Representing the "historical centre" of Bologna: preservation policies and reinvention of an urban identity.

De Pieri, Filippo ; Scrivano, Paolo

Abstract

This article analyzes the visual and textual representations of the "historical centre" of Bologna before and after 1969, the year when the first of the city's celebrated plans for the preservation of the ancient urban fabric were approved. In spite of the attempts made by architects and planners to precisely and "technically" define the object of the plans, the notion of "historical city centre" remained a vague and ambiguous one. Conflicting images of history, tradition, and centrality shaped the preservation policies, and were in turn reshaped by them. The visual, historical, and political discourse behind the Bologna plans intentionally brought together a multiplicity of local and non-local cultures, resulting in an overall reinvention of both a local identity and an idea of the city of the past.

Resume

Cet article analyse les representations visuelles et discursives du <<centre historique>> de Bologne avant et apres 1969, date d'approbation du premier des celebres plans pour la conservation de l'ancien tissu beti de la ville. Malgre les nombreuses tentatives des architectes et des urbanistes pour definir precisement et <<techniquement>> l'objet de ces plans, la notion de <<centre historique>> demeura vague et ambigue. Les politiques de conservation etaient influencees par une pluralite d'images en conflit (notions d'histoire, de tradition, de centralite) et les modifiaient C leur tour. Le discours visuel, historique et politique qui accompagnait les plans de Bologne rassemblait de facon intentionnelle de multiples cultures locales et non locales, avec le resultat de reinventer C la fois une identite locale et une idee de la ville du passe.

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Introduction

The policies for the city centre that Bologna's Communist administration carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew wide international attention at the time of their implementation. (1) They were seen as an ambitious program of urban preservation whose aims were to avoid both the physical destruction of the city centre and the expulsion of the original inhabitants. The example of Bologna was widely circulated, at least in Europe, it enjoyed a long-lasting popularity among planners, architects, urban geographers, and those sectors of the public opinion that were more sensitive to the safeguarding of historical cities.

In the postwar years, what has been called the "rise of the urban conservation movement" was in no way a locally limited phenomenon. (2) Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the need to shift from the restoration of individual and isolated buildings to the preservation of entire urban complexes of historical value began to be considered particularly urgent in several European countries. Italy was in the foreground of this tendency. (3) During the years of the "economic miracle," in fact, the deep transformations affecting the country's built environment animated a wide intellectual and professional debate on the issue of the preservation of the historical centres. Centri storici became a common term either to designate the dense network of small urban centres of historical significance or identify the central core of Italy's largest cities. The fundamental ambiguity of the expression centri storici helped to build public consensus around the several proposals for the preservation of the historical centres that were put in practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 1969 plan for Bologna was by and large the most famous among these initiatives. Despite its reputation however, the case of Bologna is still partially analyzed and surrounded by an aura of myth. (4) Several questions remain unanswered how was the notion of centro storico defined when the plan was prepared, approved, and implemented? Did this notion correspond to an existing idea of historical centre? How and by what means was the centre supposed to be preserved? Univocal answers to these questions are difficult to give: architects, planners, and administrators, in fact, defined the centro storico in very different ways.

No doubt, the formalization of a concept of historical centre was a difficult task for those working in Bologna during the 1960s and the 1970s. The notion of centro storico had to be grounded on historical evidence and, at the same time, be precise enough to provide the basis for planning regulations. Moreover, preservation policies resorted also to partially inaccurate but strongly evocative representations of the historical centre, making use of images of the existing city that proved able to shape political and social consensus. As a matter of fact, in Bologna architects, planners, and administrators relied on both "technical" and "non-technical" definitions of the centro storico. What was at stake, at the end, was not only the preservation of a physical setting, but a more important issue: the redefinition of a local identity.

"Red Bologna": "Good Administration" and Town Planning

Bologna represented an anomaly in the political panorama of postwar Italy. In a country where the Communist party (PCI) had been constantly excluded from power at the national level, the city had remained uninterruptedly under left-wing administration since the end of the war. Three Communists held the post of mayor from 1945 to the early 1980s. Giuseppe Dozza (1945-66). Guido Fanti (1966-71), and Renato Zangheri (1971-83). (6) The region of Emilia Romagna, of which Bologna was the capital, had a strong presence of Communist organizations, with almost 20 per cent of the adult population being members of the PCI in the years immediately after World War II. The substantial left-wing political sympathies of the local society derived from the pre-war rootedness of labourers' leagues and radical and socialist associations. Moreover, a tradition of social Catholicism was solidly grounded in the city. (7) Since the early 1950s, the municipality of Bologna and the PCI leaders tried to portray the city as a model of buona amministrazione, of good administration. By diffusing a positive image of Bologna's administrative experience, in fact, the PCI intended to promote its role at the national level. Bologna came to be seen as a Communist showpiece, living proof of the party's potential capacity to run a modern society as well as the testing-bench for its apparatus. (8)

Town planning had a central role in this process. (9) This was especially true during the 1960s, when the arrival of a new generation of city administrators coincided with a radical shift in Bologna's municipal agenda, involving, for example, greater attention to economic planning and the systematic implementation of a policy of deficit spending. An overall revision of the previous plan for the city, approved by the municipal council in 1955, began then to take place. From 1968 onwards, this revision resulted in a sequence of varianti (variations) to the document, all of which were finally absorbed in a new general plan in 1970. The decade also witnessed the preparation of an inter-communal plan extended to the whole metropolitan region. (10) Moreover, the period was characterized by a series of important municipal initiatives in the fields of public housing and land policy, with the implementation of schemes characterized by original technological and organizational solutions and the acquisition of extensive amounts of land in areas for potential expansion. (11)

Finally, the municipality pursued policies aimed at increasing the interaction between citizens and the public sphere. In 1960, the city council approved the division of the city into 15 quartieri (neighbourhoods). A neighbourhood council (consiglio di quartiere) with consultative functions represented each neighbourhood: places for debate and discussion, the councils were meant to act as an intermediary between citizenry and municipality. Bologna was the first Italian city to deliberate the adoption of such institutions. The quartieri not only reinforced political consensus but contributed also to amplify the image of Bologna as the stronghold of new experimentation in local democracy. (12) All this was possible thanks to a favourable context, one where the consensus on the projects involved administrators, labour unions, housing cooperatives, and citizens; these favourable conditions began to deteriorate at the beginning of the 1980s. (13)

