Lecture: FROM ITALY WITH LOVE

What Americans Have Brought Back to New York

Americans have long been among the pilgrims drawn from all over the world to the Italian peninsula. Food and wine and warm Italian evenings have played their part, but for many -- especially American architects and their well-to-do patrons -- the main attraction has been the great buildings of the past: ancient Roman and Greek temples; Renaissance palaces; medieval and Baroque churches; cathedrals, baths, and small town squares; Rome, Florence and Venice. As a result, the streets of New York, the great American metropolis, are lined with early-19th-century Anglo-Italian commercial buildings, handsome rows of Italian-style brownstones, block after block of tenement apartments hidden behind Renaissance-inspired ornament, clubs and universities and police stations modeled after the great palaces, and skyscrapers looking back to Italian towers.

This lecture considers seven New York buildings and their famous Italian models. These include the Metropolitan Life Tower (modeled on St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice), the cast-iron Haughwout Store (modeled on St. Mark’s Library), the University Club (modeled on the Palazzo Medici in Florence), the Loew’s Paradise movie palace (modeled on Michelangelo’s Medici tombs in Florence), the Campagna Estate, a 1920s Bronx “villa” for an expatriate Italian builder (modeled on Palladian villas), Lincoln Center (modeled on Rome’s Campidoglio), and the plaza of the World Trade Center (modeled on the Piazza San Marco). The intentions are all entirely different: nostalgia, imaginary tourism, snobbery, homage to lost monuments -- but all show the undying appeal of Italian art for Americans.

Tony Robins won a 1997 Rome Prize fellowship to the American Academy in Rome.