Description: Noto is an extraordinarily beautiful city built during the eighteenth century on the south-eastern coast of Sicily. Stephen Tobriner has traced the metamorphosis of Noto from its state before the earthquake of 1693 to its rebuilt state in a new location. The city changed from a mediaeval hill-top stronghold to an urbane unfortified eighteenth-century city near the sea - from an organically evolving geomorphic city to a grid-planned Renaissance Baroque utopia. The architecture and city plan of Noto are investigated in the context of the tastes, sensibilities and concerns of the clergy and aristocracy who ruled there. In addition to examining the politics of the city plan and reconstructing the appearance of eighteenth-century Noto the author investigates the architecture of Baroque Noto according to type and to role in the functioning of the city. The 'urban culture' which emerges has an important bearing on the evaluation of Sicilian architecture and urbanism as a whole. The reaction of a population to a natural disaster is also of interest in a wider context. This is the only book in English analysing the architecture and plan of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italian city outside Rome. It is the only book offering a thorough analysis of the evolution of the plan and architecture of Noto in any language.

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