine; likewise, no one knows what may happen to the body of Naples.

Rationalists tried to cut this body with surgical precision, deliberately inflicting acts of “allopathic violence” on it, only to get chaotic results. Despite pruning, Naples kept on growing “in its own way”, “gurgling in disorder, like the jungle” (p. 11). Even the ancients’ line is almost invisible now, different from the ones in Turin, Aosta, and Rome (p. 11).

It is a long time, the author considers, since she began to wonder why in Naples there are so many small unnecessary stairs, bricked-up windows, blind alleys, architectural excrescences

similar to “wild and exotic flowering” as well as skyscrapers or colourful, Mediterranean façades presented as tourist attractions (p. 10).

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She gives herself just one answer – in Naples there is no accuracy at all; the cabalistic mathematicians got carried away with anatomical algorithms “we cannot quite understand” (p. 10): Sulla cima del Vomero, dal piazzale della Certosa di San Martino lo spazio ventoso si apre sulla città e mostra gli esiti di questo misterico progettare: con la sola eccezione dei pazientissimi Romani, che dappertutto costruivano dritti cardi e decumani, di cui Spaccanapoli e via dei Tribunali sono le sole tracce, la città ha rifiutato i tradizionali riordini geometrici. Si è fatta un baffo della via Toledo aperta dagli Spagnoli o del Rettifilo che il Risanamento, voluto con l’Unità italiana, ha disegnato come una lunga ferita. […] A causa del digradare della collina, i decumani napoletani sono frutto di geometria non euclidea, somigliano a una corda per panni troppo carica, alla tonda scriminatura dei capelli disordinati della città, che ora c’è, ora non c’è (p. 11)12.

Everything grows on what previously grew – nothing, or almost nothing, is demolished; different epochs mix together. Thus, Naples is immortal, independently of the too many illnesses accumulated over the years and centuries. “What would a human body be like”, the author asks, 12 [From the top of Vomero, from the square of the Certosa of San Martino, the windy space opens on to the city and displays the results of this mysterious planning: with the sole exception of those most patient Romans, who built straight cardi and decumani everywhere, of which Spaccanapoli and via dei Tribunali are the only trace, the city refused traditional geometrical reorderings. The city couldn’t care less about via Toledo, which was opened up by the Spanish, or about the Rettifilo, which the urban renewal project, brought about with Italian Unification, designed like a long wound. […] Because of the hillside slope, Neapolitan decumani are the fruit of a non-Euclidean geometry, in that they resemble an overloaded clothesline, a rounded parting which comes and goes in the city’s messy hair.]

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if it kept on living, despite thousands of illnesses and the flow of time? It would be like an unrecognizable shape, a monster, a mythological being (p. 13).

The ancient bodies of Italian cities are often mummified bodies, which preserved their original splendour because of an accurate conservation of the corpses – wonderful cristallized bodies. Siena, Florence, Venice, some parts of Rome, are Sleeping Beauties (p. 13).

Conversely, Naples is “a self-devouring and self-replicating body” – visitors do not realize they have fallen down into “a big ruminating intestine”; they leave Naples with the only sensation of clean air and blue water […] when the wind blows, and everything seems peaceful and infinitely beautiful (p. 14).

Everything (which is invisible to the human eye) falls into Cilento’s cynical description of Naples; to name just a few things: Gomorra-like episodes (just some hints) and ‘scippi’ (bag-snatching) from scooters; unbelievable traffic jams; transportation patterns; illegal construction; walls and buildings that age, rot and die, or transform relentlessly into something completely different and often useless; the air quality (actually, she calls it ‘stink’); and she locates the source of the stink almost everywhere in the city, even in its best parts, seeing that the head and heart of Naples are in her guts13, from her point of view: This statement evokes the historical period of the ‘questione meridionale’ [Southern Question] and, in particular, one of the most objective and purposeful books of those years, Matilde Serao’s Il ventre di Napoli (1884, enlarged edition 1906); the term significantly stems from Émile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and it still resounds today in titles referring not only to Naples; see for example Raiola, 2014; Virgilio, 2009; Fra-

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Il cielo di Napoli, via d’aria mutevole, sfoglia di nuvole barocche che si inseguono e si espandono, teatro di colori, di apparizioni celesti e lunari, velato di trine buie o carico di cirrocumuli grondanti d’acque colorate, verdi, gialle, azzurre, rosa, è la vetrina dei Campi Elisi sempre allestita. Le vie d’aria fanno la città salubre, o la facevano: oggi puzza. Eppure si atterra a Capodichino e si dice: ah, che aria fresca.

Un celebre negozio di curiosità che sfotticchia i luoghi comuni della città vende in scatola l’aria di Napoli (p. 145)14.

By the way, not all Neapolitans who have read her book have been, so to speak, politically correct with their response – some of them replied on the Internet that her opinions stank, not the city of Naples; and that her novel was just the result of her convoluted psychology. To tell the truth – if I am allowed to express my opinion – Naples does not stink. It did smell some years ago because of the notorious crisis with rubbish, but luckily now it is different.

If maps are an instrument and a metaphor for rational understanding of the world, the only way of mapping Naples has to be connected with a cabalistic-geological and electromagnetic structure: comunque la si guardi, Napoli è un intrecciarsi d’acqua, aria, terra e fuoco, canali che regolano i flussi di uomini e

tus, 2007; Marchesoni & Taiani (eds.), 2006; Montesano, 1999; Pavia, 1999. For a detailed discussion of these themes, see Manica, 2014; Prisco, 2011 e 2006; Sabbatino, 2007, especially pp. 67-112; Giammattei, 2003.

14 [The Neapolitan sky – a changeable flow of air, a puff pastry of Baroque clouds which chase each other and expand, a theatre of colours, of celestial and lunar apparitions, veiled with dark lace or full of cirrocumulus dripping in coloured waters, green, blue, pink – is the shop window of the Elysian Fields, always dressed. The air flows make, or rather made, the city healthy: nowadays it stinks. And yet, when landing at Capodichino, one says, ah, the air is so fresh. A famous shop full of curiosities that mocks clichés about the city sells Neapolitan air in a tin.]

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pietre, invisibili meridiani energetici composti di strade, facce, incroci, ricordi – una Venezia senza canali ma attraversata da flussi di magma (pp. 15-16)1516.

A city which is able to be defined by these characteristics, how could it be mapped? As I said before, the author chooses to enter it by following the route of the four elements: la Napoli del fuoco e quella dell’acqua, la Napoli della terra e, infine, la città dell’aria. (p. 16).

Città stretta d’assedio dall’acqua come dal fuoco, Napoli non può che essere città di terra, città pietrosa, buia, ritratta, corpo dai piedi troppo profondi per essere visti, città con una testa d’aria invisibile, città che pur non pensando produce filosofi ariosi, scrittori terragni, pittori liquidi e matematici disperati. La testa d’aria non sa niente della pancia di terra, guarda con timore gli organi e le vie del fuoco e contempla, rassegnata, le vie dell’acqua, di cui si nutre (p. 47)17.

The central chapters of the book are four: 1. Fuchèra, fuchèra; 2. Aquae; 3. Terra, materia; 4. In luce et in aere, 15 From a literary point of view, Cilento’s representation of Naples offers a very perceptive and original interpretation of the city’s highly complex structure. From a scientific point of view, there is a previous technical study dedicated to the urbanistic situation of Naples, in which the classification of the four elements, as a pre-eminent reading key, has been adopted; see Rosi, 2003.

16 [any way you look at it, Naples is an interweaving of water, air, earth and fire, canals which regulate the flows of people and stone, invisible energy meridians composed of streets, faces, intersections, memories – a Venice without canals but traversed by flows of magma.]

17 [Naples of fire and Naples of water, Naples of the earth and, finally, a city of air. A city besieged by water and by fire, Naples can be nothing but a city of the earth, a stony city, dark, withdrawn, a body with feet buried too deep to be seen, a city with an invisible head of air, a city which, while unthinking, produces airy philosophers, earthly writers, liquid painters and desperate mathematicians. The airy head knows nothing of the earthly belly, it looks fearfully upon the fiery organs and streets and, resigned, contemplates the waterways, from which it nourishes itself.]

