Almost all of these developments in this history of graphic visibility take place in Rome, in the sight of Roman remains and in dialogue with them. After Michelangelo, who plays an important role in this dialogue—his role being halfway between a renewal of the classical order and innovation—the Baroque revolution starts to break out. The pleasure of fiction starts to gain the upper hand, and it is no longer so much the writing that counts as its material support, which deforms it and sometimes hides it between drapes and linings. What we find are commemorative stones and plaques, in bronze or in black or red marble, in the shape of scrolls or drapes or shrouds or animal-skins, surfaces that are either in movement or crumpled or torn at the edges, where metallic or golden letters wave and disappear between the folds. Just as stonework pretends to be a page, so in the frontispieces of books the page pretends to be a stone. Thus we arrive at Piranesi, in the visionary and eclectic eighteenth century which runs alongside and counterbalances the neoclassical and purist eighteenth century of Bodoni and Canova.
When we come to the modern era, Petrucci stops following the dominant line of graphic taste, which was becoming less interesting artistically, to try to catalogue the ‘departures from the norm’. From this point of view he starts his story from scratch again, exploring scrolls by the Sienese primitive artists, as well as astrological charts, guild-emblems, and ex-votos. The fantastical forms of popular graphics are a spontaneous vegetation that will be cultivated and harvested by the avant-gardes, starting with William Morris, who will proclaim the revolution against Bodoni.
In a rapid sketch he brings us all the way down to 1930s Italy, where, in a nod to modernity, the most simple and austere character, the unadorned sans-serif, is adopted as the official font of the Fascist regime, which thus transformed the functional lines of Bauhaus design into something more authoritarian and neoclassical. As for recent times, contrasting with this picture is not so much a left-wing graphic style (though here Petrucci gives prominence to the ‘losing side’ and traces a fine portrait of Albe Steiner) as the illegal explosion of graffiti on walls all in support of current protests.
It is thus right that Petrucci’s article ends on this invasion of script ‘from below’, characterized by an ‘anti-aesthetic’ urge. This anti-aesthetic impulse is the most glaring aspect of the protest by the young and the excluded in society, a protest which has been going on now for some twelve years, starting, of course, with the famous slogans from May ’68 in Paris and from the phenomenon of the tag ‘signatures’ on the New York subway (a phenomenon with particular characteristics that are more linked to artistic intentions).
The ‘palimpsests’ that these illegal writings form, as they are superimposed on previous ‘official’ inscriptions of all kinds, which act as a simple ‘support’ surface, or as they become entangled with later interventions by militants of opposing factions, become in Petrucci’s study a precocious object of study analysed by a method that is almost palaeographical. However, the technical objectivity of Petrucci the scholar does not hide the sympathetic attitude he displays for this graphic jungle, where he recognizes a ‘growing importance of writing as a semantic instrument and as an aesthetic product in the urban space’. This does not prevent him recording also the degradation caused by such urges, which we witness in writing that has nothing behind it except an ill-defined and lazy arrogance, writing which so frequently occupies the walls of Italian cities. This historical survey ends significantly with the desolate vision of the Foro Italico, where the letters of Fascist inscriptional rhetoric mix with the violent graphic screams of the fanatics who support football teams.
Now that I’ve reached this point, now that I have done my duty as regards information and summarized the content of this essay in all its richness and sophistication, it is time to come out with the objection I have been holding back from the start. From the first page, when he evokes the city of Rome totally covered in writing, both official and private, down to the last, where he celebrates the guerrilla warfare of 1968 graffiti, Petrucci pursues his ideal of the ‘written city’, a place saturated in messages which are structured using alphabetical signs, a place that lives and communicates through the positioning of words that can be exposed to people’s gaze. Now that is precisely the ideal I disagree with. Words on walls are words imposed by someone’s will, whether that person is high up or low down, words imposed on the gaze of all the others who have no choice but to see them or receive them. The city is always a transmission of messages, it is always a discourse, but it is one thing if this is a discourse that you have to interpret yourself and translate into thoughts and words, and quite another if these words are imposed on you without any chance of escape. Whether it is an inscription celebrating authority or a defamatory insult, we are still dealing with words that land on us at a point in time which we have not chosen: and this is a form of aggression, abuse, violence.
(Of course the same applies to the writing produced by advertising; but there the message is less intimidating and conditioning—I have never believed much in ‘hidden persuaders’—it finds us more prepared and it is in any case neutralized by the thousands of equally powerful competing messages.)
The written word is not an imposition if it comes to you through a book or a newspaper, because in order to be received it presupposes a previous act of consent on your part, an agreement to listen which was expressed in your buying or just in opening that book or paper. But if it comes to you via a wall which one has no chance of avoiding, then it is a form of tyranny however you look at it.
There are people today who feel the need to assert that their rights have been trampled on by writing about them on walls with a spray-gun. The day they have power they will continue to need walls to justify themselves, using bronze or marble letters or—depending on the customs of the time—huge propaganda banners or other tools for brainwashing people.
