Sanderson Miller (1716-80), William Hiorne (c.1712-76) and David Hiorne (1715-58): Shire Hall, Warwick 1753-58

Thomas Johnson (died 1800): County Gaol, Warwick 1777-83

Sir William Wilson (1641-1710): Collegiate Church of St. Mary, Warwick 1704

Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick

Francis Smith of Warwick (1672-1738): Old Courthouse, Warwick 1724-31

Forthcoming Publication

Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape
Editors: Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin

Warwick Series in the Humanities
Hb: c.256pp: 2013
978 1 84893 349 1: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
  978 1 78144 000 1

Until the mid-twentieth century the Western imagination seemed intent on viewing Rome purely in terms of its Classical past or as a stop on the Grand Tour. This collection of essays looks at Rome from a postmodern perspective, including analysis of the city's 'unmappability', its unity, and its iconic status in literature and film.

Contents
Introduction – Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin
Part I: Knowing Rome
1 Roma intra muros, Roma extra muros – Marco Cavietti
2 'The Paradise, The Grave, The City, and The Wilderness': A Travelogue of Imagined Rome – Eamonn Canniffe
3 The Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography – Fabio Benincasa
Part II: Fragmented Topography
4 Topophilia and Other Roman Perversions – John David Rhodes
5 Filming on the Campidoglio – Lesley Caldwell
6 Simulacra and Deconstruction: Anachronistic Clashes Between the Classical and the Postmodern – Filippo Trentin
7 A Postmodern Gaze on the Gazometro – Keala Jewell
Part III: Situating Rome
8 Ecclesiastical Icons: Defining Rome through Architectural Exchange – James Robertson
9 Roma Interrotta, 1978–2010: A Retrospective Historical Analysis – Léa-Catherine Szacka
10 Las Vegas, by Way of Rome: The Eternal City and American Postmodernism – Richard W Hayes

This volume will gather together the presentations from the University of Warwick conference The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome held earlier this year. The images from my keynote paper are below.

The book may be ordered here

the Paradise, The grave, the city and the wilderness

The images from yesterday's keynote lecture at the University of Warwick conference
THE POSTMODERN PALIMPSEST: NARRATING CONTEMPORARY ROME

"the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness": travels between the past and future Rome

This phrase from Shelley's Adonais is a route into the concept of Rome as a palimpsest, more evocative in its four overlapping terms than Freud's famous image which compares the city to the human mind 'an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.' Shelley's words suggest the different ways , surely many more than merely four, in which the physical fabric of the city might be read, above all the city which remains a fundamental locus of European culture.

The pattern which can be read in its monuments, as forensic clues in some vast site of investigation, tie events across time to provide the matrix through which urban representation occurs. My paper will explore the city through the narratives which have animated its spaces in fact and fiction, or in the grey zone which includes both those realities. Rome as image of the city is as pervasive as the image of Rome, and therefore the readings of Rome stand proxy for many of the manifestations of the contemporary urban condition.


The above text is the abstract of my keynote paper at the forthcoming University of Warwick conference THE POSTMODERN PALIMPSEST: NARRATING CONTEMPORARY ROME

The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome

The Postmodern Palimpsest:

Narrating Contemporary Rome

Saturday 26^th February 2011

A one-day interdisciplinary conference

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Rome is privileged in its relationship with Western history, constructed over layer after layer, from Roman to Fascist ‘empires’: in this sense the city constitutes the urban palimpsest. In postmodernity, the sprawl, the latest metamorphosis of Rome, overlaps with historical images of the capital to form a shapeless and fragmentary identity. The aim of this conference is to probe this latest level of the city, to discern the new and the old, and the links and reflections of one onto the other

Keynote Speakers:

Eamonn Canniffe (Manchester)

Dr. John David Rhodes (Sussex)

For further information and to register: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/pmp/

Provisional Programme

Saturday 26^th February 2011

Humanities Building, University of Warwick

09.00 – 09.20 Registration and Coffee

09.20 – 09.30 Conference Welcome and Introduction

____________________________________________________________________________________________

09.30 – 10.30 Panel One: Re-Mapping the Ecclesiastical City

Chair: (tbc)

James Robertson (Manchester) – ‘Ecclesiastical Icons: Defining Rome through Architectural Exchange’

Marco Cavietti (Rome) – ‘Roma intra muros, Roma extra muros’

____________________________________________________________________________________________

10.30-10.45 Tea/Coffee Break

____________________________________________________________________________________________

10.45-11.45 Panel Two: Landmarks of Modernity

Chair: (tbc)

Allison Cooper (Colby College) – ‘Builiding a Symbolic Capital: The Monumental Planning of Modern Rome’

Keala Jewell (Dartmouth College) – ‘A Postmodern Gaze on the Gazometro’

____________________________________________________________________________________________

11.45-12.00 Tea/Coffee Break

____________________________________________________________________________________________

12.00-13.00 Keynote 1: Eamonn Canniffe (Manchester School of Architecture)

______________________________________________________________________________________

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

______________________________________________________________________________________

14.00 – 15.30 Panel Three: Representations of Fragmented Cityscapes

Chair: (tbc)

Fabio Benincasa (Duquesne) – ‘L’odore del sangue da Parise a Martone. La mappa assente della Città Eterna’

Carmelo Princiotta (Rome) – ‘Dario Bellezza e la Roma dei poeti’

Marina Vargau (Montreal) – ‘Raccontare Roma dopo Fellini’