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enriched by “bellissime cartine” (“gorgeous maps”, p.

149); Iole, the author’s sister, an expert in graphics and art direction, drew them, as we read in the final section of the book (Ringraziamenti, p. 149). They are an amusing combination of stylised mapping and what is defined today as “emotional cartography” (Nold, 2009)18. The city’s different areas are interconnected through analogies which stem from associations of ideas, concepts, images, memories or daily experiences: for example, the lively and detailed description of the lady owner of Scaturchio (a famous, old pastry shop), with her unflappable way of selling ‘pastiera’ and ‘ministeriali’ (pp. 26-29); or the representation of the taxi driver, who was able to drive ‘magically’, that is without starting the engine (pp. 126-127).

Due to space constraints, I will not include the author’s four selected itineraries; moreover, it seems to me more opportune to stay consistent with the overall theme, i.e. the relationship between the writer and her city. [fig. 1] The vertical city not only grows in height; it also breathes air and light. Depicting the higher parts of Naples, Cilento’s syntax tinges itself with lyricism: Appare, la domenica mattina, la città come dovrebbe essere, ripulita di cielo e di vento. […] Questa è la città verticale, la città che ascende, quella che si vede camminando a testa in su. Non ci sono più zone di buio, lacerti e angoli oscuri.

Bianca e azzurra e verde, persino vagamente fiorita, così appare Napoli, in una veste che non le appartiene mai, una ve-

Other types of maps (essentially topographic) are shown in Carelli’s novel, Vado a Napoli e poi… muoio! (2013). See also Corrado Castiglione’s short stories, Vedi Napoli e poi niente (2014), in which each chapter corresponds to a particular place in the city (but with no maps).

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ste bugiarda, fatta di natura, priva di animali se non di quelli aerei: gabbiani, colombe, api nella stagione buona, poche mosche d’autunno. Allora è quasi superfluo salire fino a San Martino, da dove la città si finge in questi panni tutto l’anno, anche con la burrasca, anche mentre si muore, mentre si odia, mentre ci si annoia nel rumore (p. 115)19.

And later, she says: Le vie d’aria dominano i monumenti sopraelevati della città che […] mostrano il turchino delle sfere celesti tutto l’anno, anche nei mattini d’inverno, sospendendoci tutti in questo sembiante di eterna felicità che ci fa schifare i cieli bui di primo mattino nelle città del Nord e ci condanna a questa beffa di perenne serenità meteorologica (p. 145)20.

Appearances can be deceiving (‘veste bugiarda’ [false apparel], ‘beffa’ [hoax]), quietly protests the author, and a bitter taste emerges from the sweet aerial image of the city – just a paradox, an unfair masquerade.

Every living organism contains all four elements. Disruption of the delicate harmony of elements in the human body, for example, gives rise to diseases, especially by 19 [The city appears, on Sunday morning, as it should, with a cleaned-up sky and wind. […] This is the vertical city, the city that ascends, that you see when you walk with your head upturned. There are no longer any dark zones, no fragments, no dark corners. Naples thus appears as white and blue and green, even somewhat flowery, in apparel that has never belonged to it, false apparel, made up of nature, devoid of animals except those of the air: seagulls, doves, bees in the warm season, a few flies in the autumn. So for this reason it’s almost superfluous to go up to San Martino, where the city pretends to wear this garb all year round, even in stormy weather, even when dying, when hating, when getting bored with the noise.]

20 [The airways dominate the raised monuments of the city that […] display the turquoise celestial spheres all year round, even on winter mornings, keeping us all suspended in this semblance of eternal happiness which makes us avoid the early morning dark skies of Northern cities and condemns us to this hoax of perennial meteorological serenity.]

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Figure 1 “Emotional map of the centre of Naples accompanying the chapter ‘Fuchèra, Fuchèra’ of the book Napoli sul mare luccica by Antonella Cilento”.

abusing the energy of elements or by blocking it. And Naples is “a crowded and confused body, tormented by beings, ill and devastated” (p. 146); the vivid similarity Cilento finds between the city and one of van Eyck’s paintings is absolutely striking:

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L’esatto ritratto di Napoli, uno spaccato del suo corpo fatto di aria, di terra, acqua e fuoco, è il Giudizio Universale di Jan van Eyck conservato al Metropolitan Museum di New York (p. 143)21.

She continues: La terra del Giudizio Universale sorretta dalle ali dello scheletro è una terra agitata di resurrezioni infelici: i corpi che tornano alla vita sembrano i révenants napoletani dei tram e degli autobus, i corpi dannati alla luce e seppelliti nelle scatole cittadine dei mezzi viarii o delle case o degli uffici, imbottigliati nell’agitazione, nella rabbia e nella guerra, nella fatica di campare. […] Fuori dal tempo, a dispetto di ogni modifica sostanziale, Napoli come città-corpo vive e si alimenta soprattutto di notte, di sotterraneo e di oscuro: nel Giudizio Universale sotto la pancia magra dello scheletro, una corte di morti, dannati, diavoli e fere si arravoglia come la fogna borbonica, come i cunicoli tufacei della città che ad ogni pioggia si appilano, si otturano. O di Luce e di volo: e infatti van Eyck riempie il cielo di gerarchie angeliche, santi, profeti, tutti attorno alla Sacra Famiglia, il Cristo avvolto in un magnifico manto rosso e sotto i suoi piedi, a cavalcare e scamazzare la morte che tutto regge, un arcangelo, anch’esso rosso e fiammeggiante. (pp. 144-145) […] Poi, van Eyck mostra l’inferno, dove accumula i simboli più oscuri, mostri, brutte facce di pesce e ali di orride bestie, insetti, vescovi teratomorfi, lucertole puntute e serpenti scivolosi. […]

Il rettile che ingoia il dannato, il mostro con le fauci nella pancia, cieco e divorante, la lince dall’occhio allucinato come un gatto pazzo, l’orso dalla lunga zanna, il diavolo in forma d’albero (il noce di Benevento, la foresta che un tempo incombeva oscura fuori dalla città, la città-foresta di oggi), i lucertoloni dall’occhio glabro (l’occhio bianco della rana pescatrice, pesce orribile ma dalla carne squisita cucina[The exact portrait of Naples, the spitting image of its body made up of air, earth, water and fire, is The Last Judgement by Jan van Eyck, housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.]

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ta in sugo per la pasta) e poi liquami, visceri, sangue e vermi22 […] (pp. 145-146) Dovrei scrivere, uscire per sbrigare alcune commissioni. Ma come si fa? Guardo il cielo sul balcone e vedo la pletora che viaggia verso il cielo turchino di van Eyck: santi, vescovi, cardinali, profeti, re. Somiglia alla gran folla di nobiltà di seggio, alla ricca borghesia di oggi, ai troppi napoletani che vogliono salvarsi dalla terra dei morti risuscitati (p. 146)23.

22 I vermi is also the title of Francesco Mastriani’s novel published in 1864; Mastriani is one of the most popular and prolific writers of the Neapolitan proto-Verism. For further details, see B. Croce, La vita letteraria a Napoli dal 1860 al 1900, in Id., La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols, 19031914 (from 1914 onwards published by Laterza, Bari), vol. IV, Appendix.

23 [The earth of the Last Judgment held up by the skeleton’s wings is an earth agitated by unhappy resurrections: the bodies which are coming back to life seem to be Neapolitan revenants on the tram or bus, bodies damned to be in the light and entombed in the urban boxes of road transport or houses or offices, bottled up in agitation, in anger or in battle, in the effort of living. […] Outside of time, and in spite of any major changes, Naples as a city-body lives and nourishes itself above all at night, underground and in the dark: in The Last Judgment beneath the skinny belly of the skeleton, a court of the dead, the damned, devils and beasts, winds itself like a Bourbon sewer, like the city’s tufaceous underground passages which, with every rainfall, become plugged or blocked. Or of Light and flight: and in fact van Eyck fills the sky with hierarchies of angels, saints, prophets, all around the Holy Family, with Christ enveloped in a magnificent red cape and and at his feet an Archangel, also red and aflame, who rides and crushes Death who is holding up everything. […] Then, van Eyck shows us hell, where he accumulates the most obscure symbols, monsters, ugly fish faces and wings of horrid beasts, insects, teratomorphic bishops, pointed lizards and slippery snakes. […] The reptile swallowing the sinner, the monster with its jaws in its stomach, blind and devouring, the lynx with its shocked eye like a crazy cat, the bear with a long tooth, the devil in the form of a tree (the walnut tree of Benevento, the forest which in times of old loomed darkly outside the city, the city-forest of today), the green lizard with its smooth eye (the white eye of the monkfish, a horrible fish with the most delicious flesh when prepared as a pasta sauce) and then fluids seeping from corpses, entrails, blood and worms. […] I should write, go out to run a few errands. But how can I? I look at the sky above the balcony and I see the plethora which is travelling towards van Eyck’s blue sky: saints, bishops, cardinals, prophets, kings. It resembles a huge crowd of longstanding nobility, the rich bourgeoisie of today, the many (too many) Neapolitans who want save themselves from the land of the living dead.]

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I think that the Neapolitan reader (and not only Neapolitan, of course) can find another meaning in Cilento’s pages; and this meaning is offered in the epilogue of Le città invisibili quoted previously: The second [way to survive Hell] is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the Inferno, are not Inferno; then, make them endure, give them space.

Cilento chooses the magnetic power of the natural, enchanting beauty of the city: Per chi è più attento restano, però, piccoli tragitti da compiere, visite alle porte infere, ai balconi dei Campi Elisi, lì dove la città è eterea, dove qualche piccola scala porta su insetti e animali, dove i cocchi delle fate da vie invisibili si travasano dentro Napoli direttamente dall’Irlanda, dal regno di Fairie, e nel tardo pomeriggio appaiono azzurrati a chi scende le scale del Petraio o risale le calate senza traffico. Non si corrono pericoli, allora, almeno non i pericoli dei cani randagi o degli scippatori in motorino, solo pericoli d’incantamento e infatuazione, di abbandono e melanconia, perché attorno a questo corpo mostruoso si muovono le potenze meteorologiche e teatrali delle nuvole, che velano in apparati di scena la luna sul golfo, del celeste dei tramonti, delle albe pallidissime, che muovono i fronti di tempesta lungo la costa e che, per chi ha il tempo di guardare, anche solo un istante, anche seduti in auto nel traffico, tolgono ogni forza.

Come può, allora ci si chiede, il miracolo ripetersi? Perché di miracolo si tratta, non importa se fatto di sangue finto come si dice sia quello di san Gennaro. Il fatto è che, spesso e volentieri, questo sangue finto o alieno si scioglie e si rimane prigionieri del corpo ordito in discese e trappole. Disgustati, infuriati, felici (p. 15; emphasis added)24.

[For the careful observer, there remain, however, small itineraries to follow, visits to the gates of hell, to the balconies of the Elysian Fields, there

24

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And later on in the text, another description of the city’: È nei rari momenti in cui le vie dell’aria si aprono che il torpedone di dannati prende requie e il cielo risplende di luce eterna, come se nessun rumore fosse mai capitato. Il silenzio, allora, si dirige verso le vie di terra e di acqua e si espande: la città si squaderna, il corpo è aperto, respira, aspetta. La via del fuoco riposa. Solo in quel raro momento di silenzio e di riposo la bellezza è più forte, più forte di ogni cosa (A finale, p. 147)25.

Cilento’s book is intended for middle/highbrow readers, who know Naples and its history quite well, because the author’s observations are very often interspersed with local cultural references. Her way of narrating is refined, but, at the same time, flexible, creatively open to neologisms where the city is ethereal, where some small stairway carries up insects and animals, where the chariots of the fairies along invisible roads pour into Naples directly from Ireland, from the kingdom of Fairies, and in the late afternoon appear tinged sky-blue to those who descend the stairs of the Petraio or climb back up the traffic-free calate. There are no dangers to be faced, then, at least not the dangers of stray dogs or of bag-snatchers on mopeds, only dangers of enchantment and infatuation, of abandonment and melancholy, because around this monstrous body move the meteorological and theatrical forces of the clouds, which veil in stage sets the moon on the gulf, of the blue of the sunsets, of the palest of dawns, which move the storm front along the coast and which, for those who have the time to look, even only for an instant, even seated in their car in the traffic, deprives them of all strength. How, one asks oneself then, can the miracle repeat itself? Because it is a matter of a miracle, whether it be that of fake blood as it is said that of San Gennaro’s is. The fact is that, frequently and willingly, this fake or alien blood liquefies and one remains prisoner of the body ordained in descents and traps. Disgusted, infuriated, happy.]

25 [It is in those rare moments in which the air ways open up that the bus of the damned finds peace and the sky is resplendent with eternal light, as if no sound had ever occurred. Then the silence directs itself towards the earth ways and water ways and expands: the city spreads open, the body opens, it breathes, it waits. The fire way rests. Only in that rare moment of silence and rest does beauty become stronger, stronger than everything else.]

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(“pluripesciuta”, p. 65; “neragnosi”, p. 134), forms of word-play that suggest two or more meanings, by exploiting the contiguity of semantic fields referring to a specific subject, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. There are many examples of different jargons, styles, metaphors, bourgeois and popular settings. Her readers have to be quick and audacious, since her words are often sharp; and, if from Naples, they ought to be not too sensitive, otherwise they cannot reach the book’s end.

Are Cilento’s feelings deeply rooted in her city? Does she feel like a parasite of the beast? A small creature with antennae (“animaletto antennuto”, p. 142), held captive by its peristaltic dynamics? It could well be: Napoli, insomma, è un corpo di animale antico.

Se abiti una città-corpo, come parassita o cellula, con funzioni precise anche se dimenticate, sei insieme minerale e vegetale, liquido e solido. Ti ritrovi fatto di aria, ma anche di sangue, e ti senti a disagio a viverci, come il tonno nella balena di Pinocchio: sei in salute ma in attesa di essere digerito (p. 141)26.

Some people can manage, she adds, if they find hiding places, or if they choose to disappear assimilating themselves to the “subtle bodies” of Naples “il cielo, le nuvole, l’aura immota ed eterna, sempre azzurra” [the sky, the clouds, the motionless, eternal air, always blue]; they may 26 [Naples, basically, is the body of an ancient beast. If you inhabit a citybody, as a parasite or a cell, with precise (albeit forgotten) functions, you are at once mineral and vegetable, liquid and solid. You find yourself made of air, but also of blood, and you feel uncomfortable living there, like the tunafish in Pinocchio’s whale: you feel healthy but are waiting to be digested.]

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happen to become, as she suggests, “mistici e contemplativi” (p. 142) [mystical and contemplative].

Naples never transforms itself; so little has changed since the 1600s, the period in which another recent novel by Cilento is set (Lisario o il piacere infinito delle donne, 2014). The following passage seems to confirm this: È un mare chiuso quello che prospetta il golfo, sarà colpa di Capri, come scriveva Raffaele La Capria, della penisola sorrentina e di Ischia, che fanno sembrare il mare un lago. Qui, le acque alchemiche di Napoli terminano e inizia la metamorfosi del mondo da cui, spesso, Napoli è esclusa (p. 78)27.

Nevertheless, Cilento does not want to give up (“Eppure, non mi rassegno”, p. 143). She does not want to leave her city, she seems to meet the challenge so well expressed by Calvino in the epilogue of Le città invisibili, where he exhorts us to seek out that which is not Hell and to make it last.

