Regarding Romantic Rome
Regarding Romantic Rome

Author: Richard Wrigley

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9783039111206

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This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore the cultural history and representation of Rome from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The essays address diverse aspects of Rome as a subject and site of Romantic experience and commentary, investigating the legacy of the Grand Tour, and the changing face of Rome in the early nineteenth century. The contributions range across various media, genres, and topics - the Roman art market, paintings of contemporary Romans and their interpretation, music in and 'of' Rome, the evolution of nineteenth-century guidebooks, novels which take Rome as their narrative mise-en-scène, the idea of Rome as a setting for creative activity, ruins as polysemic metaphor, women and the reception of antiquity, the aesthetics of urban hygiene, and the mythology of that renowned quarter of Rome, Trastevere. In different ways, all of the contributions to this volume contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Rome's changing identity and the evolving forms of literary and artistic representation employed to record, evoke, commemorate, or make sense of the city, its people, and landscape.

Tosca's Rome
Tosca's Rome

Author: Susan Vandiver Nicassio

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002-01-15

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9780226579726

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A timeless tale of love, lust, and politics, Tosca is one of the most popular operas ever written. In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio explores the surprising historical realities that lie behind Giacomo Puccini's opera and the play by Victorien Sardou on which it is based. By far the most "historical" opera in the active repertoire, Tosca is set in a very specific time and place: Rome, from June 17 to 18, 1800. But as Nicassio demonstrates, history in Tosca is distorted by nationalism and by the vehement anticlerical perceptions of papal Rome shared by Sardou, Puccini, and the librettists. To provide the historical background necessary for understanding Tosca, Nicassio takes a detailed look at Rome in 1800 as each of Tosca's main characters would have seen it—the painter Cavaradossi, the singer Tosca, and the policeman Scarpia. Finally, she provides a scene-by-scene musical and dramatic analysis of the opera. "[Nicassio] must be the only living historian who can boast that she once sang the role of Tosca. Her deep knowledge of Puccini's score is only to be expected, but her understanding of daily and political life in Rome at the close of the 18th century is an unanticipated pleasure. She has steeped herself in the period and its prevailing culture-literary, artistic, and musical-and has come up with an unusual, and unusually entertaining, history."—Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph "In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio . . . orchestrates a wealth of detail without losing view of the opera and its pleasures. . . . Nicassio aims for opera fans and for historians: she may well enthrall both."—Publishers Weekly "This is the book that ranks highest in my estimation as the most in-depth, and yet highly entertaining, journey into the story of the making of Tosca."—Catherine Malfitano "Nicassio's prose . . . is lively and approachable. There is plenty here to intrigue everyone-seasoned opera lovers, musical novices, history buffs, and Italophiles."—Library Journal