Books published by Marsilio

The thrilling urban experience of creating and developing a new city in France. Val d’Europe is a new city created in 1987, located next to the first tourist destination in Europe, Disneyland Paris. The challenge of this unique architectural and urban experience was to design, ex nihilo, a city that simultaneously represents beauty, practicality, and sustainability, creating social diversity without architectural discrimination, limiting the use of vehicles, and responding to ecological imperatives. This book presents, without concealing the difficulties, the process that was put into place in order to achieve the same urban quality as Europe’s most beautiful cities.

The large building, today known as Les Docks, designed by Gustave Desplaces and constructed between 1858 and 1864 on the model of the warehouses in the docklands of London, looks like a stone ship looming over the wharves of the port of Marseille. Rightly or wrongly, its designer is credited with the idea of having associated the construction with a symbolic and imaginative calendar: 365 meters in length, the number of days in a year, four courtyards, like the seasons, fifty-two doors, and seven stories... Urban myth or the truth? What is certain is that esoteric symbolism and a taste for numbers were often the prerogative of master builders and architects and undoubtedly fascinate the Italians Alfonso Femia and Gianluca Peluffo of 5+1AA. Their renowned ability to bring together the know-how of artisans, artists, contractors, and suppliers of materials has produced a remarkable aesthetic result, in which color and material articulate the internal spaces, animated by stores, restaurants, and offices.

The rediscovery of a protagonist of Italian art. The first international monograph about Emilio Scanavino after his death, this book focuses on the wide breadth of his creative output, which began immediately after World War II and continued until the 1980s. He was one of the pioneers and protagonists of an innovative poetics of the “sign,” situating his practice between the Informel and Spazialismo movements and a new concept of the void. Scanavino’s art is characterized by a distinctive human quality: the gesture is the focus, and the intention is to penetrate the meaning of reality. He aimed to overcome the traditional notion of abstraction as lyrical, surreal, or constructive, whilst incorporating it into a new relationship of the image with reality.

Company archives can provide real surprises. But few can also convey a sense of history like those of the Generali. The structure of the books, one devoted to the ninteenth-century and one to the twentieth-century, is based on closely related document entries and personnel entries, centered on particular events and personalities connected with the Assicurazioni Generali, the largest insurance company in Italy and third in the world, starting out from some of the most significant records preserved in the insurance company’s historical archives. General historical profiles and short accounts of curiosities from contemporary news reports set the entries against their national and international background. The lavishly illustrated volumes are completed by essays on specific aspects of the company’s history and its archives, and by a comprehensive index of all the management positions from 1831 to 1981, in alphabetical and chronological order.