From Hyde Park to the Planetary Garden: rhetorics of development at the London 1851 and Milan 2015 World Exhibitions

The article intends to suggest a comparative reading between the first world fair – the 1851 Great Exhibition – and the Milano Expo 2015, trying to retrace similarities as well as discontinuities in the repetition of the cultural practice of universal exhibitions by interrogating the present through the prism of the past. The purpose of such a cultural analysis is to map the complex interweaving of social expectations and mythologies in the act of their formation, paying special attention to the different rhetorics of development that characterise the staging of the Victorian and the Italian world fairs.