The Campaign for the Historical Centres

From the 1950s onwards, the subject of the historical centres and their preservation began to record in Italy a growing interest among both specialized and public audiences. (14) Italy's economic and social transformation was then accompanied by an intense building activity, affecting both large and small cities and endangering the integrity of what many perceived as a cultural patrimony whose defence was of national significance. Echoes of the increasing interest in these issues could be easily found outside the architectural and planning milieux. A good example of this attitude is represented by the publication in 1958 of Italo Calvino's La speculazione edilizia (The Building Speculation), a novel that described the transformation of Liguria's seashore under the push of rampant mass tourism. In this context, initiatives to safeguard the historical centres from building speculation flourished. Journalist, essayist, and social activist Antonio Cederna epitomized the figure of the modern intellectual committed to the defence of Italy's cultural patrimony. Often with marked moralistic tones. Cederna promoted campaigns from periodicals like II Mondo and L'Espresso and daily newspapers like II Corriere della Sera to stop new interventions in historical settings. (15) This movement of opinion led to the foundation of associations such as Italia Nostra, created in 1956 with the task of sensitizing the public to conservation.

On its part, the official professional culture (or at least part of it) tried to press in favour of a more controlled urban development, one respectful of the cultural heritage of the Italian cities. The INU ("Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica," National Institute of Town Planning) began to address the issue of the historical centres in its congresses, most notably the one of Lucca of 1957. One subject recurrently debated in the INU conferences was the need to bridge the gap between urban planning and preservation of historic buildings. Two laws approved before the end of World War II had created separate bureaucratic paths and legislative procedures for these matters. The 1939 law for the protection of the artistic heritage (Law n. 1089) was centred upon the action of specific state offices, the Soprintendenze, (16) while the 1942 law on planning (Law n. 1150) had given the task of approving planning documents to municipal administrations. As preservation was increasingly directed towards entire urban areas rather than isolated works, it was important--many argued--to integrate these separate approaches and address the problem with specific planning instruments. (17)

A turning point in the debate over the Italian historical centres was the foundation in 1960 of the Associazione Nazionale per i Centri Storico-artistici (National Association for the Art-historical Centres, ANCSA) an association that grouped architects, planners, experts on restoration, and municipal administrators. (18) One of the outcomes of the first ANCSA congress held in Gubbio was the drafting of a document (the so-called Carta di Gubbio) that was a declaration of principles for the preservation of the city centres. (19) The congress also marked the moment when the expression centri storici started to be widely recognized as the mot d'ordre used by a heterogeneous elite to discuss the problem of urban preservation. (20)

During the 1950s, a large part of the town-planning debate regarded the urban policies of the Fascist regime as a target for polemics, with the sventramenti, the large-scale demolitions of the centres of Rome and other Italian cities, often evoked as an example. On the contrary, historians tend today to stress that many links existed between the postwar professional milieu and the architectural and planning culture of the 1920s and 1930s. (21) The work of Gustavo Giovannoni is probably the best example of these continuities. In his influential book of 1931, Vecchie citta ed edilizia nuova (Old Cities and New Building). Giovannoni argued that "surviving old cities are almost always unfit to become the centre of new ones." (22) According to Giovannoni, decentralization of functions external to the "old cities" was the only way to reconcile modern urban development with the need to preserve existing urban settings. The example of Giovannoni makes clear that the preservation of old urban tissues was already a crucial problem for the Italian planning culture in the early 20th century. The postwar debate about the centri storici was the result of this ongoing history. This was also the case of the discussions taking place in Bologna around the preservation of the city's central area.

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Defining Bologna's Centro Storico: The Studies of the Mid-1960s

The most influential attempt to define Bologna's centro storico in a way that could provide a basis for a preservation policy was made in the early 1960s by a group of architects and planners led by architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo. (23) The group was based at the University of Florence, since the University of Bologna did not have a faculty of architecture at that time. (24) The research was one of the studi settoriali (sector studies), as they were called, commissioned by the municipality as preliminary works for a revision of the 1955 plan. (25) The preface to the document--unsigned yet certainly written by Benevolo--explained why, in the view of the authors, the historical city should be the object of special planning policies as a whole.

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A fracture existed, according to the document, between the "modern city" and the "city of the past." No continuity could be found between these two opposite urban models: their spatial forms and organizational principles were irreducibly different. As "we communicate with the past less and less through the continuity of tradition and more and more through historical reflection," the report argued, it was necessary to preserve what remained of the historical city as a "concrete testimony" of "past values." It was important to recognize that the "directional" functions required by the modern city could not but partly find their place in historical settings. Most of these functions, especially bureaucratic and commercial activities generating the movement of large masses of people, were incompatible with the ancient urban fabric and its road network. Whenever located in the historical centre, they inevitably tended to produce an "irresistible push" towards transformation and, implicitly, towards a loss of cultural identity. The remedy was clear. Only a few central activities contained in the metropolitan area of Bologna could be located in the old city centre: the remaining others would have to be situated elsewhere. (26) Interestingly enough, the report gave no explicit definition of what a "modern city" was.

As these excerpts make clear, the document prepared by the group led by Benevolo considered the preservation of the historical city to be just an aspect of a larger problem: the organization of Bologna at a metropolitan scale. The preservation of the centre could be considered only in the context of a wider policy. (27) It was, in many respects, a problem of centrality; if some activities of the "modern city" tended to destroy the "historical centre," it was the planner's and the administrator's duty to imagine a metropolitan organization based upon the coexistence of different types of centrality. (28) These statements echoed Giovannoni's old assumptions about the role of city centres in the modern city and, to a certain extent, adapted them to a different conceptual and historiographical framework.

The delimitation of Bologna's centro storico, proposed by the Benevolo group, was defined on a limited number of factors. The centro storico was identified with the entire area of the city within the perimeter once occupied by the late-medieval walls. (29) However, not everything within this limit was considered worthy of preservation. The report emphasized the diversity of the cityscape, reminding the administrators that the historical city was the result of a stratification of building activities resulting from successive alterations. Some zones had been so altered that they had almost lost their historical value: the preservation policies put forward by the report did not apply to them. As a whole urban and social entity, defined by the memory of the walls and the persistence of a sense of unity, the centro storico was one thing. As the object of an architectural and urban preservation translated into practice, it was something else.

