Place-identity and social representations of historic capital cities: Rome through the eyes of first-visitors from six countries

Abstract

Writers, philosophers, anthropologists … but also journalists, filmmakers, musicians, painters … well before social-environmental psychologists, helped us to understand the meaning of places and the psychological and symbolic importance of the dimensions that they involve, in addition to characteristics which are purely functional. The places where we live are not simple collections of dwellings intended to protect us. Our cities are more than bricks and mortar. They are also made of, and accommodate as well, immaterial materials, that is, symbolic human productions. This less visible part of cities is acutely described by Italo Calvino:Cities are a collection of many things: memory, desires, signs of a language, cities are places of exchange, as they explain all the books of economic history, but these exchanges are not only trade in goods, they are exchanges of words, desires, memories. (Italo Calvino 1993: IX-X)However, this symbolic and immaterial part of the city shows through the city itself, exuding from its walls and becoming tangible:The feel and the fabric of the town or city is always present to citizens as it is to the visitors. Appreciated, seen, touched, smelled, penetrated, whether consciously or unconsciously, this fabric is a tangible representation of that intangible thing, the society that lives in it – and of its aspirations. (Rykwert 2002: 6)As Ricoeur rightly pointed out, the feelings and impressions that endure from the contact with such specific places establish a link between individuals and those places:The memories of having inhabited some house in some town or that of having travelled in some part of the world are particularly eloquent and telling […] In memories of this type, corporeal space is immediately linked with the surrounding space of the environment. (Ricoeur 2004: 148)This relation between individuals and places consequently impacts on our ways of thinking, as Heidegger (1971) emphasised in his essay Building Dwelling Thinking. However, to understand this impact fully, it is necessary to grasp the phenomenon at the representational level, as suggested by Lombardi Satriani:The relations between representations and practices of the city fall outside the power of mental maps, even if built with maximum accuracy: these mental maps assume their meaning through ways of living, cultural models, and not only through visual acts. The representation of the city is inscribed in an ethno-history. (Lombardi Satriani 2004: 23)Amongst social sciences, social psychology holds a prime position in the study of how individuals build their representations of cities.