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).

Mills & Murgatroyd: Mr. Thomas's Chop House, Manchester (1901)

Gate of Honour, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (1575)

Travis & Mangnall: 83 Princess Street, Manchester (1847)

Graham Sutherland: Christ in Majesty

Sir Jacob Epstein: St. Michael subduing the devil (1959)

Sir Basil Spence: Coventry Cathedral (1956-62)

Carlo Scarpa: Bridge of the Querini Stampalia, Venice

Korean Edition

My 2007 book MODERN ARCHITECTURE THROUGH CASE STUDIES 1945-1990 (co-authored with Peter Blundell Jones) is to be published in a Korean language edition by the Daega Publishing Company of Seoul in Autumn 2010. The translation is being prepared by Dr. Alfred Bong Hwangbo of Seoul National University of Technology

A Chinese edition was published in 2009

Station Semiotics

17-23 St. Ann's Square, Manchester

"This is a wonderful book"

This is a wonderful book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who has traveled to Italy or would like to, to anyone interested in Italy in general and it’s fabled sense of la dolce vita, and to anyone interested in cities, history, architecture, art or the impact of technology on social life. Canniffe provides an excellent history of the political meaning of the Italian piazza from the Roman forum to the postmodern. The book reflects years of research transformed into a cohesive well-written text filled with beautiful photographs of Italian piazzas. The authors enthusiasm for and extensive direct experience in piazzas throughout Italy is something that all readers will appreciate, regardless of the particular interests that bring them to the book.
Rating: 5 / 5

Professor David Vogler of Wheaton College (Norton, MA) was kind enough to post the above comment on THE POLITICS OF THE PIAZZA here. David used the book in his paper Can you tell me where a person can go to find a decent piazza in this town? An Italian piazza and quality of life which he allowed me to publish here

Northern Neo-Grec

41-43 Faulkner Street, Manchester (1846) by Thomas Fish Taylor

Rus in Urbe

Ste-Genevieve (Panthéon) by Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713-80)

Archaelogy's Places and Contemporary Uses: An Exhibition

Venue: Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design
Righton Building, All Saints, Manchester Metropolitan University

4 May to 14 May 2010

Come along to the private view 4 May from 18:30 until 20:30




Involving students from Manchester, Venice, Barcelona and Catania.






This collaborative project was funded by a grant from the Lifelong Learning, Erasmus Intensive Programme and it started with a two-week international student design workshop in the early autumn of 2009. The workshop proposals were then exhibited at a conference at the IUAV in November 2009 and will form the basis of a travelling exhibition that will be in Manchester in the spring of 2010. The design workshop was based in Venice and the students and their tutors lived in the city for the two week period. The results of the workshop, and a compliation of papers written by the lecturers who were directly involved in the project will be published in May 2010. Visit the project website.



The project also features on the website European Higher Education Area : celebrating a decade of UK engagement



The exhibition is an event of the Manchester Architecture and Design Festival

E. Vincent Harris: Central Reference Library, Manchester 1930-34