There is always so much more to learn about the world around us. The urge to discover can permeate all aspects of life. The more interested we are, the more tuned into our lives we become. Cultivating curiosity can expose us not only to new information, but also to new ways of thinking, which can positively impact our lives on a daily basis. I think that following through on one’s commitments with an open mind and a positive attitude towards 27 [The sea which the gulf looks out on is a closed sea, the fault must be Capri’s, as Raffaele La Capria wrote, of the Sorrento peninsula and of Ischia, which make the sea look like a lake. Here, the alchemical waters of Naples end and the metamorphosis of the world, from which Naples is often excluded, begins.]

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enterprise and effective co-operation is crucial in order to determine major changes.

Furthermore, I want to specify that the afore-mentioned divinity named Kali is also the goddess of transformation and rebirth. I do not think I am forcing the text by stating this. Therefore, beyond Cilento’s ambivalent, cynical, and sometimes startling comments, I would like to consider Napoli sul mare luccica as an underlying, somewhat cryptic invitation to the readers, to the frequenters and inhabitants of Naples. It provides, in fact, the impetus needed to re-interpret the city with courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity, as well as the awareness of the importance of being present and involved in the city’s life.

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“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”: narrating transnational urban spaces as fluid forms of resistance and conf conflict Vincenzo Binetti University of Michigan

A Roma la gente corre sempre, a Mogadiscio la gente non corre mai. Io sono una via di mezzo tra Roma e Mogadiscio: cammino a passo sostenuto. Do l’impressione di correre, ma sempre camminando.

Igiaba Scego, “Dismatria” L’ultima manifestazione alla casa della cultura è stata una serata a soggetto… sugli indiani d’America … Sono venuti da Milano due tipi alti, decisi e taciturni. Con la macchina, perché a Milano tutti hanno la macchina… Avranno parlato, prima uno poi l’altro, per due ore e mezzo… Non c’è stato dibattito… Minuti ha cercato di farli restare, portarli a cena, come facevamo sempre con i nostri ospiti, parlare un po’ con calma della situazione culturale a Milano, ma loro hanno detto di no, grazie, perché dovevano tornare subito al nord. “Là si lavora, caro Minuti”, ha detto uno di loro stringendoli la mano. Son saliti in macchina e via, con gran fracasso di motore. “Però”, mi ha detto Minuti prendendomi sottobraccio, “Milano… che gente… che città!”

Luciano Bianciardi, Il lavoro culturale

“The border crossed us, we didn’t cross the borders” is a slogan often shouted by activists, mainly Latinas/os, politically engaged today in North America and along its “frontiers” in the struggle for the recognition of a different, more ‘porous’ and problematic definition of the no-

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tion of the ‘border’ and of the political, social, juridical and economic instances directly tied to a tragic and ineludible diasporic and migratory identitarian condition. A dramatic and impelling situation which raises the necessity of a radical questioning of what, in fact, through a continuous process of (re)negotiation of the very concept of border and of the “strategic role it plays in the fabrication of the world”1 (Mezzadra and Neilson VI), separates and unifies, distances and draws us near, immunizes and contaminates. It is, in fact, by understanding how the border is productive of subjectivity, rather than acting as a mere limit on already-formed subjects, [that we can] critically understand its capacity to act as a brake on justice as well as a conduit of injustice.

(Mezzadra and Neilson, p. 268).

After all, the dangerous and misleading, and at the same time reassuring and mystifying, dichotomous separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between foreign subjects and familiar ones, between homelands and nation states bordering one another and geographically close by, but still irreparably distant and unreachable because of their being stiffened within an unacceptable impermeability, is nowadays constantly set forth through delirious and unrealistic public discourses. This is indeed a dangerous and misleading rhetoric often advocated by so-called public intellectuals, xenophobic political parties and nationalis1 As Mezzadra and Neilson point out: “the border has inscribed itself at the center of contemporary experience. We are confronted not only with a multiplication of different types of borders but also with the reemergence of the deep heterogeneity of the semantic field of the border” (Mezzadra and Neilson, p. vi).

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tic groups who would erect taller and taller walls and intensify controls at the borders or even definitively close them in the name of the safeguarding of national security or as a result of a perennial “state of exception” and “vulnerability” (Bauman, Collateral Damage, p. 27), which would justify any abuse of human dignity and violation of the most fundamental civil rights. We need instead to start thinking of a “universalism” not intended anymore “in a merely uniform manner” (Marramao, p. 226), but also and most of all, as Giacomo Marramao rightly sustains, to democracy itself as a paradoxical sort of community, as a community without community […] That is to say, in the direction of a cosmopolitanism of difference. (Marramao, pp. 238-9).

The problematic relationship between border, space, citizenship, national identity, migration and diaspora obviously pertains to very complex and problematic juridical, political-economic and socio-cultural issues that go beyond the limits of this essay; therefore, I would like to limit my argument to investigating how those very socio-political tensions I was referring to before – issues which are clearly tied to an ontological rethinking of the concept of border itself and also to the fluidity and ‘pourousness’ of those spaces that incessantly territorialize and re-territorialize themselves around it – could somehow ‘translate’ themselves within a narrative setting. A humanistic and intellectual practice that, through an ‘alternative’ linguistic and literary discourse, could become a constituent and active moment of conflict and resistance: “for to translate is always to transform – as Ian Chambers reminds us

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It always involves a necessary travesty of any metaphysics of authenticity or origins […] For the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history. (Chambers, p. 4).

Among the various literary references which represent the so-called “migrant literature” today in Italy—and I am thinking here mainly of writers such as Mohsen Melliti and his novel about the occupation of the Pantanella in Rome2, or of the autobiographical tale by Salah Methnani about his own dramatic experience as an ‘immigrato’ travelling between southern and northern Italy alla ricerca di quell’Occidente ricco e civile, vagheggiato nei ricordi d’infanzia (Mario Fortunato e Salah Methnani)3,

or even of Yvan Sagnet and his Ama il tuo sogno. Vita e rivolta nella terra dell’oro rosso, a painful and pitiless account of the mondo impietoso del caporalato e delle condizioni di sfruttamento, violenza e schiavitù in cui sono costretti a vivere i braccianti in un campo per la raccolta dei pomodori vicino Nardò in Puglia (Yvan Sagnet)4.

I would like here to make a brief reference to a novel, a cross between a memoir, an autobiographical account and 2 See also, in this respect: Binetti, V. Città nomadi. Esodo e autonomia nella metropoli contemporanea. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008.

3 [searching for a civilized and wealthy West, dreamt of during his childhood memories, my translation] 4 [merciless world of the ‘caporalato’ and of the conditions of exploitation, violence, and slavery in which the day laborers are forced to live, while working in a field, near Nardò in Puglia, harvesting tomatoes, my translation].

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a bildungsroman, by the Italian-Somalian writer Igiaba Scego, La mia casa è dove sono, published in Italy in 2010.

The transnational and discontinuous spatiality through which her diasporic characters move around this story, certainly represents a destabilizing and provocative political-cultural element within the Italian literary canon.

As Piera Carroli reminds us: these hybrid daughters of the colonized, these Italian citizens, with their multiple differences portrayed in their autobiographical and imagined trajectories, offer possible paths forward […] towards nomadic subjectivity (p. 206).

The problematic representation of antagonistic subjectivities and of fragmentary and marginal geographies which emerges within its narrative allows, in fact, in my opinion, for a decentered visualization and a precarious conceptualization of identitarian constructs and, at the same time, for a radical and necessary renegotiation of the notion of the nation-state and its sovereignty5: La mia casa è dove sono rappresenta un elemento importante nella nuova configurazione di una letteratura italiana che va al di là dell’assetto retoricamente, linguisticamente e concettualmente nazionale (Benini, p. 492)6.

The author herself had already raised, on another occasion, the question of her own origins through the chalAs Piera Carroli correctly suggests: “postcolonial Italian literature is an essential element of the process of decolonization of Italy from within [...]

