This book examines the transformation of the Italian city from the 1950s to the present with particular attention to questions of identity, migration and changes in urban culture. It focuses on two phases of that transformation: the years of accelerated industrialisation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the period of de-industrialisation and postmodernity beginning in the 1980s. It shows how major demographic movements and cultural shifts threw into relief new conceptions of the city in which old boundaries had become problematic. Design, fine art, literature, youth culture, film and social history all provide focal points. The contributions bring specialist expertise to each area while the extensive illustrations give a vivid picture of the contemporary visual culture for which Italian cities are famed. This is a genuinely interdisciplinary approach by Italian and English-speaking historians and scholars of urban studies, literature, architecture and design which introduces new debates and research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Extensive illustrations provide a vivid picture of contemporary Italian visual culture.

Although never named as such, the landscape of Sanremo was a constant visual source for Calvino's fiction. In its recognizable pattern of sea-city-hills, it appears in sixteen works written over a period of thirty two years. This recurring theme provides both a link between some very different works and an insight into the autobiographical dimension of an author whose attitude to privacy and his past is protective but detached. Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood is an analysis of the criteria of representative (and of representational distortion) of a descriptive motif. Claudia Nocentini is a Lecturer in Italian at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to articles on Calvino she has published studies on Natalia Ginzburg and Gianni Celati.