Critical observations on the cultural tradition of "city and country": "The hum and murmur", "the triumph and the jingle"

This essay develops from Raymond William’s seminal book “The Country and the City” and takes its legacy well into the critical context of contemporary studies on “The Politics of the Landscape” and cultural memory, to which it wishes to contribute. The relationship between the country and the city is explored against a specific historical background, which is interpreted in relations to the categories of “taste”, “wealth” and various ideological interpellations. The country house is here represented as an emblem of the paradoxical relationship of town and country, and of the intricate, rather than linear and oppositional relationship of rural and urban “values” and lived experience.