The Renaissance Perfected

Mussolini’s bold claims upon the monuments and rhetoric of ancient Rome have been the subject of a number of recent books. D. Medina Lasansky shows us a much less familiar side of the cultural politics of Italian Fascism, tracing its wide-ranging efforts to adapt the nation’s medieval and Renaissance heritage to satisfy the regime’s programs of national regeneration. Anyone acquainted with the beauties of Tuscany will be surprised to learn that architects, planners, and administrators working within Fascist programs fabricated much of what today’s tourists admire as authentic. Public squares, town halls, palaces, gardens, and civic rituals (including the famed Palio of Siena) were all “restored” to suit a vision of the past shaped by Fascist notions of virile power, social order, and national achievement in the arts. Ultimately, Lasansky forces readers to question long-standing assumptions about the Renaissance even as she expands the parameters of what constitutes Fascist culture.

The arguments in The Renaissance Perfected are based in fresh archival evidence and a rich collection of illustrations, many reproduced for the first time, ranging from photographs and architectural drawings to tourist posters and film stills. Lasansky’s groundbreaking book will be essential reading for students of medieval, Renaissance, and twentieth-century Italy as well as all those concerned with visual culture, architectural preservation, heritage studies, and tourism studies.

Lasansky (architectural history, Cornell U.) has written a substantial account chronicling the focused development of a nationalistic tourism industry in fascist Italy, through the invention of Renaissance histories, festivals, and architecture in Italian towns—including Florence and Arezzo—and the promotion of the towns, thematic tours, and Italian history with postcards, films, and other media. Based on extensive archival research and supplemented with frequent color and b&w images, Lasansky's study adds a new dimension to the history of the era. The book will challenge readers' assumptions and provoke new insights not only of the Italian towns and festivals so vividly described but also of the nature and meanings of tourism. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

D. Medina Lasansky is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and co-editor of Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place (2004).