This course will introduce students to Italian literature and cinema, exploring how novels, poems and films recorded the spatial and environmental changes that affected the Italian landscape during the 20th-century. At the center of this course is the relationship between urban changes and artistic form. The course will focus on five different locations: 1. The Italian South and the emergence of the anthropological novel in Carlo Levis’ Christ Stopped at Eboli; 2. Postwar Rome and the emergence of neorealist cinema and literature; 3. Climate change and the industrialization of the Italian North in the 1960s in the "environmental cinema" of Michelangelo Antonioni; 4. The rise of the detective novel in 1960s Milan through Scerbanenco’s short stories and the appearance of the poliziottesco film genre; 5. Postmodernism and Italy’s shift towards a post-industrial society in the 1970s in the work of Italo Calvino. This course is taught in English. No previous knowledge of the subject or language skills are required.