Anyone who has dipped a toe into spatial theory likely knows Michel de Certeau's description of Manhattan viewed from the top of New York's World Trade Center. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), the French thinker contrasts the stable, all-encompassing view of architects and governors with the ever-shifting, unpredictable experience of walkers on the ground. Early in Street Life in Renaissance Italy, Fabrizio Nevola evokes de Certeau's analogy. He compares a fifteenth-century story about a puffed-up Bolognese lawyer pranked by tricksters – much of the action revolving around a piazza – and a later map painted for private apartments at the Vatican, in which the city's religious sites are marked in gold but its streets are largely unpeopled. Nevola's book is an exercise in bridging this binary, between the street as a built environment envisioned by rulers and elites, and a space given meaning through the daily movements of its residents. Formed by multiple forces, Nevola argues, the pre-modern street was the ‘key ecosystem of everyday urban living’ (p. 269). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian street life was transformed by ambitious schemes of urban renewal, but was shaped in turn by the people who walked, gossiped, worshipped and shopped in these bustling public spaces.
Reviewing the historiography of the street, Nevola observes how, for a long time, social historians have paid too little attention to the physical fabric, while scholars of art and architecture have focused less often on the impact of ordinary citizens. The point is made carefully, and the critique is fair. Nevola seeks to overcome this false division, at each stage in his analysis and through the book's overarching structure. The first section considers the city as a whole, its three chapters tackling projects of rebuilding, straightening and cleansing, the way people navigated and sensed the street environment, and the practice of surveillance. The second section zeroes in on architectural features, examining in succession the specialization of buildings and spaces, street corners and the activities that huddled around them, and the entanglement of urban palaces with the surrounding city. Writing comparatively, Nevola saturates the text with examples from across the Italian peninsula.
The book presents a convincing framework for how to study the daunting complexities of street life. Applying Kevin Lynch's classification of ‘paths’, ‘edges’, ‘districts’, ‘nodes’, ‘landmarks’, the second half suggests a typology of urban space. This allows Nevola to consider, for example, the multiple functions of street shrines, usually erected on visible, corner sites. Shrines encouraged devotion and community pride, and sometimes marked boundaries. Such productive use of theory, not just namechecking usual suspects but translating their ideas to a historical context, is a hallmark of the book. In the chapter on surveillance, after weighing the concepts of Michel Foucault and urbanist Jane Jacobs, Nevola conceives a version of watchfulness and discipline, top down as well as distributed, that better reflects the Italy of this time. In some cities, inhabitants denounced one another by depositing slips of paper in prominently placed boxes. Urban authorities communicated their power in the places chosen for execution, like the piazza di Ponte in Rome, where the papal fortress of Sant'Angelo loomed across the river. This is a study in how to employ general theory to write specific yet resonant history.
To consider street life from its various aspects, the book draws on evidence as diverse as literature, diaries and archival material such as tax lists and the records of city government. But visual evidence plays the leading role. This includes stunning panels, canvases and frescoes, from which Nevola picks details with care. More than once, he makes intriguing suggestions about the way more accessible artworks, such as a fresco in a Florentine church depicting a miracle on the piazza outside, may have influenced how residents thought about their city. There are also dozens of the author's own photographs, testament to how well preserved these cities remain while adding to the sense that Nevola is guiding us through the streets himself.
As well as being pretty as a coffee table book – Yale have done a stunning job with the 160 illustrations – Street Life would make an excellent resource for teaching urban history, architecture and art. Because of the comparative approach and critical application of theory, there is plenty for those interested in other periods and disciplines to chew on. Not only wide-ranging and thorough, the book also raises questions and ideas beyond its scope. Are the cities of Renaissance Italy particularly suited to applying modern concepts of urban theory? Was street life in urban areas elsewhere shaped by the same forces? How can we integrate burgeoning fields like environmental, animal and sensory history? (Nevola does touch on the latter.) There may not be a blueprint for how to write about these complex, contested urban spaces, but by committing to look at streets from multiple perspectives Nevola has set a high standard.
