Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape
- Part I Knowing Rome
- 1 Between Rome's Walls: Notes on the Role and Reception of the Aurelian Walls
- 2 The Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography: Federico Fellini and the Forma Urbis
- 3 Centre, Hinterland and the Articulation of ‘Romanness’ in Recent Italian Film
- Part II Fragmented Topography
- Part III Situating Rome
- Notes
- Index
2 - The Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography: Federico Fellini and the Forma Urbis
from Part I - Knowing Rome
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape
- Part I Knowing Rome
- 1 Between Rome's Walls: Notes on the Role and Reception of the Aurelian Walls
- 2 The Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography: Federico Fellini and the Forma Urbis
- 3 Centre, Hinterland and the Articulation of ‘Romanness’ in Recent Italian Film
- Part II Fragmented Topography
- Part III Situating Rome
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Much scholarship has been devoted to the unique development of Rome during centuries of European intellectual history as the symbolic forma urbis: it has repeatedly been perceived as the city that summarized all cities. Rome was at once a geographical location and an ideal, the cradle of antiquity and the holy site of Christianity. The universal city of classicism since the Middle Ages, it represented an ancestral model on which the great Western metropolises were later to be founded or reshaped. In the cases of Paris, London, Berlin, and more ‘recent’ cities like New York City, Washington, DC and Buenos Aires, marmoreal colonnades, memorials, triumphal arches, domes and obelisks were the landmarks that characterized the shape of the urban landscape, marking the presence of a sacred aura of power and its culture that are direct descendents of the Roman Empire and its historical memory.
In the modern period, the relationship of the Italian intellectual with Rome has been pointedly visceral and contradictory. It was impossible to separate the symbolic importance of the city – in relation to national unification – and its reality: a chaotic and often provincial town, humiliated by the rigidity of the Papal bureaucracy and later by the presence of an asphyxiating and myopic Piedmontese government. From Giacomo Leopardi to Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Carlo Levi, the disappointment of intellectuals over the contrast between ideal value of Rome and its real condition become almost a literary topos.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape , pp. 39 - 56Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014