The centre was losing population when the report was written. Its 116,949 residents according to the 1951 census had already diminished to 93.219 in 1961. The document did not count on a reversal of this trend: it rather hoped to bring the population in the central area to a total of 75,000. Expulsion of residents was perceived as a problem, but large parts of the city centre were still deemed overcrowded: for this reason, experts thought that the city could benefit from the reduction of density encouraged by the plan. The report did not hide the fact that pressure of non-residential activities upon the historical centre was bound to grow. It called for strong administrative action, in order to carefully control the phenomenon and reduce its potentially negative effects. The city centre was depicted as a living part of the city, still densely populated, characterized by a high degree of social cohesion, formal unity, and functional interconnection. (30)

Plans for the City Centre, 1969-1973

Bologna's municipal council approved the plan for the preservation of the centro storico on 21 July 1969. (31) The document was one of the varianti to the 1955 plan: it replaced the latter's directions for the centre, which still allowed for relevant architectural modifications, with a new set of regulations, more oriented towards the preservation of the existing urban fabric. When the plan was approved, Leonardo Benevolo was no longer involved in the city's preservation initiatives. In fact, while the "sector studies" of the early and mid-1960s had been systematically entrusted to external consultants, by the end of the decade a much more prominent role was played by Bologna's recently renewed municipal services and technical bureaucratic apparatus. The figure of Pier Luigi Cervellati epitomized this change: an architect and former member of the research group led by Benevolo, he later joined the municipality and rapidly gained a wide national and international reputation. (32)

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Nevertheless, the plan of 1969 continued to be inspired by the studies that had been carried out in the previous years. Among other things, this was evident in the way the city centre was identified by the document the municipality had approved. The plan, in fact, defined the centre as the part of the city enclosed by the boulevards built in the early 19th century under Napoleon's rule, with the exceptions that had been defined by the 1965 document. The plan also illustrated the transformations that were considered admissible for every building of the historical city. Once again, the definition of the permitted or forbidden actions (six categories, which ranged from complete demolition and reconstruction to total conservation) was derived, with some developments and modifications, from the Benevolo report. The analysis of the urban fabric proposed by the plan was relatively simple. The architectures of the city centre were divided into four basic typologies, a classification that had only a partial impact on the proposed interventions. The first typology included large monumental buildings of historical relevance (the so-called big containers): these were considered crucial for the localization of special urban services (for instance, those associated with the presence of the university).

The 1969 plan for the centro storico was above all a classification of the existing buildings, accompanied by regulations defining a limited set of possible transformations. Publicly funded procedures for the implementation of the plan in specific parts of the city centre were put into action only at a later stage. Most of them were launched in the early 1970s, when a growing emphasis upon social housing and land policy involved a major reassessment of the plan's goals. This change of attitude was related to the social conflicts generated by the worsening housing situation, a problem that affected several Italian cities in those years. This issue took on particular importance in the political agenda of local administrations; (33) more importantly, it was accompanied by a widespread perception that part of the problem could be solved through public intervention on the existing housing stock in the city centres. (34)

Bologna soon positioned itself in the forefront of these initiatives. In the aftermath of the approval by the Italian Parliament, in 1971, of a law on public housing (Law n. 865), the municipality headed by Mayor Zangheri chose to experiment with implementation of these new legislative instruments in some parts of the city centre. A plan for low-cost public housing ("Piano di edilizia economico-popolare," PEEP) was passed by the municipal council in 1973; it was concerned exclusively with the city centre. (35) The action undertaken by the municipality raised fierce discussions among planners and within the PCI itself, in particular on expropriation of large private properties. (36) Precise historical evaluations of the effects of these strategies are not available yet; nonetheless, it must be noted that, at the end of the decade, several authors seemed to agree on the high economic cost and limited social impact of these policies on the renewal of the existing housing stock. (37) In any event, this "social" aspect of the preservation activity soon became the most widely publicized aspect of the experience of Bologna, in Italy and abroad.

The City Centre and Its Narrative

The 1969 plan for the city centre was presented to the citizens of Bologna in an exhibition opened in May 1970 in the rooms of Palazzo d'Accursio and in the courtyard of the Archiginnasio. Under the title of "Bologna centro storico," the show represented an important moment to public communication. As its subtitle ("An ancient city for a new society") made clear, the contrasting issues of preservation and modernization were at stake. The purpose of the exhibition was twofold: to gather consensus on the recent policies for the city centre and to use the ancient city as a medium of political communication, in order to reinforce a collective identification between citizens, local government, and the physical setting of the city. (38)

In the catalogue published to accompany the 1970 exhibition, the images of the city centre were presented as a complement to the portrayal of the centro storico codified by the 1969 plan. This emphasis on visual representation served not only to speak to a general audience but also to produce a link between the plan (and the planners) and sectors of the Bolognese cultural elite. For example, several art historians and preservation specialists working at the Soprintendenze were involved in the preparation of the 1970 exhibition and catalogue. In their essays they provided copious information on Bologna's architectural and artistic history. Even though their nuanced analysis of the city's historical characters contrasted often with the simple classification of the urban fabric propounded by the planning documents, their involvement helped to create consensus on the new policies among key sectors of the Bolognese society.

An important role in this consensus-building strategy directed towards both the general public and other specialists and experts was played by visual communication--most notably photography. At the beginning of 1969, just before the plan's approval, the municipality commissioned the photographer Paolo Monti to complete a "photographic survey" of the centre. (39) Monti was not new to working in the context of Emilia-Romagna and had begun during the 1960s to participate in various surveys directed at analyzing and reevaluating the local cultural patrimony. (40) His "survey" set forth with a series of trial sessions conducted between March and April 1969. The main campaign began some months later, on 8 August. A squad of city policemen and municipal workers--whose task was to close streets to pedestrian and vehicular traffic and to remove billboards and road and shop signs--accompanied the photographer. Tow trucks followed this unusual cortege in case cars were left in the No Parking zone. (41)

Monti's work produced an astonishing number of photographs: more than four thousand. The photographer employed two types of cameras: the Linhoff 10 X 12 and the Nikon F reflex The latter had been chosen because it was an agile and relatively cheap instrument for a work that was intended to realize a large number of shots in a short period of time. During the campaign, Monti pursued an approach grounded on the rapidity of execution and on the possibility of producing long sequences of shots. It was an overview of the urban space based on a multiplicity of sights rather than an analytical investigation. The campaign offered a vision of the city characterized by perspective visuals, often accentuated by the long colonnades of Bologna's famous arcades. All photographs were taken at human eye level. Isolated details sometimes punctuated the tracking shot, almost as a series of objets trouves. Occasionally, the photographer moved from the streets into the adjacent buildings, to explore courtyards, gardens, and architectural and ornamental details.

