Carlo Nardi's Book on Frank Lloyd Wright's Italian Sojourn

Carlo Nardi's new book "La crisi del profeta Frank Lloyd Wright" (Quodlibet, 2024) examines the American architect's 1910 stay in Florence and Fiesole, a self-imposed exile that shaped his later work. Nardi, an Italian architect born in 1982, focuses on Wright's cultural formation and "American-ness," drawing on Wright's autobiography and his citation of Victor Hugo's "Ceci tuera cela." Wright left his wife and six children in 1909 for Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a client's wife, justifying the departure as a personal crisis. In Fiesole, he hid in a cosmopolitan salon before returning to Oak Park. The book documents six drawings from that year, including a villa labeled "Villa: Florence, Italy, Via Verdi. Madame Illingworth – 1910. Feb." Nardi argues the Fiesole experience prefigured Taliesin, Wright's integrated live-work compound. The volume also covers Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio (Berlin, 1910) and his reception in Italy, first by Edoardo Persico in 1935 and later promoted by Bruno Zevi after WWII.