Piazza Fountain and Tourist Office, Italian City Centre, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Piazza Fountain and Tourist Office, Italian City Centre, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Piazza Fountain and Tourist Office, Italian City Centre, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-869306

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An American tourist in postwar Italy had discovered that the country's entire economy had reorganised itself around the proposition that foreigners needed help deciding where to go next, which is why a 'Travel Tourist Office' occupied prime real estate directly facing a baroque fountain that had been drawing visitors for centuries without anyone's assistance. The piazza's ground floor is a layered argument for the Italian service economy: a rosticceria feeding the hungry, a tourist office redirecting the confused, and a cinema marquee overhead capturing whoever was left. The cars parked at the fountain's edge are broad-fendered American and Italian models of the kind that 1950s city planners had not yet decided were a problem, so they simply left them wherever they stopped. The fountain itself — figures, jets, stone basin — stands in the middle of this commercial orbit with the patience of something that has watched arrangements like this come and go for three hundred years and expects to watch several hundred more.

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