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The campaign was instrumental to the consolidation of Bolognese public opinion on the issue of the historical centre in that it offered a visual representation of the otherwise abstract notion of centro storico. Not only were the photographs presented during the 1970 exhibition at Palazzo d'Accursio but Monti's material became the bulk of the show. Even if they represented only a selection of the shots made during the campaign. Monti's photographs portrayed a reality that the visitors could observe outside the walls of the exhibition spaces, creating thus a short-circuit between historical image and direct perception. (42) In this respect, photography provided a sort of mediation to the visual observation of the urban space. (43) The way Monti's work was used in the exhibition and catalogue emphasized the more easily perceivable, almost common-sense traits of his work: the nostalgic image of a city untouched by modernity, full of hidden secrets and architectural surprises, a city that only the glance of the flaneur could fully appreciate. In a section of the catalogue entitled "The Garage City." Monti's photographs were presented in couples to create contrasting effects between the images of Bologna submerged by traffic and those of the empty city. By implicitly inviting observers to appreciate a view unaffected by contemporary transformations, the book almost seemed to condemn modernity: moral issues prevailed over all scientific and practical consideration. (44)

Monti's portrait of Bologna was neither a "survey" nor a mere invention of the photographer. In the postwar years, in fact, several photographers had already portrayed the city and its physical setting, although none of them had operated within a publicly funded project of such ambition. (45) Some of these photographers (such as Walter Breveglieri, Aldo Ferrari, Antonio Masotti, or Enrico Pasquali) had, in different ways, contributed to the fabrication of some of the visual conventions later revisited by Monti. In turn, it is worth remembering that these representations were sometimes related to more remote sources, such as pictorial traditions, literary descriptions of the city, local histories, urban biographies. (46) The complexity of this visual and textual stratification is particularly evident in the short films that Renzo Renzi made in the 1950s for the Provincial Tourist Office. His Guida per camminare all'ombra ("A Guide to Walking in the Shade," 1955), written with Leone Pancaldi, reconstructed the history of Bologna's arcades and portrayed them as the key element of the image of the city. Arcades contributed to the character of an urban scenery that was, as the script went, "perhaps without big architectural individualities but bound together and homogeneous." (47) Bologna's arcades were also a key element of Monti's photographic survey and a recurring theme of the image of the city outlined by the 1970 exhibition. It is interesting to note, however, that no specific attention had been given to these defining elements of the cityscape in the plan of 1969.

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Conclusions

In spite of the attempts by architects, architectural historians, and planners to provide an "objective" background for preservation, the idea of "historical centre" that lay behind the policies put in place by the municipality of Bologna in the 1960s and 1970s remained in many respects equivocal. Far from being just "technical," it reflected the influence of a plurality of cultural factors that were in turn reshaped by the changing notion of centro storico. Among them were generic definitions of art and architectural heritage, social and political practices affecting urban space, deeply rooted traditions of urban description, and visual representations codified by cinema and photography.

To explain operatively what the centro storico was, or to isolate the key elements of the city's urban fabric, was no easier task in the 1960s than it would be today. Interestingly enough, most of the people involved in this operation were not from Bologna. In fact, nothing of what happened there was only of local importance. That of "Red Bologna" was a political experiment of national relevance, a crucial showcase for the administrative capacity of the Communist party. The city attracted political and technical elites from all over Italy, and these elites--be they planners like Giuseppe Campos Venuti, architectural historians like Benevolo, photographers like Monti--made important contributions to the definition of the image of Bologna's city centre.

It was one of the paradoxes of the Bologna experience (and, more generally, of the Italian debate over the historical centres) that these collective efforts converged ultimately upon the definition of a local identity. One of the main goals of the preservation policy was to build consensus among Bologna's citizens: in doing this, administrators, architects, and planners tried to associate a sense of citizenship with a notion of shared tradition. Unsurprisingly, this tradition was largely invented: it was a cultural construction based upon the assemblage of heterogeneous materials. Some of these materials were recent while others were deeply rooted in the past. Some were already shared by portions of Bologna's society while others were not. Some aimed at an "objective" analysis of the urban fabric while others suggested the traits of a regressive utopia. At the end, the image of the historical Bologna that emerged was a collage of representations, the result of a cultural mediation.

Another paradox was that the consolidation of this image contributed in the following years to a rise in real estate values in the historical centre, in a process that contradicted some of the "social" intents that had accompanied the plans of 1969-1973. In fact, the attempt to use the historical centre in order to define a local identity favoured a valorization of the centro storico that was both cultural and economic and that coincided with the contemporary rediscovery of central of the central areas of Italy's largest cities by building speculation. The result was a somewhat conflicting relationship among preservation plans, housing policies, urban planning programs, and real estate dynamics. The constant predominance of an "architectural" attitude in dealing with the problems of the historical centre further amplified these contradictions.

The policies for the urban conservation of Bologna in the 1960s and 1970s resorted to powerful metaphors. The plurality of images and words associated with the idea of historical centre was a precious resource for Bologna's administrators. This plurality enabled the city, its leaders, and its bureaucratic apparatus to adapt their policies to changing circumstances, while speaking to different cultural elites and sectors of the Italian public opinion. The outcome was a partial reinvention of Bologna's urban identity, one that shaped an ambiguous but highly evocative public discourse about the historical city.

Acknowledgements

The Nederlands Architectuurinstituut and the Akademie der Kunste Berlin provided financial assistance in the early stages of the research. The authors wish to thank Luigi Mazza and Michela Morgante for their extended and useful criticism, and Angela Tromellini (Cineteca di Bologna, Archivio Fotografico) for her precious help.

