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Titre:
The architecture of public space

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$95.00
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Résumé:
This new book by Labics, one of Italy’s leading architectural firms, is devoted to the country’s architecture of public space. Squares, galleries, loggias, porticoes, and courtyards are the elements that characterize Italy’s historic towns and cities—and that make the experience of these public spaces intense and attractive. Labics sets out to explore these enchanting spaces, to analyze their history and typologies, and to document and describe them through newly produced photographs, plans, and diagrams. They offer a taxonomy of solutions that, as a whole, forms a timeless theory for the design of public spaces. ''The architecture of public ppace'' forms a captivating collection of image material that visually decodes the characteristic core elements of Italian architecture and specifies their role in the definition of public space. The volume highlights the architectural solutions from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries that produce the particular spatial quality of these urban structures and sets out how they were originally established for and are continuing to be used by the people.

Titre:
Venice from the ground up

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$34.95
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Résumé:
Venice came to life on spongy mudflats at the edge of the habitable world. Protected in a tidal estuary from barbarian invaders and Byzantine overlords, the fishermen, salt gatherers, and traders who settled there crafted an amphibious way of life unlike anything the Roman Empire had ever known. James H. S. McGregor recreates this world-turned-upside-down, with its waterways rather than roads, its boats tethered alongside dwellings, and its livelihood harvested from the sea. McGregor begins with the river currents that poured into the shallow Lagoon, carving channels in its bed and depositing islands of silt. He then describes the imaginative responses of Venetians to the demands and opportunities of this harsh environment - transforming the channels into canals, reclaiming salt marshes for the construction of massive churches, erecting a thriving marketplace and stately palaces along the Grand Canal. Through McGregor's eyes, we witness the flowering of Venice's restless creativity in the elaborate mosaics of St. Mark's soaring basilica, the expressive paintings in smaller neighborhood churches, and the colorful religious festivals - but also in theatrical productions, gambling casinos, and masked revelry, which reveal the city's less pious and orderly face. McGregor tells his unique history of Venice by drawing on a crumbling, tide-threatened cityscape and a treasure-trove of art that can still be seen in place today. The narrative follows both a chronological and geographical organization, so that readers can trace the city's evolution chapter by chapter and visitors can explore it district by district on foot and by boat.

Titre:
The foundation of Rome

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This book deals with `the historical anthropology of the ancient world', investigating the way in which Romans represented the founding figure of Romulus and the foundation of Rome in the mid-8th century BC, rather than examining whether it really did happen that way. Augusto Fraschetti presents the history of the foundation of Rome as it existed in the writings of historians such as Tacitus and Livy, by poets such as Ovid and by Cicero. In examining events in the life of Romulus, such as his war-making skills, his troubled relationship with the senate and the dismemberment of his body, Fraschetti asks whether authors exploited these episodes to comment upon actual events such as the assassination of Casear. This book is also about how Romans during the reign of Augustus, created their own history in order to account for and justify their future imperial glory, at the cost of their republican ideals. Appendices examine the ambiguous figure of Tarpeia and the archaeological discovery of a piece of wall at the foot of the Palatine Hill which has been dated to the 8th century BC. Translated from the Italian by Marian Hill and Kevin Windle.

Titre:
Voyage dans la Rome baroque : le vatican, les princes et les fêtes musicales

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Italianiste et historien de la musique, l'auteur plonge dans la vie culturelle de la Rome baroque aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles et fait découvrir la musique et l'opéra, les fêtes de l'aristocratie, les palais privés, les cérémonies du Vatican, les carnavals, les courses de chevaux.

Titre:
The piazza San Marco

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$22.99
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Résumé:
The piazza San Marco, one of the most famous and instantly recognizable townscapes in the West, if not the world, has been described as a stage set, as Europe’s drawing room, as a painter’s canvas. This book traces the changing shape and function of the piazza, from its beginnings in the ninth century to its present day ubiquity in the Venetian, European, as well as global imagination. Through its long history, the Piazza San Marco has functioned as civic space that was used for such varied activities as public meetings; animal-baiting; executions; state processions; meat and produce markets; a performance venue for rock concerts; as well as, more recently, a cafe to enjoy a leisurely Campari. Constantly alert to the question of function, this book recreates not only rituals of the past but also activities of the present.

Titre:
Engineering the eternal city: infrastructure, topography, and the culture of knowledge in Rome

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$64.95
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Résumé:
Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the ''engineering pope'' Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, ''Engineering the Eternal City'' explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before.

Titre:
The allure of Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck draws the city, 1532

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In 1532, the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) traveled from Haarlem to Rome. Pencil in hand, he discovered antiquity and the Renaissance. His remarkable drawings take us on a journey through time in sixteenth-century Rome. Van Heemskerck was everywhere, from the Colosseum to the Forum Romanum to the Piazza del Campidoglio. He was one of the first artists from north of the Alps to embark on a trip to Rome purely for the sake of art. His sketches reveal his admiration for the buildings and artworks of antiquity and the contemporary art of Raphael and Michelangelo. This magnificent volume invites the reader to discover van Heemkerck’s drawing technique, Roman topography, and the social network of the sixteenth century as well as the fascinating story of the restoration of his Roman sketchbook.

Titre:
The architecture of modern Italy volume I: the challenge of tradition, 1750-1900

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$40.95
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Résumé:
Volume 1 : the challenge of tradition, 1750-1900 explores the dynamic balancing the forces demanded by a reverence for Italy's unparalleled architectural patrimony and a desire for new means of expression and technological innovation. From the neoclassical fantasies of Giovanni Battista Piranesi to the spectaculor steel-and-glass galleries of Milan, 'The challenge of tradition' reveals an underappreciated history of richness and complexity.

Titre:
The gates of paradise : Lorenzo Ghiberti's masterpiece

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$49.95
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Résumé:
In 1452, Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti unveiled a masterpiece that had been a quarter-century in the making: ten bronze panels depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of Paradise” one of the great masterworks of Western art. This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume.

Titre:
Venice : the tourist maze

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$27.50
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Résumé:
"The tourist Venice is Venice," Mary McCarthy once observed--a sentiment very much in line with what most of the fourteen million tourists who visit the city each year experience, but at the same time a painful reality for the 65,000 Venetians who actually live there. Venice is viewed from a new perspective in this engaging book, which offers a heady, one-city tour of tourism itself. Conducting readers from the beginnings of Venetian tourism in the late Middle Ages to its emergence as a form of mass entertainment in our time, the authors explore what happens when today's "industrial tourism" collides with an ancient and ever-more-fragile culture. Giving equal consideration to those who tour Venice and those who live there, their book affords rare insight into just what it is that the touring and the toured see, experience, and elicit from each other.