Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy

Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy

Hardback (24 Nov 2022)

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Publisher's Synopsis

In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolours and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have travelled to Italy-ranging from "To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral" to "To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu" (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)-while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy's architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson's narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect's scrutiny of certain Italian tropes. He recounts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, set out "To Flee England Out of Embarrassment" after breaking wind when he bowed to Queen Elizabeth I; French novelist Stendhal went "To Discover an Anti-France"; and an English architect went "To Get Some Ideas for a Mausoleum." At the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, a dapper architect found that he had come to Italy "To Fall Overboard in a White Suit," the artist Cy Twombly went simply "To See," and Wilson himself found that he was "Captured by the Ospedale Degli Innocenti," enchanted by the sight of Brunelleschi's architrave.

Book information

ISBN: 9780262047265
Publisher: The MIT Press
Imprint: The MIT Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 945
DEWEY edition: 23/eng/20220317
Language: English
Number of pages: 271
Weight: 512g
Height: 138mm
Width: 192mm
Spine width: 28mm