Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Michelangelo Sabatino is professor and director of the PhD program in the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology

Michelangelo Sabatino's profile page

• Winner, Society of Architectural Historians Alice Davis Hitchcock Award
• Short-listed, CICA (International Committee of Architectural Critics) Bruno Zevi Book Award 2011
• Winner, American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize - Twentieth-Century Category
• Winner, Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians Publication Award
• Winner, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies awarded by the Modern Language Association

‘Sabatino’s eloquent and significant study establishes and develops the critical ground that will serve as a bench mark for future research.’

Andrew J. Manson , <em> Traditional Dwellings & Settlements Review, vol :23:01:2011 </em>

'Pride in Modesty offers the Anglophone scholar a rigorous and nuanced analysis not of Italian vernacular architecture per se but instead of the intellectual and creative engagement architects, engineers, and other proponents of modernist trends with everyday architecture in Italy during the twentieth century. Sabatino deftly navigates architects' adaptation of vernacular traditions under fascism...A compelling and insightful study of Italian Modernist architects.'

Joseph Sciorra <em>Buildings & Landscapes: vol 18:01:2011</em>

‘Pride in Modesty brings a valuable new perspective to the scholarship on Italian modernism. Sabatino unquestionably establishes the vernacular as a major feature of Italian modernism and invites scholars to reconsider the topography of inter-war and post-war Italian architecture, which has far too long been defined by a narrow cannon of exemplars.’

Canadian Art Review: vol35:02:10