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ABSTRACT
In the context of early twentieth century Italy, Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947) played a pivotal role. Father of artistic city building and urban conservation in Italy, founder of its first School of Architecture (in Rome in 1920) and of a holistic approach to architecture, conservation and planning through l’architetto integrale (see below), his work had a long-lasting appeal which also stemmed from his contribution to the 1939 Italian law on landscape preservation, later extended also to historic urban contexts. He died in 1947, but it was only in the late sixties that his legacy was recognized first by Manfredo Tafuri and later -for the French audience- by Françoise Choay. After decades of damnatio memoriae –partially due to his biographical correspondence with Fascism– scholarly research reassessed his multistranded contribution.
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Notes
1 Act n.1497/1939 on the ‘Protezione delle bellezze naturali’.
2 Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, 73.
3 Choay, L’allègorie du patrimoine, 94–96, 108–111; Giovannoni, L'urbanisme face aux villes anciennes. Introduction by Françoise Choay.
4 Bonaccorso and Moschini, “Il controverso lascito di Giovannoni tra politica e cultura architettonica,” 13–22.
5 Zucconi, “Gustavo Giovannoni: la naissance de l’architect intégral en Italie”; Ventura, ed., Gustavo Giovannoni. Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova; Zucconi, “Giovannoni, Gustavo”. Dictionary of Art; Zucconi, ed., Gustavo Giovannoni. Dal capitello alla città; Pane, “Dal monumento all’ambiente urbano”; Pallottino, “Filologia urbana in chiave ambientista”; Bonaccorso and Moschini, ed., Gustavo Giovannoni e l’architetto integrale.
6 The Genealogy of Urban Design – GUDesign network. https://gudesign.org/thematic-nodes/giovannoni-before-giovannoni/.
7 The Malraux Law 1962; Civic Amenities Act 1967.
8 Tobia, Una patria per gli Italiani; Vidotto, “Fare la Nazione: spazi urbani, monumenti, pedagogia politica nell’Italia liberale.”
9 Gaudin, ed., Desseins de villes. “Art Urbain” et Urbanisme; Zucconi, ed., Camillo Sitte e i suoi interpreti.
10 Trincanato, Venezia minore; Muratori, “Studi per un’operante storia urbana di Venezia”; Muratori, Bollati, Bollati, and Marinucci, Studi per una operante storia urbana di Roma.
11 Giovannoni, “Relazione sulla zona monumentale di Roma,” 76.
12 Zucconi, La città contesa. Dagli ingegneri sanitari agli urbanisti, 1885–1942.
13 Zucconi, “Il profilo dell’Italia artistica. Conservazione e manipolazione di un’identità, 1902–1934”; Zucconi, L'invenzione del passato. Camillo Boito e l'architettura neomedievale, 1855–1890; Zucconi, “Il Medioevo degli architetti italiani tra scienza e arte (1869–1940)”. On the city as a “spontaneous collective work of art” see also Giovannoni’s mention on Sitte: Giovannoni, “Il dopoguerra dei monumenti e delle città d’Italia”.
14 Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen kiinstlerischen Grundsätzen; Monneret de Villard, Note sull’arte di costruire la città.
15 Collins and Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning; Sonne, “The enduring concept of Civic Art”.
16 Collins and Crasemann Collins. Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning, 66.
17 Vivarelli, Italia 1861; Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood.
18 Vidotto, Roma contemporanea.
19 Parpagliolo, “La protezione delle bellezze naturali,” 1188.
20 Mazzei, “Dalla città sognata alla città ricostruita. Un lungo periodo di trasformazioni, Bologna 1879–1961”; Zucconi, “Il Medioevo degli architetti italiani tra scienza e arte (1869–1940)”.
21 Act n. 688/1912 on ‘Villas, Parks and Gardens’ introduced the notion of large-scale preservation, together with the principle of ‘perspective’. Thanks to the Act n.778/1922, large portions of land were put under protection, some of them later transformed into National Parks.
22 Porfyriou, “Camillo Sitte. Optically Constructed Space and Artistic City Building”.
23 Porfyriou, “Sulle radici del disegno urbano. Europa e Italia nei primi decenni del Novecento”.
24 Muratori, “Vita e storia delle città”.
25 Giovannoni, L'urbanisme face aux villes anciennes. Introduction by Françoise Choay.
26 Giovannoni, Architetture di pensiero e pensieri sull’ architettura.
27 Ibid., chapter ‘The aftermath of the war for monuments and old Italian Cities’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Heleni Porfyriou
Heleni Porfyriou (PhD in Planning history, UCL - UK) is an Urban historian with expertise in urban conservation and valorization. Senior researcher of the National Research Council of Italy-CNR (since 1999), is currently working at the Institute of Heritage Sciences - ISPC of the CNR https://www.ispc.cnr.it/en/. She was Head of the Rome unit of the CNR-Institute ICVBC (2006-2017); visiting scholar of Columbia University-NY (2018, 2021) and visiting researcher of Peking University and Xian University, in the context of the 7th European funded project “Planning, Urban Management and Heritage” (2012-2016). She is currently coordinating two bilateral projects, with CACH and Xiamen University, as well as the global network Genealogy of Urban Design – GUDesign network, launched in May 2020 https://gudesign.org/. She published extensively on Camillo Sitte, urban conservation, urban design and enhancement policies in Europe and China.
Guido Vittorio Zucconi
Guido V. Zucconi, born in 1950, full professor of History of Architecture the IUAV University of Venice, from 1992 to 2020. After completing his graduate studies at the Politecnico di Milano, he studied at the Princeton University. He was one of the founders of the Italian Association of Urban History (AISU) and serving as its president from 2009 to 2013. From 2014 to 2017, president of the Ateneo Veneto in Venice. His work focuses on Italian architecture and urban history in the 19th and the 20th centuries. His publications include studies of Venice, Giovannoni, Boito, and questions of urban planning and conservation.