LanguageTerm (authority = ISO 639-3:2007); (type = text)
English
Language
LanguageTerm (authority = ISO 639-3:2007); (type = text)
Italian
Abstract (type = abstract)
My dissertation “Spectacular Capital(ist) City: Wanderings through Rome from 1870 to the Economic Miracle” analyzes modern Italian cultural production that investigates the city’s singular role in forging Italian national identity through monuments and urban plans and reflects on the effects that these modifications had in the daily lives of the capital’s inhabitants. My work includes chapters on heterogeneous texts such as Altobelli’s photo of the breach of Porta Pia and articles chronicling Rome’s conquest and its urban transformations (De Amicis, Imbriani, Faldella, D’Annunzio), novels depicting the daily life in the capital (Serao’s La conquista di Roma, D’Annunzio’s Il piacere e Le Vergini delle Rocce, and Morante’s La Storia) and politicians’ speeches (Crispi, Mussolini), post-neorealist films (Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Fellini’s Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio) and urban plans.
The texts under consideration reveal that the Italian state’s at times frantic, superficial, and spectacular modifications to the capital’s urban structure reveal the nation’s frustration with its perceived “backwardness” or “belatedness” with regard to European modernity. Indeed, the process of national unification cannot be detangled from the desire of transforming Italy into a more productive, industrialized, capitalist country. In the texts analyzed, the authors isolate different agents that transformed Rome’s appearance: the State, which regulated internal migration, segregated the working poor in the city’s outskirts, erected new monuments, and planned new bourgeois districts; land speculators who destroyed green areas and attracted thousands of underpaid workers; and, more in general, the explosion of capitalism. These texts demonstrate how social and cultural homogenization, the expulsion of the deviant, and the spectacularization of the society through architecture and media are at the base of capitalist nation formation.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Italian
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TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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