______________________________________________________________________________

15.30-15.45 Tea/Coffee Break

_________________________________________________________________________________________

15.45 – 16.45 Panel Four: Reinterpreting the Urban Map

Léa-Catherine Szacka (UCL) – ‘Roma Interrotta: A comparative historical analysis of the 18th century urban project on display (1978 to 2008)’

Richard Hayes (Cambridge) – ‘Las Vegas by Way of Rome: the Eternal City and American Postmodernism’

____________________________________________________________________________________________

16.45-17.00 Tea/Coffee Break

____________________________________________________________________________________________

17.00-18.00 Keynote 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex)

18.00-18.30 Roundtable Discussion

______________________________________________________________________________________

18.30-19.30 Wine Reception and Buffet

_______________________________________________________________________________________

The conference is organised by Dominic Holdaway and Filippo Trentin

CALL FOR PAPERS - The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome

The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome

«What better place to await the end, to see if everything ceases or not?»

- Gore Vidal, in Roma

Keynote Speakers: Eamonn Canniffe (Manchester School of Architecture)

& Dr. John David Rhodes (Sussex University)

Saturday 26th February 2011, University of Warwick

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Rome of Federico Fellini’s eponymous film (1972), with suffocating traffic passing dazzling locations, and police brutality in enchanting piazzas; the Rome of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), with long tracks down shadowed streets and lively social gatherings masking potential violence: these images, though informed by converse ideologies, offer overlapping fragments of Rome’s ‘imagined geography’. The closing shots of Roma linger on dozens of mopeds fading into the distant black as they abandon the historical centre for an undefined urban sprawl. The sprawl, the latest metamorphosis of Rome, overlaps with historical images of the capital to form a shapeless identity, a fragmentary postmodernity.

Rome is privileged in its relationship with Western history, constructed over layer after layer, from Roman to Fascist ‘empires’: in this sense the city constitutes the urban palimpsest, with a deliberate void at the end. Rome is going through a time of change that needs to be theoretically framed: this conference aims to provide this through a multidisciplinary approach aiming to link together both urban and architectural analyses, and literary and cinematic ones. The classical palimpsest and the ‘modern’ Rome are overlapping with manifestations of the city’s postmodernity, such as the controversial new museum for the Ara Pacis (2006), the recent museum for contemporary art Maxxi (2010) and, in cinema and literature, ‘New Italian Epic’ depictions such as Il divo and Romanzo criminale. These images affirm a progression beyond Fellini and Pasolini’s ‘modernity’, though one with strikingly little critical attention. They aim to probe the above citation of Vidal, his conception of ‘the end’, and tentatively paint this as a movement towards post-history.

This conference will seek to address the following questions:

- Where present and past intersect and overlap synchronically, is it still possible to represent ‘reality’, or possible only to capture fragments of it?

- Can we still perceive the city as a ‘master narrative’, or do we need to challenge the notion of one city?

- How can the city be perceived in relation to Italian and to European landscapes?

- How does the image of Rome relate to contemporary global cities?

- How is this historical shift represented in global cultural products, and how do they redefine our perception?

Research methodologies are unlimited (urban & architectural studies, cultural theory, photographic and film studies, (art) history, comparative literature and anthropology etc.), and papers will be welcomed which engage with the city or with its representation.

Titles and abstracts (maximum of 300 words) for proposed papers should be sent in either English or Italian to the conference organizers, Dominic Holdaway (D.F.G.Holdaway@warwick.ac.uk) and Filippo Trentin (F.Trentin@warwick.ac.uk), by 30th September 2010.

The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome

Eamonn Canniffe has been invited to give a keynote lecture at the above titled conference organised by Dominic Holdaway and Filippo Trentin to be held at the University of Warwick in February 2011






The Postmodern Palimpsest: Narrating Contemporary Rome



«What better place to await the end, to see if everything ceases or not?»



- Gore Vidal, in Roma



The city of Rome has always been privileged in its relationship with Western history: constructed over layer upon layer, from Roman to Fascist empires, with corresponding iconic images. More recently, films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini have contributed to capturing the changes modern Rome underwent, with suffocating traffic passing dazzling locations, long tracks down shadowed streets and lively social gatherings masking potential violence. These images have been qualified as embodying ‘modern’ Rome. The closing shots of Fellini’s Roma (1972) linger on dozens of mopeds fading into the distant black as they abandon the historical centre for an undefined urban sprawl. The sprawl, the latest metamorphosis of Rome, overlaps with historical images of the capital to form a shapeless identity, a fragmentary postmodernity.



This conference, which will take place at the University of Warwick in February 2011, aims to shed light on contemporary imagined geographies of Rome: it will investigate the void at the end of Roman palimpsest, addressing the following questions:



- Where present and past intersect and overlap synchronically, is it still possible to represent ‘reality’, or possible only to capture fragments of it?



- Can we still perceive the city as a ‘master narrative’, or do we need to challenge the notion of one city?



- How can the city be perceived in relation to Italian and to European landscapes?



- How does the image of Rome relate to contemporary global cities?



- How is this historical shift represented in global cultural products, and how do they redefine our perception?



The interdisciplinary nature of this event is acutely represented by its two keynote speakers: Eamonn Canniffe (Manchester School of Architecture; author of The Politics of the Piazza: the history and meaning of the Italian square) and Dr. John David Rhodes (Literature and Visual Culture, Sussex; author of Stupendous Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome).