As a urban that turns out to drift among Europe and Asia, got rid of by way of a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has lengthy seduced the Western mind's eye. because the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies concerning the sinking urban have engendered an difficult sequence of romantic clichés, upsetting glossy artists and intellectuals to build conflicting responses: a few embody the resistance to modernity appear in Venice's labyrinthine premodern shape and temporality, whereas others aspire to modernize by way of "killing the moonlight" of Venice, within the Futurists' infamous phrase.

Spanning the background of literature, artwork, and structure -- from John Ruskin, Henry James, and Ezra Pound to Manfredo Tafuri, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, and Robert Coover -- Killing the Moonlight tracks the pressures that modernity has put on the legacy of romantic Venice, and the precise traces of aesthetic invention that resulted from the conflict. even if seduced or repulsed through literary clichés of Venetian decadence, post-Romantic artists chanced on a reason for innovation in Venice. In Venetian incarnations of modernism, the anachronistic city cloth and vestigial sentiment that either the countryside of Italy and the ancient avant-garde might do away with develop into incompletely assimilated components of the new.

Killing the Moonlight brings Venice into the geography of modernity as a dwelling urban instead of a metaphor for dying, and provides the archipelago as a crucible for these looking to outline and transgress the conceptual limits of modernism. In strategic detours from the capitals of modernity, Scappettone charts an elusive "extraterritorial" modernism that compels us to redraft the confines of modernist tradition in either geographical and ancient terms.