Review: NEO-REALISM: URBAN FORM AND LA DOLCE VITA IN POST-WAR ITALY 1945-75

I was very pleased to find these comments in Anthony Raynsford's review of the book

'Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape'
edited by John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten and Peter J. Larkham (Routledge, 2014)

to which I contributed the final chapter on Neo-Realism

'Italian politics becomes the overt subject of Eamonn Canniffe's essay, ‘Neo-Realism’, which recapitulates portions of his book, The Politics of the Piazza (Ashgate, 2008). In this essay, Canniffe traces the ‘heroization of the working life and environment’ in representations of the Italian city, from the vernacular urban peripheries of Neo-Realist cinema to the starkly enigmatic typologies of Aldo Rossi's Neo-Rationalism, especially as these examples emerged from a leftist articulation of the city as framework for the unfolding of everyday life. [p. 241] Despite Canniffe's somewhat strained comparison between the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the architecture of Aldo Rossi, the essay delivers an effective analysis of the generally leftist politics behind these movements, providing a useful corrective to the often superficial accounts of Rossi as a post-modernist whilst also situating Italian post-war urbanism within Italy's unique political culture.'

Professor Raynsford teaches at San José State University and his full review appears in THE JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE Volume 21 Issue 1 2016 pp148-152