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Article Excerpt
Giovanna Franci. Dreaming of Italy: Las Vegas and the Virtual Grand Tour. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005.
What, precisely, is the point of juxtaposing photographs of Las Vegas strip resorts with their "originals" in Italy? Readers who admired Eco's Travels in Hyperreality will be disappointed by this book, which stages the issue of authenticity without pursuing its implications. Although she cites Eco, Bataille, and other cultural theorists, the author of this monograph does not approach the problem analytically, but simply pairs the Italian-themed resorts with the cities that inspired them, concluding (inevitably) that they are both similar and grotesquely different.
In the tradition of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Learning from Las VG, as, 1972), Giovanna Franci is open-minded toward commercial vernacular architecture and curious to decipher what they called "the persuasive heraldry that pervades our environment." She attributes the recent emergence of three Italian-themed mega-resorts (Caesars Palace, Bellagio, and the Venetian Hotel) to a postmodern revival of the Grand Tour:...
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