Author: Lisa Cesarani
Most often, cinematic images of Florence are connected to the glorious art and architecture of its Renaissance past. The river Arno, its bridges, the narrow streets, and majestic domed cathedral are perfect backdrops to stage a romance, a mystery or a murder. Yet, in films, Florence is often held hostage by its postcard beauty. These images of the city are intrinsically linked to the viewer’s perspective. A born and bred Florentine or a visitor to the city will see Florence differently. So, does our collective imagination of Florence begin and end with the Renaissance or is there room for another view? This was the initial question I considered when teaching GLS Juniors in the EXLI course in Florence. Our first semester is based on Place Theory and we work with the ideas that Timothy Cresswell lays out in his Introduction to Place. Place Theory addresses the proverbial elephant in the room. Everyone knows what a place is, right? The word place manages to be apparent and yet transparent at the same time. Cresswell introduces students to authors like Tuan, Harvey, Massey, and May and quickly constructs a critical framework in which students can now interrogate the concept of place from a variety analytical perspectives. This critical framework helps me to temporarily liberate Florence from its Renaissance past. By turning my students’ gaze towards depictions of of the city during the period of Fascism, I can have them examine the ways in which political and economic factors helped to shape the place they see today.
For resources, I relied heavily on film, using episode four in the Neorealist film Paisà by Roberto Rossellini (1946) and also the deeply sentimental and nostalgic depiction of Florence in Tea with Mussolini by Franco Zeffirelli (1999). To counterbalance these two films, I took screen shots from the documentary Rape of Europa (2006) and found a variety of newsreel footage on Youtube of Hitler’s 1938 visit to Florence. These filmic reference points were then coupled with and often contrasted with family photos that had been donated to and digitized by the Instituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (ISRT). To hear the words of those who saw first hand Hitler’s visit to Florence in 1938 and later witnessed the Germans bombing the bridges of Florence in 1944, I sought quotes from an excellent anthology of first person descriptions of Florence introduced by Sir Harold Acton and edited Edward Chaney called Florence, a Traveller’s Companion. These quotes gave voice to the images shown in class. Excerpts in the anthology from Florence Under Fire by Frederick Hartt, the famed art historian and US Army monument man, enabled students to hear a description of Palazzo Pitti that today would seem unimaginable. They heard the words of Ugo Procacci, the Florentine art restorer who, along with the top administrators at the Uffizi, helped to crate and move artwork to safety before the fateful bombings in August 1944. A quote from an excerpt of Lady Una Vincenzo Troubridge’s book, Life and Death at Radclyffe Hall describes the preparations for Hitler’s visit to Florence in 1938 and provides a sense of Lady Troubridge’s opinion on the visit. In making my selections, I tried to have both Italian and foreigners’ views of the city. Given that Florence has always had an international community of residents and admirers, these “outsider” views from Hartt and Troubridge provide a fuller understanding of Florence as an iconic place when coupled with those of the Italians: Procacci, Rossellini and Zeffirelli.
Seeing images of Florence both in the years leading up to Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler and the subsequent destruction to the city during the August 1944 German retreat, we address the question of reconstruction and the competing schools of thought that shaped this debate in 1945. Here I use quotes from two opinion pieces written in response to one another in a journal that was first published in 1945, Il Ponte, (The Bridge). In the first issue of Il Ponte, Bernard Berenson, foreign born, long term Florence resident, and noted Renaissance art historian, writes an article entitled “How to Rebuild Demolished Florence.” He argues that the people of Florence have an obligation to rebuild the city as it was or else they risk changing the mnemonic image of a Florence known by generations. His opinion is swiftly countered in the second issue of Il Ponte by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, a famous Italian archaeologist born in Siena. In Bandinelli’s article, “How Not to Rebuild Demolished Florence,” he argues that the people of Florence should not be custodians of the past and that after the trials of war they merit a city that will put them on par with the rest of Europe.
This leads us to an interesting class discussion on post conflict national reconciliation, post war reconstruction, collective amnesia and issues surrounding the ethics of restoration. We end the class session with a quote from Calvino’s Invisible Cities that states:
[T]he city does not talk about its past, it contains it like the lines on a hand, written in the edges of the streets, the iron grills of the windows, in the bannister of the stairway, in the antennas and lightning rods, in the flagpoles, every segment of which is lined in turn by scratches, chips, cuts, lashings. (translation by L. Cesarani)
The final decision on the part of the Florentine community to reconstruct what was destroyed as it had been makes one look at post WWII Florence and Italy differently. This privileging of a past that did not embody the divisive elements that became apparent during and after the WWII speaks volumes. It helps students understand the rationale behind Italy’s constitution, how current political parties and political discourse is shaped, and the role tourism has in the life of the city. By examining place, we can begin to frame a social and cultural context in a very powerful and tangible way. The goal is to have the students look beyond the facade, the appearance of the city of Florence, the drama of Italian politics that is most evident and seek out the scars and the scrapes, the evidence of the past. Often this particular past does not speak loudly, but it is contained just below the surface.