Notes

1. The success of the case of Bologna in the international press would deserve a thorough discussion; examples of articles or books in English, French, and German are: Marcel Cornu, "Urbanisme critique: Bologna a contre-courant," Urbanisme 42, no. 137 (1973); Astrid Debold-Kritter, "Communist Conservation." Architectural Review 154, no. 922 (Dec. 1973): 371-75. Peter Debold and Astrid Debold, "Die Planungpolitik Bolognas: Stadtentwicklung und Stadterhaltung," Bauwelt 65, no. 33 (Sept. 1974): 1112-33, Marie-Christine Gangneux, "Bologne, la riposte d'un urbanisme democratique." L'Architecture d'Aujourd'Hui 180 (July-Aug. 1975): 44-67 (special issue on historical centres, edited by Bernard Huet): Juan Rodriguez-Lores. "Warum Bologna? Bemerkungen zu einer Strategie von politischer Planung." Arch + 26 (1975), Thomas R. Angotti and Bruce S. Dale. "Bologna: Conservative Plans of a Communist City," Architectural Design 46, no. 1 (1976): 12-17; Max Jaggi, Roger Muller, and Sil Schmid, Red Bologna (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1977); Peter A. Ulram, Zwischen Burokratie und Burger: Sozialistische Kommunalpolitik in Wien. Stockholm und Bologna (Wien: Braumuller, 1978); Harald Bodenschatz, Stadtische Bodenreform in Italien: Die Auseinandersetzung um das Bodenrecht und die Bologneser Kommunalplanung (Frankfurt-New York: Campus, 1979); Lothar Jax, Stadterneuerung in Bologna, 1956-1987; Zum Aufstieg und Niedergang der Quartiersdemokratie (Koln: Kohlhammer, 1989).

2. G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge. The Tourist-Historic City, Retrospect and Prospect of Managing the Heritage City (Oxford: Elsevier, 2000).

3. An interesting analysis of Italy's "preservation model," one that stresses both its peculiarity and originality in an international context, has recently been made by Salvatore Settis, Italia S.p.A. L'assalto al patrimonio culturale (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).

4. Books and articles written by Bologna's planners and administrators contributed to the construction of this mythology. In particular, see Pier Luigi Cervellati and Roberto Scannavini, ed., Bologna: Politica e metodologia del restauro nei centri storici (Bologna: II Mulino, 1973); Pier Luigi Cervellati, Roberto Scannavini, and Carlo De Angelis, La nuova cultura delle citta: La salvaguardia dei centri storici, la riappropriazione sociale degli organismi urbani e l'analisi dello sviluppo territoriale nell'esperienza di Bologna (Milan: Mondadori, 1977). The former was translated into Spanish in 1976: Bolonia; politica y metodologia de la restauracion de centros historicos (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1976), the latter into French in 1981 La nouvelle culture urbaine: Bologne face a son patrimoine (Paris: Seuil, 1981).

5. The construction of local identities grounded on the selection of historical memories is a key process in European modern history: Stephane Gerson. The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003) contains interesting remarks on this complex subject. The issue is even more crucial in Italy, a country where the political unification took place comparatively late (1860): see Simona Troilo. "Patrie: II bene storico-artistico e l'identita locale tra Otto e Novecento," Memoria e Ricerca 11, no. 14 (2003): 159-76.

6. On their respective mayoral experiences, see Giuseppe Dozza, II buon governo e la rinascita della citta: Scritti 1945-1966 (Bologna: Cappelli, 1987): Guido Fanti and Gian Carlo Ferri, Cronache dall'Emilia rossa: L'impossibile riformismo del PCI (Bologna: Pendragon, 2001): Enzo Biagi. II sindaco di Bologna: Enzo Biagi intervista Renato Zangheri (Modena. Ricardo Franco Levi, 1975).

7. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics. 1943-1988 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 200-1, 295-97. See also Storia d'Italia: Le Regioni dall'Unita a oggi. L'Emilia-Romagna, ed. Roberto Finzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). The image of Emilia-Romagna as a "civic model," thanks to its supposedly high degree of democratic participation, has persisted until very recently; see, for instance: Robert D. Putnam (with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

8. Luca Baldissara, Per una citta piu bella e piu grande: II governo municipale di Bologna negli anni della ricostruzione (1945-1956) (Bologna: II Mulino, 1994), 225-34; Luca Baldissara. "II Comune nello sviluppo della citta: La definizione del ruolo del comune negli orientamenti politici ed amministrativi dei comunisti bolognesi (1945-1980)," in II fondo Giuseppe Dozza, ed. Virginia Sangiorgi and Paola Zagatti (Bologna: II Nove, 1994), 9-48.

9. At a political level, there was wide agreement on the fact that planning was one of the few fields in which it was possible to carry out partial experiences of decentralized municipal government. Even an opponent to the PCI hegemony, the Christian Democrat Giuseppe Dossetti, claimed the importance of city plans, because they were the "only law"--he stated--that municipalities were allowed to issue: Democrazia Cristiana, Libro bianco su Bologna (Bologna: Poligrafici "II Resto del Carlino," 1956), 29.

10. A proper historical assessment of Bologna's planning policies throughout this period is still lacking. The best available accounts are those from the architects and planners themselves: see Vieri Quilici and Armando Sichenze. Costruttori di architetture: Bologna 1960-1980 (Rome: Officina, 1985), an interesting attempt at writing an oral history of Bologna's experience in the field of public housing; Patrizia Gabellini, Bologna e Milano: Temi e attori dell urbanistica (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1988): Giuseppe Campos Venuti. "Bologna: l'urbanistica riformista," in Cinquant'anni di urbanistica in Italia: 1942-1992. ed. Giuseppe Campos Venuti and Federico Oliva (Rorne-Bari: Laterza, 1993), 297-312 Recent historiography tends to confirm that the 1955 plan was still very much linked to the planning ideas of the 1930s and 1940s: Alberto Pedrazzini, "1945 e oltre: II dopo 'delenda Bonomia,'" in Norma e arbitrio: Architetti e ingegneri a Bologna 1850-1950, ed. Giuliano Gresleri and Pier Giorgio Massaretti, exhibition catalogue (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 349-61. See also Bologna: Guida di architettura, ed. Giuliano Gresleri (Turin: Allemandi, 2004).

11. Quilici and Sichenze, Costruttori di architetture; II volto sociale dell "edilizia popolare": i Peep periferici a Bologna (Milan-Rome: Sapere, 1975); Francesco Ceccarelli, "L'attivita edilizia dello lacp a Bologna nel secondo dopoguerra," in Per Bologna: Novant'anni di attivita dell'Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari 1906-1996 (Bologna: Grafiche Zanini, 1996): Alberto Pedrazzini, "I quartieri della ricostruzione a Bologna," in La grande ricostruzione: II piano Ina-Casa e l'Italia degli anni '50, ed. Paola Di Biagi (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), 389-401.

