Italo Insolera

He died of natural causes at age 83 in his house in Monteverde, Rome at dawn on August 27, 2012. Italian urban planners deeply mourn his passing.

Since 2003, all of Insolera's professional documents, designs, photos and writings have been deemed of public interest and protected by the Italian Superintendence of Archives [it].

He was added to the official register of land planners in 1971. From 1963 to 1971, he was a lecturer at Venice University's Institute of Architecture, and from 1971 to 1983 he was a tenured professor of Urban History at Geneva University’s School of Architecture [fr]. He also taught courses and seminars at the universities of Rome, Florence, Naples, Paris, Kassel, Barcelona, Madrid.

In 1953, Insolera graduated from La Sapienza University, Rome, with a degree in Architecture. He became a licensed architect in 1954, and qualified for university teaching in urbanism in 1960. Meanwhile, he had married Anna Maria Bozzola (architect, in the early 1960s was the author of a book series on arts education which became a reference in the freshly reformed Italian lower secondary school); she would be his partner during all his life. In 1962, he published Roma moderna. Un secolo di storia urbanistica (Modern Rome: A Century of Urban History), the first book dealing with urban planning and management in Rome from the unification of Italy to the present. The book has subsequently gone through six editions, with the most recent published in 2011.

Italo Insolera (Turin, February 7, 1929 – Rome, August 27, 2012) was an Italian architect, urban and land planner, and historian.

Born in Turin in 1929, at age five he and his family moved to Rome. His father Filadelfo, a university teacher, ranked amongst the few who introduced the financial and actuarial science in Italy. His elder brother Delfino was editorial director at Zanichelli publisher in the 1970s and 1980s; his sister Melina, high-school teacher, wrote a number of grammar books (Italian, Latin and ancient Greek).