Abstract
This chapter leaves the lagoon-city of Venice behind to look at the network of ‘secondary’ cities on its mainland. For its rapid and scattered development, Venetian ‘città diffusa’ has already been recognized as a perfect laboratory to explore postmodern cityscapes. Particularly, the chapter will focus on the ‘landscape of movement’ as a key structuring element of diffused urbanization and of its literary narration. The journey involves movement along the arterial route of the motorway connecting Milan and Venice, and analyses different case studies, from the 1989 novel by Gianfranco Bettin Qualcosa che brucia to Giorgio Falco’s 2009 collection L’ubicazione del bene, to propose these literary works as cognitive tools that contribute to the ‘readability’ of Italy’s north-eastern urban sprawl, even from a geographical perspective.
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Peterle, G. (2017). Moving Beyond Venice: Literary Landscapes of Movement in Northern Italy’s “Diffused City”. In: Finch, J., Ameel, L., Salmela, M. (eds) Literary Second Cities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62719-9_11
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