Linear Shopping(e)scape: shopping the Italian way

The paper first focuses on the history of the urban places devoted to the commerce in the towns of the Italian peninsula and analyses the change the quality and quantity of exchanges and shopping places brought before into at the urban scale and then into the territorial one. From the ancient villages Market Square, to the Market Streets that made the fortune of many Italian cities, then to the Market Roads invented during the Italian Boom of the ‘60s during last century to the Market Motorway that characterises the nowadays commerce and the shopping centres constellations: all this is the heritage that shaped the continuous, linear shopping landscape present in Lombardy and Friuli Venezia Giulia. The essay tries to individuate some hypothesis starting from this picture in motion, taking count that Italy, beside its cultural and natural landscape, has been always also a living shopping-scape.