On an April evening in Florence in 1934, before 20,000 spectators, the mass spectacle 18BL was presented, involving 2000 amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations and six photoelectric units. However titantic its scale, 18BL's ambitions were even greater: to institute a revolutionary fascist theatre of the future, a modern theatre of and for the masses that would end the crisis of the bourgeois theatre. This is the complete story of the event, a colossal failure to critics and spectators...

This book tells the tale of the prolific Italian architect, inventor, farmer, writer, and engineer Gaetano Ciocca, whose career took him from the battlefronts of World War I to Stalin's Russia, Mussolini's Italy, FDR's America, and finally to postwar liberal-democratic Italy. Like celebrated counterparts such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Ciocca was a visionary so confident in his vision of a future in which all aspects of life would be rationalized and modernized that no set of practical or political obstacles could ever stand in his way. Ciocca's endeavors included the development of...

Crowds explores the key role assumed by human multitudes in modern life by means of a graphically innovative, multi-author volume in which essays, word histories, and personal testimonies are woven together into a multiperspectival and multilayered group portrait. The portrait in question includes analyses of market crowds, crowds in modern art and literature, modern assemblies as compared to their premodern and ancient counterparts, modern sports crowds, human multitudes and mass media such as photography and cinema, crowds as political actors, and the emergence of crowd-centered...