Italian postcolonial writers reverse racist discourses and turn contamination and otherness into a language of innovation and change” (Carroli, pp. 208 and 218).

6 [La mia casa è dove sono represents an important element within the new configuration of an Italian literature which goes beyond the rhetorical, linguistic, and conceptual national order (my translation)].

5

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lenging invention of a semantic variation of the very concept of ‘patria’ provocatively defining it ‘dismatria7’. The innovative and active potentialities implied within this identitarian crisis and diasporic dimension are thus (re) valorized through a political language and affective gestures voiced by a narrating ‘I’ that, although far away from her own country or even within its very boundaries, nevertheless lives and experiences, in a conflictual manner, her own being and being perceived as a ‘stranger’: Eravamo in continua attesa di un ritorno alla madrepatria che probabilmente non ci sarebbe mai stato. Il nostro incubo si chiamava dismatria. Qualcuno a volte ci correggeva e ci diceva: «In italiano si dice espatriare, espatrio, voi quindi siete degli espatriati». Scuotevamo la testa, un sogghigno amaro, e ribadivamo il dismatria appena pronunciato. Eravamo dei dismatriati, qualcuno – forse per sempre – aveva tagliato il cordone ombelicale che ci legava alla nostra matria, alla Somalia (Scego, Dismatria, p. 11)8.

The key element from where this important authorial consideration on the notion of ‘patria’ originates clearly becomes the unavoidable signal of a political and affecIn this respect, Lidia Curti points out that “In Dismatria […] the suitcases are the symbol of a dream, the return to Somalia, and at the same time the reaffirmation of a life in which each phase of a nomadic life is represented by a different suitcase. They are the sign of impermanence as well as of the acceptance of nomadism as a way of life” (Curti, pp.

69-70).

8 [We were continuously waiting for a return to the homeland, which probably would never have happened. Our nightmare was called dismatria. Someone, at times, would correct us by saying: «In Italian you say to expatriate, you are therefore expatriates». We would shake our heads, snigger bitterly and then we would reiterate the word just pronounced, dismatria. We were dismatriati because someone—perhaps indefinitely—had cut off the umbilical cord that was connecting us to our matria, to Somalia (my translation)].

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tive need for a radical questioning of specific identitarian discourses about both national and subjective values.

Those same ‘values’ upon which the mystifying and misleading rhetoric of our own sense of territorial belonging and ‘assimilation’ within the protective and reassuring cage of the nation state is often based.

It seems also important to point out that my argument here does not aim at a facile and predictable celebration of a certain multiculturalism, academic or not, diluted within a false and simplifying universalism or cosmopolitanism—in this respect, in fact, I think it would probably be more effective to talk instead, following Balibar’s intuition, of “cosmopolitics” (Balibar, p. 9). We need, in other words, to dismiss a cosmopolitanism which finds in the mythicization of the migrant subject’s ‘nomadic’ condition, the risk of eventually tempering itself within an innocuous and de-historicized flânerie often characterized by the absence of conflict and political antagonism – after all, as Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, what is acclaimed today as ‘globalization’ is geared to the tourists’ dreams and desires. (Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences, p. 93).

It is rather a matter of locating precisely in that authorial diasporic condition—in the spatio-temporal suspension between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, the before and the after, between a ‘south’ searching for its own ‘meticcia’ identity and a globalizing ‘north’ which characterizes Scego’s narrative – the symbolic visualization of two urban maps, the uninterrupted and de-territorializing palimpsest between Mogadishu and Rome, but also between

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Italy and Somalia9. A sort of philological [discourse] of “resistance” (Said, pp. 70-8) which could eventually give space, as Edward Said would say, to a politically active “counter-memory” (Said, p. 142), to “humanism” as a “technique of trouble” (Said, p. 77) and, most of all, to a practice of identities other than those given by the flag or the national war of the moment (Said, p. 80).

We should recognize, in other words, following Said’s suggestion, that the role of the writer and therefore of the intellectual is, after all, “dialectically, oppositionally”, determined to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible […] and to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity and mission (Said, pp. 135, 141).

It is a question of creating “collective concerns” and achieving, as Bourdieu reminds us, potential “realist utopias” and “collective inventions” (cit. in Said, p. 139) capable of subverting and destabilizing the neo-liber-

As Stefania Benini, in fact, indicates: “Parlare di La mia casa è dove sono significa attraversare una scrittura che è una mappa […] una doppia mappa che abbraccia in un unico gesto la città della memoria e dell’epos familiare (Mogadiscio) e la città del vissuto autobiografico (Roma), la ex colonia e la metropoli, lo spirito nomadico e orale della Somalia e le architetture stratificate della Città Eterna” (Benini, p. 479). [“To talk about La mia casa è dove sono means to engage with this novel like a map […] a double map which embraces, in a single gesture, the city of memory and of the family epos (Mogadishu), and the city of the autobiographical experience (Rome), the ex-colony and the metropolis, Somalia’s nomadic and oral spirit and the stratified architectures of the Eternal City”, my translation].

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al logics and languages of accumulation and dominion functional to global capital.

But let’s now return to Scego’s novel. Within the process of an active philological exploration of language that characterizes, both at a textual and meta-textual level, this story – a story in itself quite atypical with respect to the Italian literary canon – it should not be forgotten that Scego herself has, on many occasions, reiterated her own impatience towards those who would like to necessarily label her writing and her intellectual role within the simplifying formula of “migrant writer”. As Scego has maintained in a recent interview, she would prefer, instead, that of “Afro-European” writer, underlying her own desire to withdraw herself from facile and banal identitarian categorization. Furthermore, already in the title of the novel, Scego emblematically anticipates what will be, in my opinion, the leitmotiv of the entire narrative, that is, the authorial need to give voice to her own precariety and exclusion, to the “fatica di sentirsi straniera a casa propria” (Taddia, p. 234) [weariness of feeling like a stranger in your own home, my translation].

This is achieved through a radical calling into question of the symbology of ‘focolare domestico’ [‘home’ (my translation)] and of its becoming – along with all the dangerous socio-cultural and politico-historical normative implications that it evokes – as an unmovable and absolute emblem of a reassuring and ‘local’ spatial-temporal referentiality: a permanent microcosm, impermeable to potential external contaminations and, for this reason, functional to a, by now, unacceptable idea of a certain identitarian par-

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adigm (being that a subjective, familiar or national one).

Instead, it is a matter of “decostruire la stucchevole retorica delle ‘radici’” (La Porta, p. 236), [deconstructing the tedious rhetoric of the roots, my translation] and recognizing that perhaps the very concept of ‘origin’, of ‘home’ could become, if revisited through a radical critical–theoretical reexamination, “una costruzione più o meno consapevole dell’immaginario” (La Porta, p. 239), [a more or less conscious construction of our imaginary, my translation] that, as such, belongs to the diasporic language of mobility and of the continuous and ontological renegotiation of our being 10. “Whatever beings”, as Agamben would say, “singularities” without identities engaged in a dramatic and tormented, but also potentially subversive and antagonistic search for a territoriality constantly destabilized by the very mobility of imaginary or real borders and through the subjective de-structuring and communitarian reinvention of rigid and pre-codified official cartographies.

This is why the first words of the novel: “Sheeko, sheeko sheeko xariir” (Scego, p. 11) [“story story or story of silk”, my 10 And, in fact, Scego underlines here the implicit conflictualities which characterize the desperate and unresolvable maternal desire of ‘returning’ to her own house in Somalia: “Il motivo vero era legato a laba dhagax. Questo era il nome della sua casa e del terreno dove era costruita. Letteralmente in somalo laba dhagax significa «due pietre»; simbolicamente per mamma erano le due pietre dove avrebbe eretto la sua vita futura […] Nessuno di noi si immaginava che della Somalia sarebbero rimaste in piedi solo due pietre, laba dhagax appunto” (Scego, p. 142). [“The real motive was bound to laba dhagax. This was the name she gave to her home and to the land on which it was built. Literally, in Somalian, laba dhagax means «two stones»; for my mother, they symbolically represented the two stones where she would have built her future life […]

None of us imagined that all that would have remained standing of Somalia were only two stones, laba dhagax, in fact”, my translation].