This discourse of mine does not apply to graffiti under oppressive regimes, because there it is the absence of free speech that is the dominant element even in the visual aspect of the city, and the clandestine writer fills this silence entirely at his own risk: even reading it is in some sense a risk, and imposes a moral choice on us. Similarly I would also make exceptions to my rule of thumb for cases where the writing is witty, as we have often seen recently, both in Paris and in Italy, or when it is such as to prompt an illuminating reflection or poetic evocation, or uses its graphic form to portray something original. To see the value of this humorous or poetic or aesthetically visual thought involves an operation that is not passive, an interpretation or decoding, in short a collaboration on the part of the receiver who appropriates it through some mental effort, however instantaneous. But where the writing is simply a naked affirmation or negation which requires from the receiver merely an act of consent or refusal, the impact of being coerced into reading in this way drowns out any potential advantage that comes from managing to re-establish our internal freedom in the face of verbal aggression. Everything is lost amidst the din of the neuro-ideological bombardment to which our brains are subjected from morning to night.
Nor would I feel like taking the cities of the Roman Empire as a model, where all the official written and architectural messages were imposed by imperial power and state religion. If today Roman writing attracts us it is because its messages require on our part a decoding system that is to some extent a dialogue, freely participated in: its intimidatory power is now extinct. In the same way, the function of Arabic script in architecture and in the whole visual world of Islam seems to us full of fascination: we notice the presence of the written word, which envelops its spaces in an atmosphere of thoughtful calm, but we are safe from the power of injunction i
n that script because we cannot read it, or—even if we do know how to read it—because it seems distant from us, sealed shut in its formulae. (The same applies to the calligrams of the Far East.) It is the presence of writing, the potential of its varied and continual uses that the city has to transmit, not the abuse of power in its actual manifestations. Perhaps this is the point where Petrucci’s thesis and my argument meet up: the ideal city is the one over which hovers a dust-cloud of writing that does not calcify or turn into sediment.
But have not the poor walls of Italy’s cities also now become a series of layers of arabesques and ideograms and hieroglyphics superimposed on each other, so much so that they no longer transmit any message except that of dissatisfaction with every word and our regret at this wasted energy? Perhaps writing finds a place that is uniquely its own on these walls too, when it refuses to be abused by arrogance and tyranny: a noise which you have to strain your ear carefully and patiently for until you can make out the rare, discreet sound of a word that is for a moment true.
[1980]
Thinking the City: The Measure of Spaces
Around the year AD 1000 Europe experienced an urban development of a kind that it had not seen since antiquity. The medieval city that had taken shape over the previous four centuries showed profound differences from the ancient one from which it had very often inherited its site, name and even its very stones: all the structures linked to the social life of the past had disappeared (temples, forum, baths, theatres, circus, stadium). Its geometric structure too based on the two great perpendicular axes was no longer recognizable, obliterated as it was by labyrinths of narrow, winding streets; the churches, the principal reference points in the Christian city, were distributed irregularly, in sites connected with the lives of the saints, miracles, martyrdoms and relics.
It was the network of churches that shaped the city, not vice versa, as did the hierarchy that was established amongst them: the cathedral, which was the bishop’s see, would be the religious and social centre; but the city had as many centres as it had parishes, plus the convents of the various orders; the routes of processions would determine the importance of the city’s various arteries.
The medieval city was the city of the living and the dead: corpses were no longer considered impure and relegated outside the circle of city walls; familiarity with the dead and contact with the necropolis were one of the great transformations of urban culture.
The straight lines that the city’s horizontal dimension had lost resurfaced instead in the new vertical dimension: the city of church-towers emerged (from the seventh century onwards), where the chimes from on high counted out the hours and confirmed for the Church its ‘dominion over time and space’, and then the city of civic towers developed, rising beside the town hall and the barons’ residences, as soon as civic power established itself (from the thirteenth century onwards) alongside the ecclesiastical authorities.
It was the function of the city that had changed: it was no longer a military and administrative space as it had been in the times of the Roman Empire, but a city of production and exchange and consumption. The market was more and more in the hands of the city’s most representative class, the bourgeoisie.
Compared with other European cities of the time, Italian cities were characterized by a much heavier presence of Roman antiquities, by signs of the predominance of the Germanic Emperors, or of the resistance to their descents into Italy (for instance, citadels and fortresses), by the presence of an urban aristocracy that was no longer holed up in its castles, by being surrounded by a countryside that was subject to the town, and by the independence of the city-states.
I am summarizing an essay by Jacques Le Goff, on ‘L’immaginario urbano nell’Italia medievale (secc. V–XV)’ (The Image of the City in Medieval Italy (Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries)), which dwells in particular on texts from a literary genre typical of the time, the Laudes Civitatum (City Eulogies): the most famous is that of Bonvesin de la Riva in praise of Milan. Le Goff traces the real or imaginary models in relation to which Italian cities were seen or thought about by their inhabitants, for instance, comparisons with Jerusalem—the earthly or heavenly one—or with Rome. (The article opens the fifth volume of the Annali of the Einaudi Storia d’Italia (History of Italy), which is entitled Il paesaggio (The Landscape), and is edited by Cesare De Seta.)
