Photograph: courtesy of University of Toronto Press

Photograph: courtesy of Routledge

Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy
Michelangelo Sabatino

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, xxvi, 341 pp., ill., $ 70 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9705-7

Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities
Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, editors

Milton Park, Oxfordshire / New York: Routledge, 2010, 320 pp., b/w ill., $ 53.95 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-415-77634-9

Over the last fifteen years scholars in Italy and beyond have shown increasing interest in the architectural debate that took place in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. The national campaign to investigate the private archives of architects launched by the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2001 has provided new sources which  will help to depict a much wider scene, highlighting the role of less known protagonists, places, and events. Michelangelo Sabatino’s book Pride in Modesty offers an original contribution to research of this period, and valuable material for future investigations.

The way to modernity in Italy, more than in other European countries, has been consistently influenced by the country’s high cultural heritage and traditions as well as its anonymous ones. Sabatino underlines this duality when he reports that during Louis Kahn’s trip to Italy in the late 1920s, Kahn was intrigued by both monumental ancient Roman architecture and vernacular buildings. It is also well known that many generations of architects from Europe and America, undertaking a viaggio in Italia, were increasingly appreciative of different townscapes and landscapes. In the early 1920s Nordic architects discovered ‘Italia minore’ and were inspired by the spontaneous juxtaposition of simple and pure volumes, and the modesty of urban spaces built in harmony with the local morphology, materials, light, and colours. ‘Italia minore’ became a model for a new generation of architects searching for a modern expression in architecture and town planning, safe and distant from the artificiality and pomposity of classicism. Frugality and modesty, evident in the wide-ranging vernacular tradition of Italy from the Mediterranean to the Alps, could provide the right answer.

‘Pride in modesty,’ the expression used by Lionello Venturi in Casabella in 1933, is adopted as the leitmotif in Sabatino’s study that re-evaluates more than sixty years of Italian architectural history. The different approaches to the vernacular tradition are mapped in five dense chapters, with the declared aim to ‘trace an alternative genealogy of the spaces and places of Italian modernist architecture of the twentieth century.’ Key events are investigated, and a long list of intellectuals, artists, and architects are quoted to focus the debate. In the background flow the political and social events which shaped the country: the difficult integration of regions and provinces with their distinct identities and traditions, diverse customs, and languages; policies for the industrialization of a rural country; the march of Fascism towards dictatorship and imperial pretensions; and the challenge of moral and social reconstruction after the Second World War. Sabatino examines the search for a national identity, the role of the architect, the establishment of new schools of architecture, the importance of architectural journals, and, finally, Italy’s contribution to the post-war international debate on the heritage of Modernism.

According to Sabatino, upon the unification of Italy in 1860, the vernacular heritage became the focus of interest, first to ethnologists, then to artists and architects. This focus inspired the various subsequent developments in Italy. In this way, Sabatino suggests, the Mediterranean ‘as the birthplace of primitive or archaic vernacular and classical traditions’—and the courtyard or patio house as its major flag—provided common inspiration to rationalism, futurism, and historic revivalism. It is against this background that one has to read Luigi Figini’s statement that ‘the intellectual premises of Mediterraneità in the development of rationalism are instrumental in the smeccanizzazione (de-mechanizing) and sgelo (defrosting) of modernism.’ Likewise, Giuseppe Pagano, one of the most important voices in the rationalist movement, who was in turn inspired by John Ruskin, emphasized the simplicity of form of the Italian country house. He contributed to the period’s debates by presenting his research on Italian rural architecture, conducted together with Guarniero Daniel, at the 1936 Triennale in Milan.

In the period after the Second World War, the heritage of the Fascist regime slowed down the impetus of architectural development, but continuity with the experimentation undertaken in the pre-war years remained evident. The vernacular tradition assumed greater relevance and played a central role in the search for a new expression. The neighbourhood housing experiments of Ina-Casa, such as at Tiburtino or Tuscolano in Rome, Mario Ridolfi’s Manuale dell’Architetto, Bruno Zevi’s organic movement, and the research of Giovanni Michelucci and Leonardo Ricci in Tuscany or the Bottega d’Erasmo by Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola in Turin, all shaped Italy’s contribution to modernism, which developed into an alternative to the International Style. Sabatino extends his account into the late 1970s, with the work of Aldo Rossi seen—through Kahn, Peter Eisenman, and Vincent Scully—‘as a stimulus for American architects seeking to establish a critical dialogue with history.’

Despite such an impressive sequence of arguments, sustained by a large quantity of references and bibliography, Sabatino’s ‘alternative genealogy of Italian modernist architecture’ is not fully convincing. The important contribution of the book is to demonstrate that this field of investigation today is open to new evaluations. It is worth mentioning, as Sabatino suggests, the well-known continuity from Pagano’s and Daniel’s 1936 Triennale exhibition, De Carlo’s display of ‘Spontaneous Architecture’ at the Triennale of 1951, through to Bernard Rudofsky’s ‘Architecture without Architects’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964–65. These contributions represented a true hymn to spontaneity and simplicity. The capacity to listen, the ‘silent resistance’ that lies behind this line of thought, is without doubt Italy’s most original contribution to the international forum.

The eternal myth of the Mediterranean as the meeting place of North and South is the main issue of Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, edited by Jean-François Lejeune and Sabatino. The research project that preceded this collection of essays investigated ‘vernacular dialogues and contested identities’ and was born in Casa Malaparte in Capri. In March 1998, the University of Miami School of Architecture hosted a seminar entitled ‘The Other Modern—On the Influence of the Vernacular on the Architecture and the City of the Twentieth Century’ in these symbolic surroundings. Sabatino and Lejeune invited a prestigious panel of scholars to explore the influence of the Mediterranean in southern and northern cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Artists and architects from the Grand Tour onwards experienced the duality of the Mediterranean as the site of classical and vernacular culture. Results and reflections can be read in the sketchbooks, publications, and architecture of travellers from Schinkel and Semper to the avant-gardes who were searching for modernity in different regions of Europe. In a well-choreographed sequence of essays, the dialogues, contrasts, and mutual influences of Mediterraneità are pointed out in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey on the one side, and Germany and Scandinavia on the other. From Art Nouveau, Sezession, or the Catalonian Noucentismo, to CIAM and Team X, the biographies of well-known and less studied exponents of the Modern movement are investigated to underline the various streams of Modernity explored during and beyond the heroic and most celebrated seasons of twentieth-century architecture.

The collection of essays is therefore a significant step towards establishing a wider picture of modernist architecture, opening up new ideas and unexplored regions. It is an important basis for future research, and also a valuable textbook for university courses.

Antonello Alici
Università Politecnica delle Marche
Ancona, Italy