“Mostrare il moderno”. Le Esposizioni universali tra fine Ottocento e gli inizi del Novecento

Universal Exhibitions have been conceived specifically by the Western society in the second half of the XIX century. As a mirror of the second industrial revolution, which also reflected the soul of a new world held together by pioneering telegraph networks, they can actually be seen as “maps of perception” that broke with the past and formed a sort of wells ring of what was yet to come. The “great exhibition cycle”, the circuit of international events that followed with some frequency, with the exception of the period immediately following the First World War, is certainly one of those privileged perspective’s corners from which to observe social, cultural, urban and anthropological phenomena with a huge impact on European history