The Architect, the Writer, and the Detective: Gianni Biondillo's Milan from the Margins, or the Education of the Gaze

ABSTRACT

Scholars are actively reflecting on how the narrative viewpoint found in city fiction endorses alternative ways of seeing, describing, and constructing urban space. Their assumption is that fiction writers can better scope out and explain to us metamorphoses in the contemporary urban environment. Gianni Biondillo, the Milanese architect and author of crime fiction and essays on the city, breaks with the tradition of Milanese noir by redeeming the urban periphery from stereotypes that exile marginal neighborhoods and their residents. By setting his fiction in Quarto Oggiaro, Bovisa, and other peripheral neighborhoods of Milan, he draws readers into a dialogue about urban identity, community, and citizenship. This study analyzes several narrative and epistemological features of his detective fiction through which Biondillo intervenes in ongoing debates about the future of the city. His topographical and architectural descriptions compel us to rethink urban residents' psychological and physical relationships with the built environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• Gianni Biondillo
• community
• detective fiction
• identity
• Milan
• periphery
• space
• urban studies

Notes

1. Several studies point to this conclusion. See Barenghi et al.; Papotti and Tomasi; Marocco; Kort; Lehan; La Porta.

2. Systematic studies of Biondillo's fiction and nonfiction have not been undertaken to date. Barbara Pezzotti lists him among the crime fiction writers of the “Milanese school” whose work condemns the widespread corruption of the Lombard capital in the 1980s (126). Fleeting glimpses of the Milanese architect appear in Pischedda (14–15) and Pieri (132).

3. In Carlo Levi e Elio Vittorini, scritti di architettura (1997), Biondillo anthologized and glossed excerpts from both authors' writings on space, architecture, and urban and social problems in the 1930s through the 1950s. Biondillo selected Levi's writings that focused on the nexus between urban structure, social stratification, and state power. The architect was particularly interested in Levi's acute and minute descriptions of public housing, working-class neighborhoods, and post-World War II destruction. Biondillo's book-length essay on Pasolini, Pasolini e il corpo della città (2001), was published by Edizioni Unicopli in the series Le città letterarie, in which architects, fiction writers, poets, and urbanists attempt to override “le rigide divisioni disciplinary che il mondo accademico ci obbliga a rispettare” (17). “Chi meglio di Pasolini,” the novelist writes, “poteva darmi il destro per operare in tale senso?”(17).

4. See Biondillo's psychogeographical experiences in Biondillo and Rizzi, “Psicogeografie”; Biondillo, “Psicogeografie.”

5. On Milan and its outskirts as a place of transformation, see Carrubba 7–21; Zajczyk 51–86.

6. On Quarto Oggiaro, see Torri and Vitale; Parsi and Tacchi.

7. Pieri scrutinizes the representations of the periphery in noir writers and helps us to understand how Biondillo departs from tradition: “The periphery as Other is a powerful physical, real, but also ‘visual’ phenomenon. The most striking feature of the representation of Milan in its noir writers is the use of oppositional and binary categories which include certain key-words: centre/periphery; golden age/modern era; order/disorder; planned/non-planned; monuments/non-places; social peace/crime; poverty/wealth; colour/black-and-white; light/dark; full/empty; accessible/isolated; and socialization/desocialization. These are consistent with other writings on the city and, as Foot has observed, stem ultimately from an ‘hegemonic “model” of the old city, the historic city’ (Foot 2001: 146), which depicts the old city centre as the ideal walled space, a medieval commune with well defined boundaries, which allows its inhabitants to know intimately its streets and spaces” (Pieri 131–32).

8. Biondillo also recalls the indelible descriptions of the city's gradual destruction in Pasolini's La religione del mio tempo (1961). See Pasolini in Biondillo, Pasolini, note on page 134, or Pasolini, La religione del mio tempo 96–97.

9. See San.

10. The relationship between inquiry (investigative reasoning) and architectonic construction is underscored also in the scenes in which the detective reasons as he tours the various spaces of a building. A vivid example is his long tour of St. Ambrose Basilica: As he mentally reconstructs the facts of the case, readers are invited to get to know or to see anew the place being described in architectonic detail (Con la morte 373–74).

11. See Trono and Zerbi for an insightful analysis of this problem.

12. See Bryden 213–20 on the role of literature with regard to contemporary architecture and urban space.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Letizia Modena

Letizia Modena is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge, 2011) and numerous essays on the intersection of the arts and urban studies.