12. On the institution of the quartieri, see Francesco Ceccarelli and Maria Angiola Gallingani. Bologna: decentramento, quartieri, citta, 1945-1974 (Bologna: Istituto per la Storia di Bologna, 1987).

13. Paola Bonora and Angela Giardini. Orfana e claudicante. L'Emilia "post-comunista" e la crisi del modello territoriale (Bologna: Baskerville, 2003).

14. Pier Luigi Cervellati and Mariangela Miliari, I centri storici (Rimini-Florence: Guaraldi, 1977); Cina Conforto, "II problema dei centri storici," in II dibattito architettonico in Italia, 1945-1975. ed. Cina Conforto. Gabriele De Giorgi, Alessandra Muntoni, and Marcello Pazzaglini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977), 129-73; Giovanni Ferracuti, "Origini, limiti e prospettive della 'cultura del recupero,'" in L'Italia da recuperare (Rome: Credito Fondiario-Cresme, 1988), 1:123-58; Chiara Mazzoleni, "Dalla salvaguardia del centro storico alla riqualificazione della citta esistente: Trent'anni di dibattito dell'Ancsa," Archivio di studi urbani e regionali 40 (1991), 7-42.

15. On Cederna, see Beni culturali, urbanistica e paesaggio nell'opera di Antonio Cederna (1921-1996), CD-ROM (Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali/Fondazione Antonio Cederna, 1999). Cederna's articles were collected in influential books such as I vandali in casa (Bari: Laterza, 1956); and Mirabilia Urbis. Cronache romane 1957-1965 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965).

16. The Soprintendenze had an important role in shaping Italy's preservation culture in the 20th century. Michela Morgante, "Salvare il volto delle citta: L'azione di Pietro Gazzola, soprintendente della Ricostruzione veronese," in Tra guerra e pace: societa, cultura e architettura nel secondo dopoguerra. ed. Patrizia Bonifazio, Sergio Pace, Michela Rosso, and Paolo Scrivano (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1998), 221-30, provides an interesting account of the action of a soprintendente in the immediate postwar period. For the evolution of Bologna's Soprintendenza during the same years, see Paola Monari, "La tormentata formazione degli uffici per la conservazione degli edifici monumentali," in Norma e arbitrio, 311-29.

17. The growing awareness of the problem was accompanied by the publication of studies on the history of those cities that had maintained some architectural uniformity throughout the centuries. An example is Bruno Zevi's Biagio Rossetti, architetto ferrarese: II primo urbanista moderno europeo (Turin: Einaudi, 1960). In 1959, Saverio Muratori published his studies on Venice, where he carried out a meticulous analysis of the Venetian urban fabric in order to identify groups of architectural typologies and determine their evolution and transformation over the time: Saverio Muratori, Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato. 1959-60). The book was highly influential and paved the way to a season of typological studies that, in spite of their different aims and methods, put a strong emphasis on the unity of the urban historical setting taken as a whole. See Aldo Rossi. L'architettura della citta (Padova: Marsilio, 1966); Augusto Cavallari-Murat, ed., Forma urbana e architettura nella Torino barocca Dalle premesse classiche alle conclusioni neoclassiche (Turin: Utet, 1968): Comune di Como, La citta murata di Como; atti della ricerca promossa dall'amministrazione comunale negli anni 1968 e 1969 (Como: Cesare Nani, 1970); Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi, and others, La citta di Padova: Saggio di analisi urbana (Rome: Officina, 1970).

18. The ANCSA conference in Gubbio was promoted by architect Giovanni Astengo, a prominent figure of the Italian town-planning milieu in his capacity of former vice-president of the INU and editor of the Institute's periodical, Urbanistica. A few years before, in 1955; Astengo had begun to work on the plan for Assisi, an Umbrian town that almost summarized the question of the historical centres. Although approved in 1958, the plan was never implemented as it was rejected by the city council in 1959; nevertheless, this failure had the effect of further enlivening the debate: Paola Di Biagi. "Giovanni Astengo: Un metodo per dare rigore scientifico e morale all'urbanistica," in Urbanisti italiani: Piccinato Marconi Samona Quaroni De Carlo Astengo Campos Venuti, ed. Paola Di Biagi and Patrizia Gabellini (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1992), 405-11.

19. Papers and documents presented at the Gubbio congress were published in Urbanistica 32 (1960): 65-92.

20. Other expressions had previously competed with centro storico to designate the ancient parts of Italian cities. Architectural historian Roberto Pane, for example, often used the expression ambiente antico (ancient setting) in his writings of the 1950s, see "Centro studi della Triennale di Milano," Attualita urbanistica dei monumenti e dell'ambiente antico (Milan: Gorlich, 1958); Roberto Pane, Citta antiche edilizia nuova (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1959).

21. Such a view of the urban policies of the Fascist years was supported by historical studies that polemically emphasized the damages brought to the urban fabric by the monumental projects of the regime: see, for example Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1963). Historians have long since recognized the limits of these interpretations: Salvatore Adorno, "Urbanistica fascista: Tecnici e professionisti tra storiografia e storia disciplinare," Contemporanea 4, no. 1 (2001); Alice Ingold, Negocier la ville: Projet urbain, societe et fascisme a Milan (Rome-Paris: Ecole francaise de Rome-Editions de I'EHESS, 2003).

22. Gustavo Giovannoni, Vecchie citta ed edilizia nuova (Turin: Utet, 1931), 156. On Giovannoni and his importance for Italy's architectural and planning culture, see Guido Zucconi. La citta contesa: Dagli ingegneri sanitari agli urbanisti (1885-1942) (Milan: Jaca Book, 1989); Guido Zucconi, introduction to Dal capitello alla citta, by Gustavo Giovannoni (Milan: Jaca Bock, 1996). The role of Giovannoni is stressed also by Francoise Choay. L'allegorie du patrimoine (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

23. Born in 1923, Benevolo studied architecture in Rome graduating in 1946: Sergio Pace, "Leonardo Benevolo," in Dizionario dell architettura del XX secolo, ed. Carlo Olmo (Turin: Allemandi, 2000), 1:217. On Benevolo's History of Modern Architecture, published in 1960, see Panayotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 85-111. On his Le origini dell'urbanistica moderna (Origins of Modern Town Planning), published in 1963, see Bernardo Secchi, "Leonardo Benevolo, Le origini dell'urbanistica moderna, 1963: L'inevitabilia del 'politico,'" in I classici dell'urbanistica moderna, ed. Paola Di Biagi (Rome. Donzelli, 2002), 233-51.

