Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Catharine Edwards, editor. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. 279.

Contemplating the Vittoriano, that much lamented "wedding cake" structure that disfigures the center of Rome, there is some comfort in knowing things might have been still worse, at least to judge by some of the alternative plans for the commemorative site documented in Catherine Brice's history of this most prominent of modern Italian monuments. Brice studies the intricate saga of the vast white edifice, analyzing in meticulous detail the myriad submissions made to the Concorsi of the 1880s that were instituted to select a winning design. Brice demonstrates the wealth of archival material available on this subject and offers an intriguing optic on the cultural fantasies of the new nation in post-Unification Italy. Not all the 293 blueprints for the project were produced by Italians; enthusiasts from Argentina, Spain, Russia, America, Japan, and Turkey all put forward proposals.	1
Although the style of presentation is somewhat dour, readers who persevere with the book will find that the commentary is thoughtful and wide-ranging; moreover the account is lightened by intriguing subsidiary tales, such as the strange case of Carlo Dossi, a late nineteenth-century onlooker so disturbed by the bizarre schemes dreamed up by would-be architects of the day that he produced a psychiatric diagnosis of the competitors in the style of the psychiatrist and criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. Here the applicants were viewed as symptoms of contemporary depravity and madness: I mattoidi al concorso del monumento a Vittorio Emanuele (1884) is clearly a neglected pearl of late nineteenth-century degenerationist literature.	2
In contrast to the close exploration of a single architectural project, a new, multi-authored study, edited by Catherine Edwards, spreads its net very wide. This ambitious collaborative exploration of the symbolic place of the "Eternal City" in modern European culture spans material from three centuries and figures as diverse as Edward Gibbon, J. W. von Goethe, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud (to say nothing of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who appear late in the book). Disparate as that sounds (and sometimes is), each chapter reveals the city as one of the most symbolically over-determined of all imaginable modern urban sites. There is a great deal to interest specialists of Italian history here as well as those intrigued by the evolution of travel writing. Students of psychohistory will also find a mine of evidence as to the sheer intensity and diversity of the feelings and passions that Rome has stirred up in its best-known literary visitors. It would have been interesting to have been offered more sustained comparative reference between these "Roman Presences" and contemporaneous perspectives on other remarkable Italian cities. Indeed, Tony Tanner's Venice Desired (1992), a brilliant exploration of desire, death, and much besides in the representation of "la Serenissima" would have been an obvious starting point for the present study—surely an opportunity missed.	. . .