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Meticulously researched and copiously illustrated, this book persuasively explicates the myriad connections among Italian cinema and architecture. Escudero’s deep knowledge of key films and buildings yields a new and more subtle understanding of neorealism and twentieth-century Italy. A must read for students and scholars of film and the city.

Edward Dimendberg. University of California, Irvine.

David Escudero brings a novel approach to housing scholarship. By viewing the postwar Italian social housing programme through the lens of neorealist cinema, he reveals their common ideological substrate – an aesthetics of everyday life that is in turn angry, nostalgic, and optimistic. The filmic records of ordinary, changing built environments, by reflecting the inner state of characters, also bring back into focus the intended beneficiary of housing: the human subject.

Irina Davidovici. gta Institute, ETH Zürich.

Locating post-war Italian architecture in what he calls the "environment" of neorealism—the convergence of literature, film, and art that characterised Italy’s reconstruction after Fascism—David Escudero compellingly demonstrates how transmedial cultural innovations transformed the built space of Italian cities in the 1940s and ’50s. Wide ranging and richly detailed, this book brilliantly illuminates the links connecting architecture and cinema, offering an original survey of the landscape and built environment of Italian neorealism.

Charles L. Leavitt IV. University of Notre Dame. Author of Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

David Escudero’s thought-provoking book on Italian Neorealism offers a new and insightful angle to the study of one of the most influential artistic phenomena of the 20th century –Neorealism. His book shows that Neorealism not only transgressed the boundaries between architecture, film and other visual forms of expression, but also profoundly influenced our way of seeing, representing and embodying modern life in dopoguerra Italy. Escudero’s book brings much needed context, colour and depth into a fascinating world that most of us know only in black and white.

Richard Koeck. Chair in Architecture and the Visual Arts, University of Liverpool. Director of the Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts | CAVA.

This book by David Escudero moves beyond being a remarkable historiographical review of the experiences in collective housing during the Italian dopoguerra, to become the possibility of a cultural study. His insight transcends both the document and the image, entering a landscape where that floating signifier that underlies the term neorealism activates a common sensibility. A sensibility that includes the dimension of the real –or what is supposed to be real– in the form of architecture, of cinematographic stories, or in the images used for its presentation.

Juan Miguel Hernández León. Chair Emeritus of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. President of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.

David Escudero provides, for the first time in book format, a reflection on the concept of neorealism in architecture, focusing on the intersection between cinema and architecture. It is especially useful to a reader who is not familiar with the topic, and provides to an international audience […] an extensive visual archive.

Alberto Franchini. Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow at TU Munich, Architectural History.

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