Italy

Italy
Author: Andrew Whittaker
Publisher: Thorogood Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010
Genre: Culture
ISBN: 1854186280

Speak the Culture: Italy offers a rich and engaging insight into the events, people and movements that have shaped Italy and the Italians. A guidebook can show you where to go, a phrase-book what to say, but only Speak the Culture: Italy will lead you to the nation's soul. The Italian character is complex, contradictory, alluring and infinitely variable: heirs to the greatest empire of the ancient world but almost ungovernable; cradle of western civilization as well as the Mafia; maestros of modern design, mired in old-fashioned bureaucracy; epicentre of the Catholic Church and exemplars of la dolce vita. Where do you start? Giotto? Caravaggio? Murky Etruscan tombs or the mighty Roman Pantheon? Speak the Culture: Italy sifts through a sprawling 3,000 year saga and makes sense of it, dissecting architecture, music, food, art, literature, cinema, family and much more. Culture is covered in its broadest sense, extending into every aspect of Italian life--food and drink, religion, politics, sport, manners, character and so on. While the Italian peninsula has its ancient history, it's been a unified nation for less than 150 years. Lo Stivale, or the famous Boot, is young: the nuances of strong, surviving regional identities are important and revealed. Taken as a whole, Speak the Culture: Italy gives you an insight into what it means to be Italian, but it's also a book to dip into, to learn, for instance, about Giuseppe Verdi, Sophia Loren or Umberto Eco. Easily read and beautifully illustrated, this, the fourth in the Speak the Cultureseries, offers an intimate understanding of Italian life and culture for new residents, second home-owners, holidaymakers, business travelers, students and lovers of Italy everywhere.

Italy in Uncertain Times

Italy in Uncertain Times
Author: Carla Monteleone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498581846

This book analyzes how variations in the traditional pillars of Italian foreign policy (the US, the EU and multilateralism) can be related to changes in the US-led international hegemonic order and to the role that Italy plays within that order. To explore these variations, the book proposes an analysis of the Italian voting and sponsoring behavior at the UN in the period 2000-2017, in both the General Assembly and the Security Council, and emphasizes the importance of the latter forum to detect how Italian behavior reflects changes at the international system level. By focusing on the Italian coalition behavior, the book explores how Italy as a status seeking middle power has traditionally played the role of coalition facilitator, adapting its foreign policy to be part of a coalition of European states and building on this coalition to increase its contribution to the maintenance of the international system in support of the US-led order. Ultimately this behavior also contributed to its status. However, at a moment when traditional coalitions are reshuffling, and elements of uncertainty are present, elements of volatility are present in Italian foreign policy, especially in the choice of intra-European coalition partners. Italy still builds on a coalition of European states and still does so in support of the US and its authority in the international hegemonic order. But changes in the bargaining environment are making the facilitation of a coalition of European states more difficult and less rewarding. The book also highlights ongoing challenges at both the domestic and international level that might lead to more marked discontinuities in the traditional Italian foreign policy behavior

Italy

Italy
Author: Diane Ghirardo
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1861899696

Packed in its dense, historic city centers, Italy holds some of the most prized architecture and art in the world, with which planners and politicians have had to negotiate as they struggle to cope with massive migration from the countryside to the city. Early modern architecture coincided with a sustained drive to transform a country that was still primarily rural into a modern industrial state, and throughout the twentieth century, architects in Italy have attempted to define the role of architecture within a capitalist economy and under diverse political systems. In Italy: Modern Architectures in History, Diane Yvonne Ghirardo addresses these and other issues in her analysis of the last century of Italy’s building practices. Specifically, she examines the post-unification efforts to identify a distinctly Italian architectural language, as well as the transformation of the urban environment in Italian cities undergoing industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She challenges received interpretations of modern architecture and also looks at the subject of illegal building and current responses to ecological challenges. In order to illuminate the full scope of the building industry in Italy, her examples are drawn not only from the work of widely published architects in the largest cities but from throughout the peninsula, including small towns and rural areas. Insightful reading for those interested in Italian culture, this book offers a new way of understanding the architectural history of modern Italy.

Italy Builds

Italy Builds
Author: George Everard Kidder Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1955
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9789990899481

Lady Morgan's Italy

Lady Morgan's Italy
Author: Donatella Abbate Badin
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1933146087

This is a scholarly study of Lady Morgan(Sydney Owenson)and her travel writings on post Napoleonic Italy. Morgan, a friend of Byron and Moore, brought a unique Anglo-Irish slant and liberal temperment to her travels and adventures in Italy; she also was the first woman from the British literary world to extensively travel and report on 19th c Italy.

Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture

Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture
Author: Denise Costanzo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-05-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1350257745

Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century. Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure. Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.

Reconstructing Italy

Reconstructing Italy
Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317070291

Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.

Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK

Post-war Architecture between Italy and the UK
Author: Lorenzo Ciccarelli
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1800080832

Italy and the UK experienced a radical re-organisation of urban space following the devastation of many towns and cities in the Second World War. The need to rebuild led to an intellectual and cultural exchange between a wave of talented architects, urbanists and architectural historians in the two countries. Post-war Architecture Between Italy and the UK studies this exchange, exploring how the connections and mutual influences contributed to the formation of a distinctive stance towards Internationalism, notwithstanding the countries’ contrasting geographic and climatic conditions, levels of economic and industrial development, and social structures. Topics discussed in the volume include the influence of Italian historic town centres on British modernist and Brutalist architectural approaches to the design of housing and university campuses as public spaces; post-war planning concepts such as the precinct; the tensions between British critics and Italian architects that paved the way for British postmodernism; and the role of architectural education as a melting pot of mutual influence. It draws on a wealth of archival and original materials to present insights into the personal relationships, publications, exhibitions and events that provided the crucible for the dissemination of ideas and typologies across cultural borders. Offering new insights into the transcultural aspects of European architectural history in the post-war years, and its legacy, this volume is vital reading for architectural and urban historians, planners and students, as well as social historians of the European post-war period.

Reconstructing Italy

Reconstructing Italy
Author: Stephanie Zeier Pilat
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317070305

Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.

Italy and the Environmental Humanities

Italy and the Environmental Humanities
Author: Serenella Iovino
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813941083

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego