Collection of Sand: Essays by Calvino Italo

Author:Calvino, Italo [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Classics, Art
ISBN: 9780141959351
Goodreads: 60569432
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1984-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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.

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