''L'intervallo perduto'' nella Metropoli Modern

The city is not only a visual environment, but it is also sonorous and therefore the “unintentional hearing which is much more influencing” is involved in an urban space experience just as sight is. Beginning with Assunto’s consideration in Il paesaggio e l’estetica, the analysis we provide cannot avoid outlining the peculiarities of aestetic fruition of the city seen as a space we cross, in which we live and in which we, as a matter of fact, are agent actors. And it is as a consequence of this peculiarity that silence has a leading role in our urban experience. Seen as a presence of itself, it is a positive value especially if we consider that nowadays modernity is expressed through its absence. It is an absence that reaches its climax in the experience of the metropolis. Besides Assunto, there is another witness of this in Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life from which our analysis cannot leave out of consideration. Given that this analysis is a sort of analytic excursus it develops around a well defined barycentre represented by the acoustic experience of the city that focuses on the presence/absence of silence as a result of modernity. Taking the first steps from Assunto and Simmel’s assumptions, this work takes into account the theme of silence in the metropolis and introduces it as a loss of interval and thus uses the analysis carried out by Dorfles in L’intervallo perduto and in Horror Pleni. The metropolitan experience is highly characterized by a sensory disorientation for which we can detect a “strong” starting, the Great War, which shows a caesura that outlines the edges of a new mental world. It shows the systematic use of modern technique, of its sonorous universe and urbanization which appears as a corollary of this picture.