Early modern Rome on the move

From the late sixteenth century, the monumental new cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica was normally the first glimpse of Rome noted by visitors arriving from the north along the Via Francigena. This route followed the ancient Via Cassia through southern Tuscany from Siena into Lazio, where the travelers joined the Via Flaminia just north of the Tiber (fig. 1). From there, they crossed over the Milvian Bridge, where the emperor Maxentius was defeated by Constantine in 312 and where they often began their reflection upon the city’s ancient heritage. In the space between these two views of Rome’s modernity and antiquity, visitors traversed the threshold between the seemingly depopulated arid landscape of the agro romano, the meandering flow of the Tiber, and the cultivated villas (vigne) emerging at the periphery of the city. After the bridge, the suddenly rectilinear trajectory of the Via Flaminia to the Porta del Popolo ushered the traveler onto the expanding network of newly laid out avenues that were linking the city’s ancient monuments to its aspiring triumphant modernity. These landscapes, waterscapes, and cityscapes constituted three intersecting ecologies that were alternately explored, described, lamented, and celebrated by visitors, whose journeys stitched together multiple and often opposing narratives of the transforming city. While papal planners were designing Rome’s possible futures, foreigners—whether humanists, diplomats, or artists—were developing ways of representing both the degradation and the regeneration of its topographies as a series of interconnected itineraries. This study, therefore, traces the ways in which a range of official design technologies and individual representational practices connected the ecologies of early modern Rome. It argues that these practices were centered