Palazzeschi's “La passeggiata” and the Urban Miniatures of the Modern World

This essay examines miniature figures and modes of writing in Italian culture at the turn of the 20th century, starting from the experimental urban vision of Palazzeschi's poem "La passeggiata" (1913). While reconstructing the implications of Palazzeschi's micro-scale thinking vis-à-vis the broader cultural history of miniatures (as expressed throughout the centuries in illuminations, painting, portraiture, and toy manufacture), this article relates the poet's construction of a mini city-world to contemporary forms of urban miniaturizations: in European Modernist art (as expressed in Baudelaire, Rilke, Kafka, photography, and cinema) and in the Italian literature of the early industrial age (in the toy cities designed in De Amicis' expositional narratives or in the archetypical wonderland of Collodi's paese dei balocchi). Palazzesch's mise en scene of the metropolis as a humorous micro-theater defines an ambivalent image of Italian industrialization, connected to infancy, as a site of thrill and loss. At the same time, Palazzeschi's playful miniaturization of the present illuminates other similar reductions and constructions of the modern world on a small-scale: in children's magazines (starting with Il giornalino della domenica and Il corriere dei piccoli), in Second Futurism (after Balla and Depero's 1915 manifesto on the "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe"), in modernist architecture, and in post-WWII urban literature (as expressed in the work of Italo Calvino).