24. The members of the research group were Paolo Andina, Leonardo Benevolo. Silvano Casini, Pier Luigi Cervellati, Pier Giorgio Felcaro, Vittorio Franchetti, Sandro Gandolfi, Eros Parmeggiani, and Paola Tamanti. Antonio Cederna acted as an external consultant.

25. In municipal architect Giancarlo Mattioli's later account, the planner Giuseppe Campos Venuti, deputy mayor for urban planning from 1960 to 1966, "started in Bologna a series of sector studies on directional centres, social housing, historical centres, green spaces, schools. These were always entrusted to couples formed by an expert and a local correspondent. Therefore we [had] Aymonino with Giordani, Benevolo with Andina, Insolera with Ballardini, and so on": Quilici and Sichenze, 44.

26. Comune di Bologna, Universita di Firenze-Istituto di Urbanistica, Universita di Firenze-Istituto di Storia dell'Architettura, Relazione dell'indagine settoriale sul centro storico di Bologna, fourth version (21 May 1965), Premessa, 5-8. Cf. also Benevolo's presentation of the research in La pianificazione temtoriale urbanistica nell'area bolognese, ed. Giancarlo De Carlo (Padova Marsilio, 1965), 29-45.

27. It is worth noting that Bologna's effort to define a policy for the historical centre was paralleled by the definition of new inter-communal strategies and by attempts to plan a "directional centre" outside the old city, in proximity to the new Fiera, the exhibition centre designed by Benevolo himself in 1964-65. Proposals for the centro direzionale were put forward in the mid-1960s in Carlo Aymonino and Pierluigi Giordani. I centri direzionali: teoria e pratica. Gli esempi italiani e stranieri. Dimensionamento e localizzazione di un centro direzionale nella citta di Bologna (Bari: De Donato, 1965). Further projects for the directional centre and the Fiera District were proposed (and only partly carried out) by Kenzo Tange in the early 1970s.

28. It is interesting to note that discussions over centrality had also a central im portance in the political process that led to the institution of the neighbourhood councils. In 1960, when the consigli di quartiere were first created, the centre did not have its own council. Four consigli di quartiere for the historical city were created only later, in 1966. As the deputy mayor Crocioni told the city council in 1963. "We cannot consider the city centre as a neighbourhood ... In the city centre there are facilities, structures, institutions matching not only the needs of the neighbourhood but also those of the entire city ... The centre has a ... general directional function." Quoted in Ceccarelli and Gallingani, Bologna: decentramento, quartieri, citta, 209.

29. This spatial definition of the centre could appear quite logical, since the demolition of the walls, their replacement with a ring of boulevards, and the subsequent expansion towards the periphery had taken place comparatively late in Bologna--only in the decades following the 1889 plan for the city. Giovanni Ricci, Bologna (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1980), 140-55.

30. Relazione dell'indagine settoriale sul centro storico di Bologna, 46-64.

31. Archivio Storico del Comune di Bologna, "Approvazione della variante al vigente PRG relativa al centro storico con l'esclusione della parte riguardante l'area di proprieta dell'amministrazione dei Monopoli di Stato," PRG, m. 7. The plan's approval was preceded by the highly symbolic decision to limit to pedestrians the access to the area around Piazza Maggiore (September 1968).

32. Born in 1936, trained at the Faculty of Architecture of Florence, Cervellati was from 1961 a member of the architectural and planning practice Citta Nuova, a firm he left in 1964 (together with two other co-founders. Giancarlo Mattioli and Franco Morelli) to work for the city of Bologna Cervellati was repeatedly assessore (deputy mayor) for matters related to housing policies and planning. He left his political and administrative duties in 1980 to become a university professor and the author of several books on city planning and preservation, most notably La citta post-industriale (Bologna: II Mulino, 1984); La citta bella: II recupero dell'ambiente urbano (Bologna: II Mulino, 1991); L'arte di curare la citta (Bologna: II Mulino, 2000). See Gruppo Architetti Urbanisti "Citta Nuova": progetti e architettura 1961-1991. ed. Raffaello Scatasta (Milan: Electa, 1992), 7-8, 207; Ilia Delizia, "Pier Luigi Cervellati," in Dizionario dell'architettura del XX secolo, ed. Carlo Olmo (Turin: Allemandi, 2000), 2:50.

33. Edoardo Salzano, ed., Casa, urbanistica e poteri locali (Rome: Edizioni delle Autonomie, 1971); Francesco Indovina, ed., Lo spreco edilizio (Padova: Marsilio, 1972); Giovanni Ferracuti, Maurizio Marcelloni, La casa. Mercato e programmazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), chap. 5 and 6.

34. Pier Paolo Balbo and Franco Zagari, ed., L'intervento pubblico nei centri storici, proceedings of the Gescal conference. Venice, 11-12 May 1973 (Bologna: II Mulino, 1973).

35. Comune di Bologna, Assessorato all'edilizia pubblica, Peep centro storico (Bologna, 1972); Comune di Bologna, Piano per il centro storico: Stato delle abitazioni e struttura della popolazione, ed. Claudio Caroni, 2nd ed. (Bologna, 1972); Comune di Bologna. Assessorato all'edilizia pubblica. La convenzione per il risanamento dei 5 comparti Peep-centro storico: Relazione e allegati (Bologna, 1975); Comune di Bologna, Assessorato alla programmazione casa e assetto urbano. Restauro conservativo nel centro storico di Bologna: Programmi, progetti, realizzazioni (Bologna, 1978).

36. The key text providing administrators with the juridical ground for this interpretation of the 865/971 law was Alberto Predieri, "L'espropriazione di immobili nei centri storici per l'edilizia residenziale pubblica secondo la legge n. 865 del 1971," in Bologna: Politica e metodologia, ed. Cervellati and Scannavini. See also Maurizio Marcelloni, "Bologna, il conflitto politico fa arretrare il piano," and Pier Luigi Cervellati, "Bologna, la difesa di un progetto," both in Risanamento e speculazione nei centri storici, ed. Paolo Ceccarelli and Francesco Indovina (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1974), also published as a special issue of Archivio di Studi Urbani e Regionali 1-2 (1974).