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translation], emblematically define not only the unavoidable linguistic contamination and hybridization between Somali and Italian language that will constantly characterize the entire narration, thus problematically complicating its own stylistic and textual homogeneity; but also, and most of all, those words delineate an attempt to involve the reader along a path of memorial re-visitation and familiarization with the authorial diasporic ‘stories’ through a visualization and juxtaposition of two urban maps, Rome and Mogadishu, so different and ‘distant’, but also so similar and close between each other and therefore constantly modifiable. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us: The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is […] susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, […] reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.

(Deleuze and Guattari, p. 12)11.

A sort of “toponomastica della memoria” (La Porta, p. 238) [“toponymy of memory”, my translation] that could help to put together the fragments of different ‘stories’ – those official ones of the colonial past, of fascism, of civil war, of expatriation and migration, but also those more intimate and personal of the familiar diaspora, of our own affects and social relations.

It is in fact, as Scego herself reminds us, in questa saudade di esiliati dalla propria madre terra [ormai lontana, ormai smarrita] che ha uno dei suoi inizi questa storia (Scego, p. 15)12.

11 12

See Benini, cit., pp. 486-87. [“within this saudade of exiles from their own [by now faraway, lost]

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A story that is meticulously narrated by the author, along with other members of this family, that carries its own home “sempre sulle spalle”, (Scego, p. 12) [“always on its back”, my translation], through a constituent and communitarian process of remapping of the urban spatiality precisely because the fluctuating contexts of languages and desires pierce the logics of cartography and spill over the borders of its tabular, taxonomic, space (Chambers, Migrancy, p. 92).

A physical, as well as a “mentale e globale” (Viarengo, p. 243) [“mental and global”, my translation] space, and a fragmentary and non-linear temporality which become therefore “qualcosa di provvisorio e scomponibile” (Scego, p. 36) [“something temporary and dividable”, my translation], but which also help, at the same time, to actively and forcedly reclaim the real tangibleness of Mogadishu – ‘their’ own city: La nostra città era morta dopo la guerra civile; i monumenti distrutti, le strade squarciate, le coscienze sporcate. Avevamo bisogno di quel disegno, di quella città di carta per sopravvivere […] Stendemmo una lista per le scuole, una per i cinema, una per gli ospedali, una per i cimiteri, una per i monumenti, una per le ambasciate, una per le carceri, una per gli aeroporti, una per ogni cosa. Catalogammo la città.(Scego, pp. 24 e 36)13. homeland, that one of the beginnings of this story takes place”, my translation].

13 [After the civil war our city was dead; the monuments destroyed, the streets ripped to pieces, the consciences dirtied. We needed that map, that city of paper in order to survive […] We made a list for the schools, another for the theaters, another for the hospitals, another for the cemeteries, another for the monuments, another for the embassies, another for the jails, another for the airports, one for each single thing. We cata-

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It is in this manner that, later on in the novel takes shape, through the symbolic use of the post-its, the urban palimpsest as a metaphor of exodus and transnational ‘border-crossing’: a political-literary representation of a diasporic language capable of willfully affirming its own voice and provocatively forcing the reader to pay attention to the hybrid presence of a female subject – both authorial voice and narrating character – suspended ‘in-between’ two worlds, two cities and two cultures: In qualche anfratto di quella mappa c’ero pure io […] Era mia come loro, quella Mogadiscio perduta […]. Ed è lì che entrarono in scena i post-it […]. Non volevo un foglio di carta: volevo qualcosa di provvisorio e scomponibile. I post-it mi sembrarono perfetti. Ne presi uno arancione […]. Ci scrissi sopra in stampatello, molto grande: «ROMA». Negli altri scrissi nomi di quartieri, piazze, monumenti: stadio Olimpico, Trastevere, stazione Termini e così via […]. Tentai di disegnare i miei ricordi (Scego, p. 36)14.

This is, in other words, an authorial attempt to render visible, through a politically active practice of ‘translation15’, logued the city. (my translation)].

14 [In some cleft of that map there was me too […] That lost Mogadishu was mine as it was theirs […] And it was right there that the post-its appear […] I didn’t want a piece of paper: I wanted something provisory and decomposable. The post-its seemed perfect. I grabbed an orange one […] I wrote on it in large, capital letters: «ROME». On the other ones I wrote the names of neighborhoods, squares, monuments: Olympic Stadium, Trastevere, Termini Station, and so on […] I attempted to design my memories. (my translation)].

15 Scego, in fact, emphasizes in her novel this necessity of giving political value to the implicit confusion and to the necessary contamination which characterizes the act of writing and ‘storytelling’ in two different languages: “In Somalia […] to tell a story was never a waste of time. You would learn, dream, become an adult, become a child again […]. The first language I learned was Italian. However, all the lullabies and little songs were in Somalian […]. I was very confused as a child. But it was

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precisely those places of personal and collective memory, which otherwise the globalizing and hegemonic ‘logic’ implicit in certain cultural-historical narratives and discourses, would inexorably let vanish16. This is why, once again, the difficulty implicit in trying to locate and recognize on the official map a ‘past’ characterized by small but telling ‘micro-stories’, translates itself instead into a continuous and destabilizing subjective re-appropriation of mutable urban spatialities capable of giving again an albeit temporary visibility to one’s own existential and intellectual experience. This is how, then, Scego’s writing gives form and consistency, for example, to the image of an old building, previously a common space and a “residence of democracy” for those who, like her own father, emigrated a nice confusion, I would jump like a cricket from one language to another, and I enjoyed myself like crazy”. (my translation)—(“In Somalia […] raccontare una storia non era mai una perdita di tempo. Si imparava, si sognava, si diventava adulti, si tornava a essere bambini […] La prima lingua che ho parlato è stato l’italiano. Ma tutte le ninne nanne e le canzoncine erano in somalo […] Ero molto confusa da piccola. Ma era una bella confusione, saltellavo come un grillo da una lingua all’altra e mi divertivo come una matta”) (Scego, pp. 150-51).

16 Here it is how, in fact, in Scego’s writing, the thirteen coffins occupying Piazza del Campidoglio, materialize in front of the reader as a testimonial discourse denouncing the umpteenth, unacceptable tragedy happening along the Italian coastline and, once again, ignored by the official mass-mediatic language: “Un’imbarcazione era colata a picco. Una di quelle che solcavano il mar Mediterraneo in cerca di un approdo verso un futuro qualsiasi in terra d’Occidente […] invece era colata a picco […] Al telegiornale avevano detto poco su quell’incidente. Si erano limitati a sciorinare cifre e poi si erano affrettati ad archiviare la notizia” (Scego, pp. 98-9). [“A boat had gone under. It was one of those that cut through the Mediterranean Sea searching for a place to land, hoping for any kind of future in the Western world […] Instead, it had gone under […]. On the news broadcast they didn’t say much about that accident.

They limited themselves to showing some numbers and then they hastened to dismiss the news”, my translation].

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to Italy, but today is somehow obliterated and ‘silenced’ because of the ‘necessary’ urban planning redevelopment of the Roman neighborhoods: Mio padre scelse l’esilio e una nuova patria, l’Italia […] In un primo tempo furono stanziati a Civitavecchia e da lì poi a Roma in un palazzo nei pressi di viale Liegi. Ho cercato quel palazzo, ma papà mi ha detto che ormai della loro residenza di «democrazia» non c’è più traccia. «L’hanno distrutto, ora al suo posto c’è una clinica privata, credo». In quel palazzo si faceva tutto. Si mangiava, si leggeva, si amoreggiava con la receptionist e si studiava democrazia (Scego, pp. 51-2)17.

