Technology and Culture

Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome By Pamela O. Long. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 368.

Considered simply as a city, much of Rome more closely resembles Washington, DC, than it does, say, New York or Hamburg. Unlike the latter cities, Rome was always meant to impress, to instill within the visitor a certain sense of awe. The cynic might say it was built to dupe the yokels, but many capital cities try to convey the same sense of imperium. Of course, Rome was frequently rebuilt over the course of many centuries, but what the tourist sees today is the result of efforts by four sixteenth-century popes who reigned between 1557 and 1590 and who successfully renovated a city that had fallen into disrepair and dysfunction. Pamela Long's Engineering the Eternal City is a history of that effort. It is a distinguished and perceptive recounting of what it took to bring about lasting change in an early-modern city.

Despite Rome's resemblance to other cities, in the sixteenth century it was unique. With a two-thousand-year-long history and as the capital of the Roman Catholic Church, Rome was also the center of the Papal Estates, the Pope's secular realm. Like most cities, Rome had a form of municipal government, the Capitoline Council, but it was also governed by the papacy itself, chiefly through "Congregations" of cardinals. Pontifical pressure was exerted—and taxes levied—on behalf of whatever project the reigning pope might wish, chiefly the streets, the sewers, the flood-prone Tiber River, and the aqueducts that supplied the city with water. Rome was a natural subject for the press, particularly the new subject of printed images and maps. But even simple matters could become subject of scholarly argument, most particularly the assorted ruins of the Roman Forum, whose exact location was hotly debated.

Urban historians will find many familiar themes here even if the cast of characters is somewhat strange. Popes who levy taxes for street repairs seem oddly out of character to the modern eye. But any city is a complex of inter-locking services, and changing any individual service affects most of the others. For example, in the 1560s the new form of horse-drawn "coach" (from the Hungarian Kocs) appeared in Italy and became the must-have fashion among Roman aristocrats. Their teams of four horses were unsuited to the winding, twisted streets of Rome, and the narrow wheels of coaches wore down the paved street surfaces rather quickly. The solution was not, of course, to restrict coaches, but to tear down residences and enlarge the streets, making them straighter and better surfaced. Many of the long, straight streets of modern Rome owe much to aristocratic privilege. [End Page 634]

The fusion of antiquarianism, Papal power, Renaissance notions of urban form, and engineering know-how is found in the moving of the Vatican Obelisk in 1586. Monolithic obelisks were leftovers from antiquity, and one in particular was lurking in the shadow of the expanded St. Peter's Basilica. Pope Sixtus V (the "engineer pope") commissioned Domenico Fontana to move the massive stone to the center of St. Peter's square. Fontana's gargantuan effort became a spectacle in itself, employing hundreds of workers and machines, attracting thousands of spectators. The successful completion was commemorated by Fontana's illustrated treatise in 1590, explaining the stupendous work in detail. Tourists today who know nothing of Fontana still marvel at the obelisk as they wander about the piazza.

Long is well-known to Renaissance historians as the author of several works synthesizing themes that stretch over long timespans and multiple nations. Engineering the Eternal City continues that tradition. Most previous studies of Renaissance Rome come from art or architectural history, while Long's synthesis...