In 2006 Yale University Press published an English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s last book—fourteen years after the Italian original and twelve years after the death of its author. Why? Admittedly Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was both famous and controversial in the Anglo-Saxon world. Famous because of the incredibly wide range of his knowledge and his refined scholarship, controversial because of his Marxist views and his preference for urban development over individual works of architecture. In Europe Tafuri was mainly known as a notoriously “difficult” author whose theoretical and historical essays were equally dark and impenetrable. Said an Italian architect: “Tafuri wrote in an Italian no one understood. As a student you read a page and in the end understood nothing. Then you reread it and didn’t understand anything better. You went to the next page and it wasn’t any better. Some years later you would pick up the same book and try it again and still you did understand nothing” (Stefano Mirti on “Tafuri Instant Forum” [http://architettura.supereva.com/instant/20070414/index_en.htm]). Others complained about his “dusty eruditism.” All this notwithstanding, Tafuri was published and republished—in Italy and abroad—during his twenty-five-year tenure (as professor, chairman, and director) at the University of Architecture’s Institute of Architectural...