Fifty towns, and how they got that way.Why does a town as small as Lucca have walls that big? It built them against Florence, spent a fortune it barely had, was never attacked, and now has the finest intact Renaissance walls in Europe with a footpath on top.Fifty towns, fifty versions of that question. Not what a place looks like, which the painting already tells you, but how it came to look like that.Siena began the largest cathedral in Christendom and stopped halfway because half its people had died, and the wall of the unbuilt nave still stands open to the sky. Palermo spent a century as a Norman kingdom governing in Arabic, Greek and Latin at once. A pope demolished his birthplace and rebuilt it as an ideal city in four years. Matera was emptied by law in 1952 as a national disgrace and was European Capital of Culture in 2019. And the cathedral at Siracusa is a Greek temple from the fifth century BC whose columns are still holding the roof up, after the Byzantines walled them in, the Arabs made it a mosque and the Normans made it a church again.Six sections run north to south, from the Alps to Sicily and Sardinia, and each one carries an argument: the north was ruled from abroad and then organized the country, the northeast faced east toward Constantinople, Tuscany looks medieval because it stopped, and the further south you go the less of Italy was ever governed from Italy at all.Inside: Fifty full-page original paintings, in colorSix essays covering the Alps to the islandsTown histories researched from the record, not from the legendDisagreements between sources left standing rather than smoothed overA word on what this is. These are not scans of old postcards. Every image is original artwork, painted for this book, of towns that have been photographed ten million times and painted almost never.It is also not a guidebook. There are no opening hours here.Painted Postcards is a series about places and how they came to look the way they do. Las Vegas is the first volume. Italy is the second.
