Street Life in Renaissance Italy

With the ambitious, innovative, and beautifully illustrated Street Life in Renaissance Italy, Fabrizio Nevola makes a valuable contribution to the spatial history of Italian Renaissance cities. Revisiting themes he has examined in previous publications, especially focusing on Siena and Florence, Nevola expands his scope to consider cities of various scales and sociopolitical profiles from across the peninsula, including major centers such as Rome and, more cursorily, Venice, Milan, and Naples, but also smaller cities like Arezzo, Bologna, Ferrara, and Mantua, as well as less studied towns like Viterbo and Ascoli Piceno. He uses archival records, novellas, maps, architectural drawings, treatises, paintings, and prints from 1400 to 1600 to narrate microstories that document the interplay between spatial practices and the urban realm. Throughout, Nevola effectively deploys the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to examine how everyday activities gave meaning to the built environment and how it in...