Locations, travel

Abstract

Adopting the gaze of the recluse allows us to disassemble the civic space of the Italian piazza. Last year's lecture attempted to theorize the notion of emplacement (from Adrien Goetz's architectural conception of dislocation) as the capacity of space to turn itself inside out, to lift itself up, to become something other than itself. In this case, we would have to understand that spacing is what makes room for the freedom of women and men, what gives them space and a place, insofar as this place will never be assigned in advance and once and for all. We attempt to re-understand the entire political history of public squares in urban Italy from the ^13th to the ^15th centuries in the light of this concept, showing in particular that their monumentalization and architectural embellishment in no way signify the intensification of their civic functioning, but on the contrary - and most often in a post-communal and then princely context - their depoliticization. In this way, the space of deliberation is turned into a space for the celebration of power, which ultimately raises questions about the archaeological paradigm and the principle of analogy that govern political analyses of urban spaces.

Contents

• Where does the past go when it is past? Presentism, simultaneity and relativity
• The past, impregnable but out of reach: the search for stratigraphy
• By paths and by squares, historians and historians
• By the wayside: Marc Bloch in Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, Durkeim and the "neighboring past
• Through places: Marcel Proust in Combray, Einstein and the church as a four-dimensional space
• Adopting the recluse's gaze on an Italian civic square: the fictional temptation
• "Let's take a random street": Arsenio Frugoni, Storia di un giorno in una città medievale (1953)
• An ideal-type of communal layout related to a that took place
• First example: Perugia's civic square and the Fontana Maggiore "dated" to 1278
• Political uses of the square since the Risorgimento and the distinction between political, religious and economic functions
• Second example: Siena's Piazza del Campo and its redesign in the 15th^century (the time of the Piccolomini and the time of Pandolfo Petrucci)
• Making Siena a Renaissance city: adapting the Renaissance idea to the shape of the city (Fabrizio Nevola)
• Bartolomeo Benvoglienti's De urbis Senae origine et incremento (1484-1486): communal completeness and princely accomplishment
• Completa est : narrative unification
• Third example: the gradual construction of civic space in Padua
• Between the commune and the episcopal entourage: distance, mistrust, gap (Gérard Rippe)
• Urban planning for the common good at the time of the regimi di popolo
• Against private urbanism, a "constant geographic and conceptual dilation" (Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan)
• Ovens, baths, furnaces and the "well war
• Public space, public places and common language
• The archaeological paradigm and the principle of analogy
• Milan, 1492: when the platea pretends to be a forum
• Architectural embellishment and political neutralization
• In Medicean Florence, from space for deliberation to space for celebration
• Again, Petrarch's Solitary Life : "They remain planted not only in front of people, but also in front of marble figures: there they are, as if they were going to speak to him, frozen in place every time they meet a statue! and, this is the last folly, the crowd and the noise have all the charms for them"