Katia Pizzi

Marjatta Hietala

The Cold War left indelible traces on the city, where polarities on the global stage intersected with existing political and social dynamics. This collection taps into the rich fabric of memories, histories and cultural interactions of urban communities in thirteen cities worldwide, countering many myths about the Cold War era.

History, Culture and Memory

Cold War Cities

Exploring literature, the visual and performing arts, photography, music, and film, the author uses the lens of European machine culture to elucidate the work of a broad set of artists and practitioners, including Censi, Depero, Marinetti, Munari, and Prampolini. The machine emerges here as an archaeology of technology in modernity: the time machine of futurism.

Italian Futurism and the Machine

Andrea Pinotti

Georges Didi-Huberman

Barbara Baert

Victoria Cirlot

Salvatore Settis

Monica Centanni

Dorothee Gelhard

Clio Nicastro

Michael Diers

Filippo Perfetti

Giulia Zanon

Matilde Sergio

Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino

Ianick Takaes

In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s Zooming Mnemosyne deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95) reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environment. Matilde Sergio’s Aby Warburg, Walter Benjaming, and the Memory of Images investigates the influence of Warburg's essay about Luther, on Benjamin's thought, while Dorothee Gelhard’s Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings reconstructs the intellectual history of Bing's doctoral thesis and its influences on Warburgian work. The theme of Warburg’s Denkraum is the focal point of Salvatore Settis’ Anselm Kiefer's Logic of Inversion: a fundamental overview of Kiefer's Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce(Andrea Emo) on display at Sala dello Scrutinio in Palazzo Ducale, Venezia from March to October 2022. The third section of the issue is dedicated to new publications and exhibitions. Echoing Settis’ reflection on Denkraum, we present Clio Nicastro’s La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg, published this year for Palermo University Press; an introduction to Cultural Memories: a series published by Peter Lang and edited by Katia Pizzi. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino with Mary Hertz Warburg: Free and Unconventional reviews the exhibition of the artist Mary Hertz Warburg. The issue closes with the important Choral Reading of Il metodo di Aby Warburg by Kurt W. Forster. L’antico dei gesti. Il futuro della memoria, where Barbara Baert, Victoria Cirlot, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Diers, Andrea Pinotti and Ianick Takaes offer us their personal reading of Warburg’s life and thought as they are presented by Forster’s newly translated book, edited by Ronzani editore.

La Rivista di Engramma 191, aprile-maggio 2022

191 | Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods

This study assesses the significance of Pinocchio in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in addition to his status as the creature of a nineteenth century traversed by a cultural enthusiasm for dummies, puppets, and marionettes. This collection identifies him as a figure characterized by a 'fluid identity,' informed with transition, difference, joie de vivre, otherness, displacement, and metamorphosis, making Pinocchio a truly modern, indeed postmodern and posthuman, cultural icon. Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity explores this crucial and as yet little visited field, reassessing Pinocchio's genealogy and progeny, as well as illuminating both the wider context and more specific cultural manifestations of the mechanical-human interface in the domains of theatre, the fine arts, literature, radio, and even virtual reality coherently with the digital metamorphosis of our times. The wide-ranging scope of this exploration encompasses Italian, French, and English literature, dummies and marionettes in modernist and contemporary theatre, the fairytale tradition, and traditional and contemporary painting, as well as the older and newer media of radio, television, cinema, and the Internet. The diverse, comparative, and multimedia focus of this original discussion testifies to the enduring transcultural legacy of Pinocchio. Eminently sellable as a traditional cultural icon, Pinocchio is equally impactful and relevant for a globalized, multicultural, and virtual society, from Collodi to Disney and beyond. Katia Pizzi is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published volumes on cultural identities, including A City in Search of an Author (2001) and The Cultural Identities of European Cities (2010), and on children's literature and illustration.

The Mechanical Body

Pinocchio, Puppets, and Modernity

Cities are both real and imaginary places whose identity is dependent on their distinctive heritage: a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. The essays in this volume, which originate from a lecture series at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, explore the complex and multi-layered identities of European cities. Themes that run through the essays include: nostalgia for a grander past; location between Eastern and Western ideologies, religions and cultures; and the fluidity and palimpsest quality of city identity. Not only does the book provide different thematic angles and a variety of approaches to the investigation of city identity, it also emphasizes the importance of diverse cultural components. The essays presented here discuss cultural forms as various as music, architecture, literature, journalism, philosophy, television, film, myths, urban planning and the naming of streets.

The Cultural Identities of European Cities

Poised between the Mediterranean and the Mitteleuropa, crossroads of civilizations and seat of vibrant cultural and literary life, Trieste is now acknowledged as enjoying unrivalled cultural status amongst Italian cities. This volume, the first comprehensive study of Triestine literature in English, originally reassesses TriesteÆs literary identity, paying particular attention to the period between 1918 and 1954 when local writing became intensely aware of its local specificity and some of its central motifs came prominently to the fore. TriesteÆs singular border identity, mirrored in a variegated literary output, emerges here as laden with complexities and ambiguities, such as the controversial notion of triestinita, the ambiguous relation with nationalism, specifically in its Fascist inflection, and the anxieties generated by repeated re-definitions of the areaÆs historical borders.

A City in Search of an Author

Katia Pizzi

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