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Micro-history of a house: memory and place in a Milanese neighbourhood, 1890–2000

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2007

JOHN FOOT
JOHN FOOT*
Affiliation:
Department of Italian, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
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Abstract

The micro-history of one apartment block in the inner-suburb of Bovisa, Milan over a period of 100 or so years is examined using oral history interviews to trace the development of the block and its residents in relation to that of the city of Milan. The piece is bounded by theoretical reflections on the role of micro-history, oral history and other methodologies as tools for understanding the home and urban history, and concludes that the survival of a rural past, the role of gender, the importance of architecture and of nostalgic memory in a rapidly changing world were important influences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 431 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

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26 The film maps out the visual space of the house before dividing its analysis – as will this article – into various thematic ‘chapters’.

27 For Bovisa see Foot, J., Milan since the Miracle. City, Culture, Identity (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Foot, J., ‘The family and the “economic miracle”: social transformation, work, leisure and development at Bovisa and Comasina (Milan), 1950–1970’, Contemporary European History, 4 (1995), 315–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foot, J., ‘Migration and the “miracle” at Milan. The neighbourhoods of Baggio, Barona, Bovisa and Comasina in the 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (1996), 184–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parisi, V.E. and Tacchi, E.M., Quarto Oggiaro, Bovisa, Dergano (Milan 2003)Google Scholar; Fiorese, G., ‘Al gran teatro della condizione metropolitana. John Hedjuk a Bovisa’, Lotus International, 54 (1987)Google Scholar; Fiorese, G., ‘Immagine di Bovisa’, Quaderni del dipartimento di progettazione dell'architettura, 11 (1990), 27–43Google Scholar; Fiorese, G., ‘Identità di Bovisa’, in Fiorese, G. and Caputo, P. (eds.), Politecnico Bovisa: progetti per l'area dei gasometri (Milan, 1999), 16–31Google Scholar; Fiorese, G. (ed.), Milano Zona Sette: Bovisa-Dergano (Milan, 1994)Google Scholar.

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32 Lorenzo Sartori, interview in documentary Piazzale Lugano, 22, Story of a House (2004).

33 CM was described as ‘part moral authority, part historical memory, part doorkeeper’ by LS.

34 See above all L. Sartori, Ogni matto ha la sua fissa (Milan, 1998) (and especially the stories Il problema degli spazi (1996) and Il problema dei tempi (1996)); Mattoti, L. and Ambrosi, L., L'uomo alla finestra (Milan, 1992)Google Scholar.

35 It is interesting to note how Milanese and Milan-based architects were inspired by, or rejected, the ringhiera tradition. At the Cesate public housing estate, built in the early 1950s just outside Milan for up to 5,000 Italian immigrants, many houses were based on English-style architecture, with small gardens. The middle of the ‘village’, however, was dominated by a huge long block of flats which represented a mix of modernism and the ringhiera style. In Comasina, on the northern edge of Milan, a housing estate built at about the same time refused to adopt the ringhiera model. Flats had small balconies which did not connect to each other. Here, privacy, not inter-house community, was expressed in the style of the housing itself. Elsewhere, long concrete walkways copied the ringhiera style.

36 This name derives from one of the owners of the block – a certain Monguzzi – whose name became El Mungus in Milanese dialect. I have relied heavily on the testimony of GB – a past-resident of the block, as well as its unofficial historian. GB has prepared his own book and film, as well as a series of articles, on the history of El Mungus and even organized a reunion dinner for some of the hundreds of past-residents of the block, see his El Mungus. L'altro politecnico (n.p., n.d.). These kind of shoeless historians can often be found – complete with unofficial archives – in major cities and towns. Alberto Rollo has written a beautiful account of growing up on the other side of the Ghisolfa Bridge, near Bovisa, ‘Un'educazione milanese’, Linea d'ombra, 117 (1996), 65–73.

37 Interview with GB.

38 For collective child-care and the role of women in a different context, see Ross, E., Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

39 C. Saraceno, ‘La famiglia: i paradossi della costruzione del privato’, in P. Ariès and G. Duby (eds.), La vita privata, vol. V: Il Novecento (Bari, 1988), 212–13.

40 Prost, A., ‘Public and private spheres in France’, in Prost, and Vincent, (eds.), A History of Private Life, 62–3, 111Google Scholar; Bourke, J., Working-Class Cultures, 1880–1960: Gender, Class, Ethnicity (London, 1993), 142–3Google Scholar.

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42 Rural-type farm-housing was also, ‘by definition, closed’, C. Barberis interviewed in Avvenire (24 Mar. 2004), 24.

43 Hausstein, A., ‘Nostalgia’, in Pethes, N. and Ruchatz, J., Dizionario della memoria e del ricordo (Milan, 2002), 389–90Google Scholar. On nostalgia see also Modrzejewski, F. and Sznajderman, M. (eds.), Nostalgia. Saggi sul rimpianto sul comunismo (Milan, 2001)Google Scholar; Shaw, C. and Chase, M. (eds.), The Imagined Past. History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar; Wright, P., On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Culture (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Samuel, R., Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1994)Google Scholar.

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46 In one sense the area is ‘simply disguised countryside’, Tindall, The Fields Beneath, 13.

47 Foot, ‘The family and the “economic miracle”: social transformation, work, leisure and development at Bovisa and Comasina (Milan), 1950–1970’.

48 See the reports at http://www.sonoma.edu/asc/cypress/finalreport/.

49 On stories see Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, and the special issues of Historical Archaeology, 32, 1 (1998), and 35, 3 (2001). See also Fondazione Maria e Goffredo Bellonci, Narrare la storia. Dal documento al racconto (Milan, 2006).

50 In Natale, N., Passerini, L. and Salvatici, S. (eds.), ‘Archives of memory. Supporting traumatised communities through narration and remembrance’, Psychosocial Notebook, 2 (2001)Google Scholar.

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