Theater of the Mind, Stage of History

This book contains the collected essays originating from a two-day conference at Stony Brook University. The conference aimed at charting various itineraries through little explored clusters of what we can rightly call "Italies," in the plural, and which have existed within and outside of the nation-state called Italy. These Italies are not to be
understood solely in terms of circumscribed socio-geographical sites - as colonies, professional settlements, or ethnic enclaves, - though these of course have been and continue to be the source of powerful and intriguing discourses. The Italies we wished to explore are those marked by a more subterranean genealogy, the rhizomes that inform symbolic presences in art, architecture, jurisprudence, and streams of cultural products which by their very nature are - and actually have been - trans-national, often created without anyone realizing that they were somehow "Italian" and yet manifest unmistakable signs associated with the historical palimpsest called Italy.