But what kind of story is Scego telling us then? Through which language does this ‘precarious’ female character express herself, determined nevertheless to “superare l’infame tradizione del silenzio” [“overcome the infamous tradition of silence”, my translation]18 while asserting her own desiring and antagonistic presence within these two [My father chose exile and a new homeland, Italy […] Initially they were housed in Civitavecchia and, later on, from there in Rome at a building next to Liegi Boulevard. I looked for that building, but dad told me that, by now, of their residence of «democracy» there is no sign.

«They destroyed it, and now, in its place, there is a private clinic, I believe». In that building, all sorts of things were done. People would eat, read, flirt with the receptionist and study democracy (my translation)].

18 In the third chapter, entitled “Piazza Santa Maria sopra Minerva”, Scego reflects, in fact, upon the problematic relation between her own writing and the memory of “donne. Anch’essa bruciata, silenziata, traviata […] Sulla mia mappa segno una collana di cuori. Per tutte quelle che stanno prendendo la parola nonostante mille difficoltà. Per mia madre che l’ha saputa prendere quando è stato necessario. E per la mia scrittura di oggi che molto deve a quelle voci di coraggio”) (Scego, p. 58). [“women. A memory burned down, silenced, deceived too. […] On my map I draw a necklace of hearts. For all those women who are speaking out notwithstanding thousands of difficulties. For my mother who did speak out when it was necessary. And for my writing of today which owes a lot to those voices of courage”, my translation].

17

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imaginary and at the same time real and tangible cities?

Among the various moments of spatial-temporal contamination and ‘crossing’ that characterize this novel, I would like to mention here what in my opinion constitutes one of the most emblematic chapters of this engaging literary and political discourse on urban destabilization and identitarian displacement which ends up subjectively reinventing and constantly (re)translating a certain socio-cultural perception of the south and of its metamorphic cities: “La stele di Axum” [“The Axum obelisk”]. The object in question or rather the emptiness, the pause, and the silence that its absence evokes, ends up instead giving space and ‘parola’—thanks to the philological and political operation carried forward by the author—to that ‘ghostly’ presence, ‘haunting’ our own past, outlining a “cartografia instabile” (Chambers, Esercizi di potere, p. 10) [“unstable cartography”], and thus unsettling at its foundations our historical national memory, along with its often forgotten colonial past: Oggi in quel posto non c’è niente. C’è il nulla. Avanzo cieca in questo abisso. Le macchine per non perdersi d’animo fanno un girotondo intorno a quel vuoto. Ogni volta che ci passo penso che quel luogo meriterebbe di essere riempito di senso […] Al centro di questa piazza non molto tempo fa c’era una stele. Ora è stata restituita ai legittimi proprietari. Veniva da lontano questo monumento, da quella Etiopia che Benito Mussolini aveva cercato […] di piegare con la sua tracotanza italica (Scego, p. 75)19.

[Today, in that place, there isn’t anything. There is only the nothingness. I proceed blindly in this abyss. The cars, in order not to lose confidence, drive circles around that void. Every time I pass by it, I think that that place would deserve to be filled with significance. […] At the center of this square not long ago there was an obelisk. Now it has been returned

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It is then the fear of oblivion, the impelling need and desire to “colmare il vuoto della piazza” (Scego, p. 79) [“fill the emptiness of the square”, my translation] which pushes the narrating ‘I’ to engage in a process of (re)writing of the homolagating, normative discourse about that spatiality, thus subverting and de-structuring what Michel de Certeau defines as the ‘panorama-city’: a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices (de Certeau, p. 93).

What Scego suggests in this text is instead a subjective destabilizing re-mapping of the urban space potentially capable of metaphorically ‘redesigning’, through the act of narrating, the conflictual ‘twine’ of different stories, cultures and languages which belong to the various ‘meridian’ places of the world. And this is possible precisely because girando intorno a quel vuoto ciascuno di noi, nel presente dell’esodo planetario, si costruisce la propria identità sempre più meticcia, composta di frammenti e pulviscoli dispersi (La Porta, p. 239)20.

Ogni volta che passo da piazza di Porta Capena ho paura dell’oblio. In quella piazza c’era una stele, ora non c’è niente. Sarebbe bello un giorno avere un monumento per le vittime del colonialismo italiano. Qualcosa che ricordi che la storia dell’Africa orientale e dell’Italia sono intrecciate (Scego, p. 95)21. to its legitimate owners. This monument came from afar, from that Ethiopia which Benito Mussolini had tried […] to subdue with his Italian arrogance, my translation] 20 [“going around that emptiness, each one of us, in the present planetary exodus, constructs his/her own identity, which is always more ‘meticcia’, and made of fragments and scattered fine dust”, my translation] 21 [Each time I pass by Porta Capena I am afraid of oblivion. In that square

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This is why in the final words of the novel once again recurs the authorial call to transversally retrace together, in proximity to the narrating ‘I’ – a subject constantly in ‘crisis’ and therefore ‘mutilated22’ because precariously split ‘in-between’ constituent and fragmented urban spatialities – those streets, those squares, and those places which bear witness to a controversial and inevitably ‘incoherent’ collective memory. With the awareness, however, that it is precisely through the act of writing, through a sharing of a “caos intrecciato” (Scego, p.

161) [“intertwined chaos”], of stories, words, and common spaces that it becomes possible, to think “mondialmente” (Gramsci) and to “demythologising identity, re-enchanting politics” (Marramao, xiii). To imagine, in other words, an ontological reconsideration of those same spaces and of our being and thus to rupturing the specular relation that we tend to set up between ‘ourselves’ and the ‘others’ (Marramao, p. 223),

there was an obelisk, now there is nothing. It would be nice one day to have a monument for the victims of Italian colonialism. Something that would remind us that the stories of Western Africa and of Italy are intertwined, my translation] 22 This is what Scego provocatively writes with respect to feeling herself as being problematically and ironically “represented” by an object—inescapable symbolic reminder of the Italian cultural identity and its artistic tradition—emblematically located at the center of a renowned Roman square: “L’elefantino del Bernini di piazza della Minerva è uno degli amici migliori che ho nella città di Roma. Per me quell’elefantino è somalo. Ha lo stesso sguardo degli esuli […] L’esule è una creatura a metà.

Le radici sono state strappate, la vita è stata mutilata […] l’identità è stata spogliata” (Scego, pp. 59-60). [“Bernini’s small elephant in Piazza della Minerva is one of my best friends in the city of Rome. For me, that small elephant is Somalian. It has the same gaze of the exiles […]. The exile is a creature divided in half. The roots have been torn off, life has been mutilated […] identity has been stripped”, my translation].

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so that we can “inhabit a sort of double movement of contamination and differentiation” (Marramao, p. 232). This would allow, in fact, a possible (re)crossing and consequently a desirable de-structuration of those demarcating lines and those normative identitarian constructions within which “la geografia del dominio” (Chambers, Esercizi di potere, p. 22) [“the geography of dominion”] and the homologating and repressive insanity perpetrated by the neo-liberal globalization and by the powerful people of the earth would prefer to relegate those emerging diasporic alterities characterizing the ‘souths’ of the planet and the fragmented stories of the migrant people: Io ho provato qui a raccontare brandelli della mia storia […] La mia mappa è lo specchio di questi anni di cambiamenti. Non è una mappa coerente. È centro, ma anche periferia. È Roma, ma anche Mogadiscio. È Igiaba, ma siete anche voi (Scego, pp. 160-1)23.

23 [“I have tried here to tell bits of my story […] My map is the mirror of these years of changes. It is not a coherent map. It is the center, but it is also the periphery. It is Rome, but also Mogadishu. It is Igiaba, but it is also you”, my translation].

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notes on contributors

Serena Acciai is an architect with research and teaching experience in multicultural heritage of the Mediterranean. She completed her PhD in Architectural Design at Università degli Studi di Firenze, with a dissertation on “Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: fragments of generous ideas: The case-study of Sedad Hakki Eldem”. In 2014 she obtained a Postdoctoral position at INHA (Institut National Histoire de l’Art) in Paris with research titled: “The Ottoman-Turkish House According to Architect Sedad Hakki Eldem, A refined domestic culture suspended between Europe and Asia”. Since 2012 she has been a freelance architect.