37. A negative evaluation of the practical results of the PEEP centro storico can be found in Elia Barbiani and Georgio Conti, Politiques urbaines et luttes sociales a Bologna: Reconstruction, "miracle italien" et crise dans une "municipalite rouge" (Paris: Centre de sociologie urbaine, 1980), 1:355-57. For contrasting interpretations of the reasons of the partial failure of these policies, cf.: Marcello Fabbri, L'urbanistica italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi: Storia ideologie immagini (Bari: De Donato, 1983), 307-20; Vezio De Lucia. Se questa e una citta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1989, 2nd ed. 1992), 103-8; Umberto Janin Rivolin Yoccoz, "Recupero edilizio e cultura urbanistica: Una riflessione sul contesto italiano negli anni '70," Archivio di studi urbani e regionali 53 (1995).

38. Bologna centro storico, exhibition catalogue, ed. Pier Luigi Cervellati, Andrea Emiliani, Renzo Renzi, and Roberto Scannavini (Bologna: Edizioni Alfa, 1970). Cf. in particular, Cervellati's introduction, "Una citta antica per una societa nuova," 9-20.

39. Born in Novara. Paolo Monti (1908-1982) arrived at professional photography after a career as business manager. Roberta Valtorta, "Paolo Monti." History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 198-203; see also Angela Tromellini, "Immagini e parole: Problemi di catalogazione del fondo Paolo Monti, conservato nell'archivio fotografico della Cineteca del Comune di Bologna," Quaderni di Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande 6 (1999).

40. In the following years. Monti continued to maintain close ties with this geographic area, thanks to the work he carried out on the urban centres of Modena, Cesena, and Forli, and to the continuation of the campaigns on some villages of the Apennines. II censimento fotografico dei centri storici. Modena, di Paolo Monti, 1973, ed. Piero Orlandi (Modena: Comune di Modena-Istituto per i Beni Culturali Regione Emilia-Romagna, 1979); Pier Luigi Cervellati, "Paolo Monti e i centri storici dell'Emilia Romagna," Rassegna 20 (December 1984): 32-37; Pieve di Cento nelle foto di Paolo Monti, ed. Andrea Emiliani (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1995); Forli e Cesena nelle foto di Paolo Monti, ed. Biagio Dradi Maraldi and Maria Cristina Gori (Milan: Motta Editore, 1996).

41. Paolo Monti, "La scoperta della citta vuota," in Bologna centro storico, 53-55; Andrea Emiliani and Paolo Monti, "II centro storico di Bologna: Un censimento fotografico," Arte Illustrata 25-6 (Jan.-Feb. 1970), 97-107; Francesco Ceccarelli, "Paolo Monti e il censimento fotografico del centro storico di Bologna: A mano libera e passi andanti," in II tempo dell'immagine: Fotografi e societa a Bologna 1880-1980, ed. Andrea Emiliani and Italo Zannier (Turin: Seat, 1993), 277-82.

42. Perhaps with involuntary irony, some of the photographs of the exhibition's installation showed visitors contemplating images of porticoes displayed on panels installed under other porticoes: see, for instance, Archivio Fotografico Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, Fondo Paolo Monti, 18-1147/1, 18-1147/12, 18-1147/24, 18-1148/3, 18-1148/16, 18-1148/32.

43. An interesting case of public use of Monti's photographs is provided by the sociological survey conducted before the 1970 exhibition, and partly published in the catalogue. The survey consisted of two sessions of 20 and 500 interviews respectively. Photographs were showed to the interviewees in order to grasp "the expressiveness of the historical centre" Questions were formulated in such a way that the need to preserve historical settings was almost implicitly stated from the outset (for instance, "Do you believe that palaces, streets, houses, churches, and piazze tell history better than a book?"). Not surprisingly, researchers concluded that an "image of the historical centre" already existed and that the arcades were its "universally recognized leitmotiv." In conclusion, the survey sounded like the expression of ideas that predated the analysis rather than an attempt to register the frictions generated by the introduction of "modern" standards of life in an ancient urban setting: see Egeria Rescigno Di Nallo. "II centro storico come racconto popolare Indagine sociologica," in Bologna centro storico, 207-28.

44. "La citta 'garage,'" in Bologna centro storico, 189-97. A similar visual narrative had been systematically arranged just a few months before, although with less interesting results, in a book by Alberto Menarini and Athos Vianelli. Bologna per la strada: Fotoconfronti col passato (Bologna: Tamari, 1969). The way Monti's images were chosen and coupled in the catalogue strongly recalled A. W. N. Pugin's Contrasts (Salisbury: Pugin, 1836), a book whose engravings were familiar to Italian architects thanks to Benevolo's work, especially Le origini dell'urbanistica moderna. Years later, Cervellati--one of the authors of the plan--stated explicitly that Monti's photographic campaign almost suggested a crystallization of the existing city "[These photographs] make understand ... that maintenance is the only acceptable intervention in our historical centres." Cervellati, "Paolo Monti," 276.

45. Emiliani and Zannier, ed., II tempo dell'immagine: Franca Varignana, ed., Bologna dall'autarchia al boom. Coscienza urbana e urbanistica tra due millenni (Bologna: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna-Editrice Compositori, 1997). Compare also Antonio Masotti, Le bolognesi (Bologna: Nuova Abes Editrice, 1963); Enrico Pasquali Fotografo: Bologna negli annidella ricostruzione 1951-1960, ed. Franco Bonilauri (Casalecchio di Reno Grafis, 1985).

46. Giovanni Ricci, Bologna, storia di un'immagine (Bologna: Edizioni Alfa, 1976). On the Italian tradition of "local history," cf.: Edoardo Grendi, Storia di una storia locale. L'esperienza ligure 1792-1992 (Venice: Marsilio 1996).

47. Renzo Renzi, Guida per camminare all'ombra, script by Renzo Renzi and Leone Pancaldi, photography by Giulio Gianini, music by Enzo Masetti, Columbus Film. 1955, 11 min Involved in many activities connected to preservation issues, Renzi was also the author of a book on Bologna's history and identity Renzo Renzi, Bologna: una citta, with photographs by Aldo Ferrari (Bologna: Cappelli, 1960).