Unruly Italian Landscapes

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

From 2024’s “Amalficore” to the current “Euromaxxing” trend, social media has transformed Italy into a collection of picture-perfect destinations – a playground where countryside and city, culture and nature, are packaged into a seamless visual fantasy. But what lies before, behind, and around these postcard-perfect frames? This course examines how film, photography, and literature have represented, aestheticized, obscured, and helped produce Italy’s many unruly landscapes. We will explore postwar reconstruction, industrialization, migration, mass tourism, real-estate development, and environmental crisis, questioning familiar distinctions between rural and urban, nature and technology, human and nonhuman, and the touristic and the authentic. Films by Rossellini, Antonioni, and Sossai, photographs by Basilico and Ghirri, and literary works by Calvino, Ortese, and Ferrante will allow us to read landscape as an archive of social, political, and ecological change. Taught in English.