Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 28 October 2026
- 31 December 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009790871
- 9781009790857
- 9781009790833
- Dimensions:
- (253 x 177 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 350 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (253 x 177 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 350 Pages
- Subjects:
- Art, Architecture
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Book description
Palermo was an active participant in the global dynamics of early modernity, a role that shaped its remaking as the capital of the Habsburg viceroyalty of Sicily. Situating the sixteenth-century city within the broader landscape of Spanish colonialism, Elizabeth Kassler-Taub positions Palermo as a model for understanding how capitals at the edges of empire were made and imagined, inhabited and described. Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo: Building an Elastic City introduces readers to monuments and sites absent from mainstream histories of early modern Italy and Spain, highlighting the experimental design models and building practices developed in response to, and defiance of, the city's entanglements across both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Kassler-Taub conceptualizes Palermo's capacity for change and adaptation as an index of its 'elasticity.' She shows how the city's centuries-long colonial condition generated remarkable resilience: Palermo was able to withstand tension and to reshape itself without violating its basic form and identity.
Reviews
‘Elizabeth Kassler-Taub's important study of the monumental architecture and ‘elastic' urban form of pre-modern Palermo redresses longstanding narratives of a Renaissance perennially belated by adherence to an anticlassical Arab, Norman, and Aragonese past, of heterogeneity as cultural contamination. Her book is an outstanding example of the recent wave of scholarship on the early modern port city, and her analyses of the intricate aesthetics of Palermitan architecture are lucid, insightful, and beautiful to read.'
Stephen J. Campbell - Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor, Johns Hopkins University
‘Elizabeth Kassler-Taub brings Palermo's early modern building into sharp focus, offering an analysis as layered as its history. Through careful visual observation, sophisticated theoretical framing, rigorous archival research, and elegant prose, this book presents a fresh perspective on the city. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a place at once deeply rooted in its past and simultaneously entwined with the vibrant networks of the early modern era.'
Robin L. Thomas - Professor of Art History and Architecture, Pennsylvania State University
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