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If you compared the streets of cities,towns, villages in both Spain and Italy, would the homes and buildings look similar? I know the much of Italy and Spain have Mediterranean vibe to them and the weather is similar.
If you showed a average person a picture of a town in Spain with out saying the location, could they think its Italy?
No. They look totally different. Both dense, apartment-oriented and Mediterranean but they have completely different looks going on. Naples would never be confused with a Spanish city; Valencia would never be confused with an Italian city.
If you compared the streets of cities, towns, villages in both Spain and Italy, would the homes and buildings look similar? I know the much of Italy and Spain have Mediterranean vibe to them and the weather is similar.
If you showed an average person a picture of a town in Spain with out saying the location, could they think it's Italy?
The average person? A picture?
Go to Google Images, put in "Spanish towns". Press the search button. Then put in "Italian towns". Press the search button.
Then, using the browser's back and forward buttons, switch back and forth between the two three times and say "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."
I find Italy to be quite different from city to city and from region to region architecture-wise.
That said I was in Reggio Calabria last week and it looked quite Spanish to me, but it's very far from here.
Turin always reminds me of Lyon and Milan has quite a French feel as well.
Bologna is a lot more medieval, while Florence has a lot of renaissance stuff.
Spain came of age during the Baroque era, and it shows. But there are some so-called medieval cities like Ávila, Toledo, Salamanca and Santiago, there is also plenty of neo-classical here and there, and the real thing at Mérida.
But perhaps the most prevalent is the Mediterranean hill town thing, as the OP suggested.
I did the Google Image exercise described above for "towns", i.e. like the average person using pictures, just as the OP requested, and not seeking the opinions of history of architecture students, and I could not tell the difference.
Yes and No. Both nations shared many common architectural movements: Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-Classical. Spain has the additional influence of Moorish architecture seen in Mudéjar Style. While Italy has a strong Byzantine influence, seen particularly around Venice.
Italy is, architecturally speaking, very different from province to province and even between smaller zones. Spain too, maybe to a little less degree.
In pre-modern age and before, there was not mass communication and other factors of contemporary society that act as cultural uniformizers. The cultural variation was manifesting only locally, between neighbour zones, regions and was often ignoring the political borders, that is, it was more similitude between two neighbour zones from two different countries than between each of those zone and farther zones from the same country.
There are some architectural features that are common to the Mediterranean, so things look similar, but there is variation within each country not to mention between countries.
One of the big differences is simply the preferred colors of buildings and then there is characteristic Spanish iron work on the facades of Spanish buildings..
Italian cities may have some similarities with Spanish ones but I think they are recognizable as Italian.
Common features among many Italian cities are medieval municipal buildings and brilliant, warm colours of houses and palaces.
This is how my hometown, Rimini, looks:
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