A passage from Leopardi could be taken as emblematic of the relationship between real places and our way of thinking about them or experiencing them. (It is quoted by Sergio Romagnoli in another fine essay in the volume, on landscape in Italian literature from Parini to Gadda.) In the early days of his stay in Rome (December 1822), Leopardi writes to his sister Paolina that what has struck him most is the disproportion between human dimensions and the size of buildings and spaces: the latter would be fine ‘if men here were five arms high and two wide’. What causes him anguish is not just the emptiness of St Peter’s Square, which the population of Rome is not enough to fill, or the mass of the huge cupola, which, when he sees it on arrival, seems as high as the Appenine peaks. Instead, it is the fact that ‘all the grandeur of Rome serves no other purpose than to multiply distances, and also the number of steps that one has to climb up to see whoever it is one wants to see . . . I don’t mean to say that Rome seems uninhabited to me; but I do say that if men felt the need to live in such an expansive way, as one lives in these palaces, and as one walks in these streets, piazzas and churches, the whole globe would not be enough to contain the human race.’
This is a sensation that differs considerably not only from our experience of our age of over-population but from the experience of European capitals that were crowded and tumultuous, which was what writers like Fielding and Restif de la Bretonne had experienced, and what, soon after Leopardi, Balzac, Dickens and Baudelaire would come to know. Leopardi’s agoraphobic vision puts us into a dimension of city landscapes dominated by emptiness which can really be said to be a mental constant in Italy and which connects the images of ‘ideal cities’ from the Renaissance with the metaphysical cities of De Chirico.
In order to convey this sensation Leopardi invites Paolina to think of a chessboard as big as the main square in Recanati, with chess-pieces of normal size moving on it. From the first evocation of a city of giants to that of a city of dwarves: Leopardi’s imagination hovers between Brobdingnag and Lilliput, as Sergio Romagnoli notes.
A few days later, writing to his brother Carlo, Giacomo establishes his idea of the ‘sphere of relations’ between men and things, such as can be realized in small environments, in small cities, but are lost in big ones. Here we touch on a crucial focus in Leopardi’s poetry: the relationship between a confined, reassuring space and a beyond that is boundless and inhuman. On one side there is the house, the window, the familiar evening noises of Recanati, its ‘lanes bathed in gold sunlight and the orchards’; on the other stands the immensity and indifference of Nature as she appears to the Icelander in one of his Operette morali; on one side the hedge of ‘L’infinito’ and on the other infinity. This is a contrast in which repulsion and fascination can swap sides: his native town, a model of human dimensions, is also unbearable; and drowning in the sea of the boundless void can be sweet. As for the theme of the Italian landscape, Sergio Romagnoli places in contrast to these Leopardian themes the idealization of the small town in German Romanticism.
Not many years before this an eccentric German, Johann Gottfried Seume, had set out to discover what he called ‘real Italy’ and this he identified as small-town Italy: scorning diligences and carriages and itineraries devoted solely to monuments, he went everywhere on foot (travelling 30 kilometres a day). The aristocratic and humanist tradition of the G
rand Tour in Italy comes to an end with Seume, who reverses its rules. So says Cesare De Seta, who devotes a lengthy essay to this vitally important experience in the history of European culture.
The journey through Italian towns that the educated and wealthy (French, British, German) foreigner was required to complete underwent various changes between the end of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries: there are locations that appear and disappear, others that change in importance. De Seta has studied travel-diaries in order to compare and interpret these changes in perspective. In the end, after the Napoleonic wars, the epoch of the Grand Tour comes to a close and the age of tourism begins, in a Europe where the distances between nations continually shrink.
Amidst the other articles in the book illustrating the idea of Italy as an image, two are on topics that are likely to arouse an ironic reaction in Italians. One is on guidebooks, Baedeker and the Touring Club Italiano (by Leonardo Di Mauro); the other is on the stereotypical images of towns such as are found on picture postcards (by Maria Antonietta Fusco). But I notice with relief that the Touring Club guidebooks—which are one of my secret passions and I believe one of the things that newly unified Italy knew how to do well—are treated with the respect and pietas they deserve, even as regards their weaknesses, lacunae and clichés.
As for stereotypes, such as the image with the pine in the foreground and Vesuvius as backdrop, our reactions are inevitably sarcastic. But perhaps we should not just see in such images a product of ‘mass culture’: a country starts to be present in people’s memory when every place-name has an image connected to it, an image which as such does not mean anything other than that name, an image which is as arbitrary or justifiable as any name. Leaning Towers and Turin’s Mole Antonelliana are nothing but concise iconic abbreviations, or coats of arms, or allegories. The important thing is that they serve to distinguish, not to confuse or flatten, differences, unlike the Venetian gondolier singing the Neapolitan song ‘O sole mio’ in Ernst Lubitsch’s film Trouble in Paradise—though it has to be said that this incongruous splicing together of two stereotypes undoubtedly has some semantic relevance for signifying tourist Italy, and in addition actually reflects the reality of consumer tourism when it comes into contact with gondolas and music in the Italy of today.
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