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Italy and the Myth of Rome Reading List

Core Texts

Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. by Robert M Durling (Harvard University Press, 1997)
Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il piacere
Matilda Serao, La conquista di Roma
Ettore Scola (dir), Una giornata particolare (1977)
Igiaba Scego, La mia casa e’ dove sono (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010) – extracts.
Vittorio De Sica (dir), Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Luchino Visconti (dir), Bellissima (1951)
Federico Fellini (dir), La dolce vita (1959)
Alberto Moravia, Racconti romani (Bompiani, 1954) – extracts
Ferzan Ozpetek (dir), Le fate ignoranti (2001)
Amara Lakhous, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Rome: E/O, 2006)
Agostino Ferrente (dir), L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (2006)

Photographic and video material from the 1920s and 1930s (including footage from the Istituto Luce)
Maps of Rome in its different phases of evolution
Rome: Continuing Encounters between Past and Present, ed. by Dorigen Caldwell & Lesley Caldwell (Ashgate, 2011).
Cinematic Rome, ed. by Richard Wrigley, (Troubador, 2008).


Selected Secondary Reading

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, “Building Power: Italy’s Colonial Architecture and Urbanism, 1923–1940,” Cultural Anthropology 3(4)(1988): 455–87
De Felice, Renzo, and Luigi Goglia, Storia fotografica del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1981)
Forgacs, David, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Neorealism in Postwar Italy’, in N. Hewitt (ed.), The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought and Film (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 51-56.
Fuller, Mia, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007)
Gordon, Robert S.C., Bicycle thieves (Basingstoke ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan : BFI, 2008).
A. Grafton et al. (eds.), The Classical Tradition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010 (entries ‘Alberti’, ‘Architecture’, ‘Vitruvius and the Classical Orders’, ‘Laocoon’, ‘Pantheon’)
F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven-London, 1981.
Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, ed. by Cristina Lombardi-Diop & Caterina Romeo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
W. L. MacDonald, The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny, Cambridge, MA, 1976.
Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)