Vincenzo Binetti is Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include 19th-21st-century Italian Literature, Cultural Studies, the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, citizenship, border and migration studies, community and urban space, globalization, and relations between literature, philosophy and political theory. Among his publications: “Città nomadi. Esodo e autonomia nella metropoli contemporanea” (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2008), “Cesare Pavese: una vita imperfetta. La crisi dell’intellettuale nell’Italia del dopoguerra” (Ravenna: Longo, 1998), “The Mediterranean Heterotopia: Gabriele Salvatores and the Poetic of ‘Fleeing’”, in Mediterranean Studies, Penn State University Press (2015), and “Otium e precarietà come spaesamento ‘conoscitivo’ nella scrittura di Giorgio Vasta”, in S. Contarini, M. Jansen, and S. Ricciardi (eds.), “Le culture del precariato. Pensiero, azione, narrazione”, (Ombre corte: Verona, 2015).

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Marzia Beltrami (BA, Università degli Studi di Milano, 2010; MPhil, University of Oxford, 2012) has completed her PhD in Italian Studies at Durham University, with a thesis entitled “The Spatial Dimension of Narrative Understanding. Exploring Plot Types in the Narratives of Alessandro Baricco, Andrea Camilleri and Italo Calvino” (2017). Her research interests lie in the fields of cognitive literary criticism and cognitive narratology, with a focus on the embodied mind and plot theories. She is currently working at a comparative project on Elsa Morante and British writer Antonia Susan Byatt.

Giulia Brecciaroli completed a PhD at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the representation of urban experience in Italian literature of the 1950s-1970s, in relation to the transformations undergone by Italian society during those years of unprecedented modernization. She was awarded a BA in Anthropological Sciences from the University of Bologna, an MA in Italian Studies, European Literary Cultures and Linguistics from the same university, and an MA for Research in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick.

Assunta De Crescenzo is ‘professore aggregato’ at Federico II University (Naples) and teaches Italian Literature. Beyond this discipline, she is interested in Theory of Literature, History of Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature, as well as the interlinked areas of study concerning literature and anthropology, religion, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Her latest research includes the relationship between literature and the Internet, and literature and cinema. Her main publications are two monographs about Emilio Cecchi and the genre of essay-writing, as well as numerous essays on some European authors (Donne, Sterne, Dickens, Kafka, Hazlitt), as well as on Foscolo, Scotellaro, Bracco, Luzi, Sinisgalli, Pirandello.

Giulio Giovannoni is an architect and urban planner, with a PhD. from the University of Florence, where he is a tenured Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning. Giovannoni teaches urban design studios and courses in urban theory and landscape urbanism. He is a former research fellow at the Johns

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Hopkins University, and a former visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. He is currently (20192020) associate visiting professor at the College of Environmental Desing, UC Berkeley. He is a founder and co-director of the scholarly association, Cross-disciplinary Urban Spaces. He has lectured widely and is the author of numerous publications, including his most recent book, (2017) “Tuscany beyond Tuscany: Rethinking the City from the Periphery”.

Richard Ingersoll teaches courses in theory and history of architecture at Syracuse University in Florence and at the Politecnico di Milano. He formerly was Associate Professor at Rice University and Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich, Università di Ferrara, and UNav Pamplona. He was founding editor of “Design Book Review” and author of “Sprawltown, Looking for the City on Its Edges” (Princeton AP 2006), and of “World Architecture”. A Cross-Cultural History (with Spiro Kostof, Oxford UP, 2012).

Ingersoll received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, under the direction of Spiro Kostof.

Francesca Mugnai is Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at Università degli Studi di Firenze. She studies primarily modern and contemporary Italian architecture investigating the relationship that links architecture to landscape and memory. After the publication of “Edoardo Detti e Carlo Scarpa.

Realismo e incanto” (2010), in 2013 she curated the exhibition “Edoardo Detti architetto e urbanista, 1913-1984”; in 2017 she published the volume “La costruzione della memoria”. Since 2004 she has been a member of the editorial board of the scientific journal Firenze Architettura.

Meris Nicoletto received her doctorate in “Storia dei beni artistici, musicali e dello spettacolo” at the University of Padova in 2013. Her research interests are on the relation between cinema and literature, on the teaching of cinema, on history of the female figure in Italian and foreign film, on cinema of the Thirties and Forties, on urban landscape in Italian contemporary cinema. Dr. Nicoletto has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences. Among her publications

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the monograph Valerio Zurlini, “Il rifiuto del compromesso” (Falsopiano, 2011) and most recently the book “Donne nel cinema di regime tra tradizione e modernità” (Falsopiano, 2014).

Donata Panizza graduated in History of Contemporary Art and Comparative Literature from the University of Florence. After working as a museum assistant and free-lance art journalist in Florence, she enrolled in the PhD program at the Italian Department at Rutgers University. She is currently completing a dissertation titled “Overexposing Florence: Journeys through Photography, Cinema, Tourism, and Urban Space”.

Luca Pocci is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). His main fields of research are contemporary Italian fiction, narrative theory, utopian studies, and the poetics and politics of landscape.

He is co-editor of two volumes: “A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge” (Routledge, 2007), and “La rappresentazione del paesaggio nella letteratura e nel cinema dell’Italia contemporanea” (Mellen, 2013).

Silvia Ross (BA U of Toronto; MA, PhD Johns Hopkins University) is Senior Lecturer (equiv. to Associate Professor) and Head of Italian and former Associate Dean and Head of the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork. Her research concentrates on the representation of central Italy in modern and contemporary literature, the subject of her monograph, “Tuscan Spaces: Literary Constructions of Place” (U of Toronto P, 2010) and of her current research project entitled “Subverted Sites: Textual Representations of Conflict in Tuscany”. She has published in a number of scholarly journals and has co-edited the volumes “Rappresentare la violenza di genere. Sguardi femministi tra critica, attivismo e scrittura” (Mimesis, 2018); “Identity and Conflict in Tuscany” (Firenze University Press, 2015); “Mediterranean Travels: Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society” (Legenda, 2011) and “Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies” (Peter Lang, 1996).

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Teresa V. Sá, sociologist, assistant professor of Sociology and Anthropology in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon (FAUL). Phd in Sociology of Work (University Institute of Lisbon, 2009), with a master degree in Regional and Urban Planning by the Technical University of Lisbon (1990), and a degree in Sociology (ISCTE-IUL). Researcher at CIAUD (Research Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Design). Email: teresavsa@gmail.com Remi Wacogne has a background in Humanities and History of Art and Architecture, and completed his postgraduate studies first at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with a thesis consisting of an ethnography of Le Murate complex in Florence, then at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris and at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, where he specialised in Cultural Management. He is currently completing a PhD in Regional Planning and Public Policy at IUAV University in Venice, while also participating in the JPI-funded research project PICH-Planning & Heritage.

Finito di stampare da Officine Grafiche Francesco Giannini & Figli s.p.a. | Napoli per conto di didapress Dipartimento di Architettura UniversitĂ degli Studi di Firenze Dicembre 2019

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Italian Urban Space examines the city and its environment through theoretically-informed essays stemming from a variety of disciplines, including urban planning, architecture, cultural geography, architectural history, heritage studies, film studies, literary studies and photography. Contributions focus on the representation of urban space in modern and contemporary society, featuring primarily Italian cities such as Turin, Milan, Florence, Marghera and Naples.

Readers will benefit from the juxtaposition of the diverse approaches to urban environments provided by this collection of essays by international scholars. Chapters include analyses of spatial theory in relation to the urban sphere (Lefebvre, Foucault, AugĂŠ), environmental concerns (climate change and urban environments; heritage studies), and explore the representation of the city in novels, travelogues, film and photography, paying attention to key questions such as identity, transnationalism and gender.

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