Roman Modernities

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Walter Benjamin's last uncompleted work, The Arcades Project, employs nineteenth-century Paris as a paradigmatic model to understand the shocking experience of modernity. Benjamin considers Haussmann's radical transformation of the French capital's cityscape in the 1850s and 1860s as the equivalent of a psychical shock, and thus mirrored in Baudelaire's oeuvre. Our project revisits Benjamin's approach in order to reflect on the cultural implications of Rome's modernisation. First, Rome's singularity is gathered together by its status as symbolic city for several traditions (classical, Christian, Italian). Second, unlike Paris, Rome's confrontation with modernity is not sudden but progressive: beginning with the aftermath of Rome's centrality to the new national state, it witnesses a significant acceleration with the violent Fascist reconfiguration of the cityscape in the 1930s, and continues in successive post-war decades through a process that is described, among others, by Pier Paolo Pasolini.By gathering scholars from different fields of expertise (literary and film studies, philosophy, history, art history and visual culture, gender and postcolonial studies, architecture, urban studies, psychoanalysis, cultural theory), our project moves within a quintessentially inter-/multidisciplinary perspective to reassess traditional studies on Rome in the light of contemporary theory. Whereas existing scholarship stresses Rome's antiquity and its mythical imaginary (for bibliographical references see the Case for Support), analysing its confrontation with modernity as a linear chronological movement and as a process of loss of previous alleged identities, our project aims to investigate the city as a field of tensions, where verticality is privileged over horizontality, synchrony over diachrony, plurality and multiculturalism over fixed identities, and rhizomatous structures over linearity.The concepts guiding our project (Multistability, Trauma and Shock, Modernity and Post-modernity, Fragment, Survival, Synchrony, Anachronism, the Uncanny) should encourage an innovative and challenging analysis of the theme, by emphasising interchange between historical and documentary approaches (CROMA and the National Archive at Rome) to theoretical ones (BSR, ICI).By exploring ways of narrating, portraying and displaying Rome's plural legacies and frequent metamorphoses, the network also aims to develop new conceptual tools of relevance for scholars, professionals, artists and institutions engaged in the preservation and interrogation of cultural heritage, museum studies and the reconfiguration and further development of urban spaces.Located across two academic institutions (Warwick and UCL), the network directly arises from the research interests of the P.I. and the Co-I., who both continue to extend the field of Italian Studies by the engagement with interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, and from international academic and non-academic partnerships throughout the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany (ICI Berlin, British School at Rome, the Rome National Archive and the CROMA).All research events will be public and several formats will be adopted (conferences, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, roundtables and film screenings specifically tailored for non-specialised audiences). Dissemination will involve several media, among which we can foresee two co-edited books, two monographic issues of refereed journals and a multimedia blog.