Invisible Cities
Invisible Cities

Author: Italo Calvino

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2013-08-12

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 054413320X

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Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Pocket Guide to Italian Cities
Pocket Guide to Italian Cities

Author: United States. Army Service Forces. Information and Education Division

Publisher:

Published: 1944

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13:

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A handbook for U.S. military personnel stationed in Italy during World War II.

Italian Cities and Landscapes
Italian Cities and Landscapes

Author: William H. Fain

Publisher: Balcony Press

Published: 2007-09-06

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781890449322

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In an age of digital cameras and computer renderings, the tradition of drawing and assembling an architectural sketchbook seems at once either willfully eccentric and or charmingly retrograde. But its profound importance to architecture and urban planning endures. Italian Cities and Landscapes is a compact and lovely sketch book created by architect William H. Fain during a six month fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Exploring the Italian city and countryside by bicycle, Fain used colored pencil to sketch scenes of the street life, the magnificent landscapes, and the architectural marvels of Italy. Italian Cities and Landscapes shows that for the creative individual, documenting travels through drawing continues to be a valuable means of learning to see, understand, and design.

The Italian City Republics
The Italian City Republics

Author: Daniel Philip Waley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1317864476

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Daniel Waley and Trevor Dean illustrate how, from the eleventh century onwards, many dozens of Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes of individual ‘tyrants’ took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material (both documentary and literary) to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seed-bed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. In this fourth edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of religion, women, housing, architecture and art, to take account of recent trends in the abundant historiography of these topics. A new selection of illuminating images has been included, and the bibliography brought up to date. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Italian City-Republics
The Italian City-Republics

Author: Trevor Dean

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-16

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1000630161

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Now in its fifth edition, The Italian City Republics illustrates how, from the eleventh century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes of individual ‘tyrants’ took over in most towns, these communes were the scene of a precocious, and very well-documented, experiment in republican self-government. In this new edition, Trevor Dean has expanded the book’s treatment of women and gender, the early history of the communes and the lives of non-élites. Focusing on the typical medium-sized towns rather than the better-known cities, the authors draw on a rich variety of contemporary material, both documentary and literary, to portray the world of the communes, illustrating the patriotism and public spirit as well as the equally characteristic factional strife which was to tear them apart. Discussion of the artistic and social lives of the inhabitants shows how these towns were the seedbed of the cultural achievements of the early Renaissance. The Bibliography has been updated to a list of Further Reading with the latest scholarship for students to continue their studies. Both students and the general reader interested in Italian history, literature and art will find this accessible book a rewarding and fascinating read.

The Italian City-State
The Italian City-State

Author: Philip Jones

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1997-05-22

Total Pages: 718

ISBN-13: 0191590304

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Italy in the Middle Ages was unique among the countries of Europe in recreating, in a changed environment, the urban civilization of antiquity - the society, culture, and political formations of city-states. This book examines the origins and nature of this phenomenon from the fall of Rome to the eve of its consummation, the Italian Renaissance. The explanation is sought in Italy's singular `double existence' between two contrasted worlds - ancient and medieval. The ancient was characterised by the total predominance of the landed aristocracy in economy and society, enforced through a peculiar system of city states embracing town and country. The new medieval influences were marked by the separation of town, country and aristocracy, by the identification of towns with trade and a mercantile bourgeoisie, and by commercial and proto-industrial revolution. Italy shared in both worlds. It remained a land of cities and of an urbanized ruling class (except in the Norman South) and re-established territorial city states; but the staes were very different from those of antiquity, the city leaders in the commercial revolution, and Italy itself seen as a nation of shopkeepers, birthplace of capitalism. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Philip Jones traces in detail the tension and interaction between the two traditions, civic and patrician, mercantile and bourgeois, through all phases of Italian life to their culmination in two rival regimes of communes and despots.

Cento Citta
Cento Citta

Author: Paul Hofmann

Publisher: Owl Books

Published: 1990-12-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780805014655

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Describes points of interest in Italy's small cities and towns, discusses the history of each region, and recommends hotels and restaurants

Moderns Abroad
Moderns Abroad

Author: Mia Fuller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-01-24

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1134648308

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This volume studies the architecture and urbanism of modern-era Italian colonialism (1869-1943) as it sought to build colonies in North and East Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Mia Fuller follows, not only the design of the physical architecture, but also the development of colonial design theory, based on the assumptions made about the colonized, and also the application of modernist theory to both Italian architecture and that of its colonies. Moderns Abroad is the first book to present an overview of Italian colonial architecture and city planning. In chronicling Italian architects' attempts to define a distinctly Italian colonial architecture that would set Italy apart from Britain and France, it provides a uniquely comparative study of Italian colonialism and architecture that will be of interest to specialists in modern architecture, colonial studies, and Italian studies alike.

The Development of Cities in Northern and Central Italy
The Development of Cities in Northern and Central Italy

Author: Paul N. Balchin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-19

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1000550788

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Originally published in 2019, this book provides a comprehensive account of a formative historical period, uniquely describing Renaissance architecture as the physical manifestation of political and economic change. The book illustrates how shifts in architectural style and design were paralleled with Northern and Central Italy’s external and internal conflicts, the evolution of urban and regional government, and economic and demographic growth. Covering the full extent of the Renaissance period, Balchin charts the era’s medieval roots and its transformation into Mannerist and Baroque tendencies. He demonstrates how developments in architecture and planning were inextricably linked to political and economic power, and how these relationships shifted from city to city over time.