Description
Gangemi Editore, Published 2014. Wraps, 47 pp.; 24 cm; text in English; illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs reproduced in sepia duotone, with a few color plates.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Black pictorial paper covers with French flaps. Scored hinges along spine edges of both covers are as issued, not creases. Mild shelf wear with light bumping to edges and corners, a crease at head of front cover, and some surface scuffing and faint scratches to both covers. Publisher's red "Extract from next catalog for American exhibition" sticker on front cover, with a hint of lifting at one edge. Perfect bound and tight. Faint offsetting from the facing plates in the lower margins of the first few leaves. Pages otherwise clean and unmarked. Photographs from the archive of the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome, shown outside Italy for the first time. Italian army photographers documented the sandbagging and casing of monuments against air raids: the bronze horses lifted from the facade of St. Mark's and sent by rail to Rome, the Colleoni monument packed inside a timber tower, the Arch of Cangrande buried under tiers of sandbags, Canova's gypsum museum at Possagno after the bombing. The protective structures became subjects in their own right. Italy also worked the pictures as propaganda, proof of the enemy's barbarity and legible to an illiterate population far from the front. Ambassador Bisogniero's foreword calls the effort a precursor to the Monuments Men.