Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape ed. by Dom Holdaway, Filippo Trentin (review)

BOOK REVIEWS WARW I K c iu i:s 1N ·1 H E I lvMANJTJ ES Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape Edited by Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin Number 2 Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin, eds. Rome: Postmodern Narratives ofa Cityscape. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013, hardcover, 256 pages, black-and-white illustrations,£60.00/$99.00, ISBN 978-1-848-93349-1. The Rome of popular imagination, the "Caput Mundi,'' the "Eternal City," the "Divine City" of the Catholic West or the "City of Ruins" of the Grand Tour, does not represent the Rome of today and perhaps not even the Rome of history. The essays presented in this volume recognize that the conceptualization of Rome as a palimpsest has long served the agendas of the historian and the tour guide, but that this characterization of the city denies both the reality of its untamed, peripheral ARRIS 76 § Volume 24 § 201 3 growth and the possibility to fully engage with the historical city. Rather than attempting to project a singular identity onto the contemporary metropolis, the essays examine the city as a complex, pluralistic entity and "aim to problematize the universal idea of Rome," offering a challenge to "both the grand narratives of Rome as 'Eternal City,' and Rome as a modern hell" (p. 3). In their introduction, Holdaway and Trentin attempt to frame the essays within a historicomaterialist postmodern perspective, which they define as a cultural reaction to the late capitalist period of the 1950s. This framework allows for the contradictions that inevitably arise when examining such an iconic, multifaceted city. In particular, the explorations of the relationship between Rome's cinematic image and the reality of the built environment reveal the fragmentary and fleeting nature of subjective perceptions. These individual moments become iconographic, which at once allows the city to be recognized through a single image but also allows the greater city to escape a total "knowability ." In this way, the editors show that Rome has the potential to always grow and to always deflect an objectively conclusive definition. The authors examine a Rome which is incomplete, unknowable, and alive-in a true historical sense-because of its capacity to escape potential petrification from its own history. The editors organized this collection of essays as a tripartite discourse with Rome's traditions and histories, and each essay acknowledges the osmotic nature of the postmodern city. The first grouping, entitled "Knowing Rome," grounds the book within an alternate historical narrative, tracing the formal development of the city from a concentrated historic center to a fragmented, modern metropolis. These essays disregard the archetypal reading of Rome as a palimpsest, as they describe an evolution of the city which was never linear and teleological; rather, the city has evolved in a variety of trajectories. which have created the fluid, de-centered contemporary condition. In the first essay, Marco Cavietti considers Rome's urban growth through an investigation of the Aurelian Walls. He proposes that this physical delineation of the traditional historic center, rather than simply separating the city from the periphery, is most useful in conceptualizing contemporary Rome as a threshold. Cavietti notes that Rome's explosive peripheral growth occurs only after the Italian Army broke through the Porta Pia in 1871, which broke down the walls' symbolic boundary. This dematerialization of the threshold resonates with the essays of Fabio Benincasa and Lesley Caldwell, whose writings on Italian film reveal the erosion of the distinction between physical space and cinematic representations. Benincasa's essay on the influence of Italian cinema on contemporary perceptions and representations of Rome traces the role of the fragmentary monument as a means for mapping the city. He finds a strong conceptual link between the Mirabilia Urbis Romae's emphasis on individual monuments as a means of orientation and Federico Fellini's presentation of the city in film, as both present Rome as a collage of fragmentary experiences. For Benincasa, Rome's postmodernity is most evident in the city's refusal to be easily defined; rather, he argues for the recognition of Rome as an infinite system ofcenters and experiences. Caldwell's essay surveys the cinematic representation of a few of these possible trajectories within...