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4 books match the query 'Turin'
An Alliance Of Women
Immigration And The Politics Of RaceHeather Merrill
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Taking as a starting point the Italian crisis over immigration in the early 1990s, Merrill examines grassroots interethnic spatial politics among female migrants and Turin feminists in Northern Italy. Using rich ethnographic material, she traces the emergence of Alma Mater—an anti-racist organization formed to address problems encountered by migrant women. Through this analysis, Merrill reveals the dynamics of an alliance consisting of women from many countries of origin and religious and class backgrounds.
Highlighting an interdisciplinary approach to migration and the instability of group identities in contemporary Italy, An Alliance of Women presents migrants grappling with spatialized boundaries amid growing nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment in Western Europe.
Heather Merrill is assistant professor of geography and anthropology at Dickinson College.
Architecture for the Shroud
Relic and Ritual in TurinJohn Beldon Scott
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In this amply illustrated volume, John Beldon Scott traces the history of the unique relic, focusing especially on the black-marble and gilt-bronze structure Guarino Guarini designed to house and exhibit it. A key Baroque monument, the chapel comprises many unusual architectural features, which Scott identifies and explains, particulary how the chapel's unprecedented geometry and bizarre imagery convey to the viewer the supernatural powers of the object enshrined there. Drawing on early plans and documents, he demonstrates how the architect's design mirrors the Shroud's strange history as well as political aspirations of its owners, the Dukes of Savoy. Exhibiting it ritually, the Savoy prized their relic with its godly vestige as a means to link their dynasty with divine purposes. Guarini, too, promoted this end by fashioning an illusionary world and sacred space that positioned the duke visually so that he appeared close to the Shroud during its ceremonial display. Finally, Scott describes how the additional need for an outdoor stage for the public showing of the relic to the thousands who came to Turin to see it also helped shape the urban plan of the city and its transformation into the Savoyard capital.
Exploring the mystique of this enigmatic relic and investigating its architectural and urban history for the first time, Architecture for the Shroud will appeal to anyone curious about the textile, its display, and the architectural settings designed to enhance its veneration and boost the political agenda of the ruling family.
Turin 1564-1680
Urban Design, Military Culture, and the Creation of the Absolutist CapitalMartha D. Pollak
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Turin
The Invisible CityChristopher McGrath
Haus Publishing, 2026
A history of Turin, home to Fiat, the Einaudi publishing house, and writers including Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, and Natalia Ginzburg.
Unknown to most foreigners, as they follow each other around Florence and Siena, Rome and Venice, the Italy they see today is the result of a second renaissance. And its seat was a city they needed to discover, in all its enigmatic allure, if they were truly to understand the nation it brought into being. As Umberto Eco says, “Without Italy, Turin would have been more or less the same. But without Turin, Italy would have been very different.” This baroque jewel at the foot of the Alps provides a unique prism on the story of modern Italy: not just as a founding capital, but also in kindling a political, cultural, and economic regeneration after the tragedies of dictatorship and civil war.
Their emergence as a dynamo of national industrialization, symbolized by Fiat, had made the factories of Turin the original seat of both Italian capitalism and socialism, and, accordingly, the heart of resistance to Mussolini. After the Second World War, the city experienced parallel revivals. On the one hand, Fiat proved a foundation stone for Italy’s famous “economic miracle"; on the other, the Einaudi publishing house became a platform for the greatest local flowering of Italian culture since the days of the Medicis, not least through several of its own employees, including Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Italo Calvino. These competing energies were personified by the respective enigmas who presided over these agencies of renewal, Gianni Agnelli and Giulio Einaudi.
But their rivalry also only demonstrated the polarities that have long defined this royal city of arcaded streets and squares, with its wild mountain backdrop. That contrast is expressed even by the city’s rival football teams: the seigneurial Juventus, long bankrolled by the Agnelli family, its perennial success toasted throughout the peninsula; and Torino, the fallen giants whose tragic legacy commands the underdog fidelity of local nostalgics, workers, and rebels.
Exploring the contribution of Turin to modern Italy, Chris McGrath entwines some of the nation’s most celebrated names with less familiar citizens who illuminate the gaps: from the forgotten poet who bears exquisite witness to the city’s crepuscular atmosphere at the turn of the last century, to the Torino footballer who fought with the partisans before becoming a star of neorealist cinema.
Risorgimento, resistance, reconstruction: none of these decisive phases in Italy’s modern evolution would have been the same without this unsung city.