Engineering the Eternal City

In the account of his visit to the Holy City published in 1581, English priest Gregory Martin wrote eloquently of the plight of beggars and vagrants in the streets of Rome: ‘Dayes and nights they wander up and down needy and harbourlesse, shewing their diseases, calling upon their Creator for helpe.’ The book reviewed here provides a much-needed corrective to the rhetoric of urban ‘improvement’ that characterises many histories of early modern Rome. In reality, the streets of the city were dirty, smelly, chaotic, subject to disastrous flooding and frequented by the poor and destitute. Splendid open-air processions jarred with the backdrop of poverty and squalor. The funding of public works was always precarious, and exposed great tensions between the papacy and the communal government of the city on the Capitol. Pamela O. Long’s gripping and valuable book considers the period between the better studied High Renaissance and Baroque eras, with a particular focus on the three decades 1560 to 1590. The post-Tridentine context lurks in the background, but plays little part, although the shortage of papal funding may reflect the broader European situation. The great cardinals’ households, the grandiose building projects of St Peter’s and the Vatican, church-building schemes and the modernising of fortifications are barely discussed. Instead, the book explores the urban infrastructure: flood control, bridges, streets, drains, sewers and water-supply. The discussion then turns to the representation of the layout of the city in printed maps and city views, where ideal and reality co-existed. Finally, the book recounts the most celebrated engineering feats of the papacy of Sixtus V: the triumphal moving of the Vatican obelisk by Domenico Fontana and the re-erection of several other broken, recumbent Egyptian obelisks

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