Scholarly literature on the architectural monuments and urban infrastructure of early modern Rome abounds. What distinguishes this collection of essays is its focus on overlooked sites, e.g., the fish market rather than the Trevi Fountain, the ill-formed piazza in front of the Palazzo Zuccari rather than the Piazza del Popolo. The objective, as editor David R. Marshall puts it simply, is to study the sites and sights of Rome, its places (as distinct from its monuments) and, more importantly, the appearance of those places. After looking long and hard at the city of Rome, the essayists make fresh inroads in the literature on this well-trodden city. Their aims are divergent, with some arguing a thesis and others laying out heretofore little-known information. However, they are held together by the reliance on the visual as a starting point. The editor’s and publisher’s commitment to the exercise is immediately apparent; this beautiful volume contains 379 color illustrations.

Four of the nine essays explore single sites in Rome. In “Rome’s Medieval Fish Market at S. Angelo in Pescheria,” Julie Rowe takes stock of the economic forces that shaped and spun outward from this site along the Tiber River. The area, located at the confluence of major thoroughfares and accessible to suppliers and buyers, was an ideal setting for the market, well established by the thirteenth century. Using the 1,405 statutes of the fishmongers’ guild, among other records, Rowe fleshes out the operations of a business with tentacles throughout the city. Situated in the porch of the ruined Portico of Octavia, the market took place on property owned by the church of S. Angelo, which generated revenue by leasing ancient marble slabs as market stalls. Wholesale and retail fishmongers supplied the staples of the medieval Roman diet—shrimp, sardines, clams and silver fish. The non-aristocratic families who owned the fish supplies (in the form of fenced-in fisheries on the river or extra-urban suppliers situated along the shores of coastal Ostia or the Lago di Fogliano) accumulated prestige and wealth, which no doubt was spent far beyond the smell of the fish market.

In “Architecture and Bureaucracy: The Quirinal as an Expression of Papal Absolutism,” Arno Witte proposes that the incremental alterations and expansions of the Quirinal Hill complex from the late 1580s to the 1740s were symptoms of the papal court’s increasing bureaucratization. As foreign powers engaged more forcefully with the papacy, the court of Rome shed its medieval trappings and transformed into an organization with specialized administrative offices. After circa 1600, additions were made to the Quirinal Palace, now the primary papal residence, to accommodate these offices. The long wing along the Salita di Montecavallo, constructed in 1615, housed the Dataria, the office that dealt with all things financial. The Palazzo della Consulta, designed by the architect Ferdinando Fuga in the early 1730s and situated across the newly refurbished piazza, was the seat of the pope’s advisory board on matters of secular state policy. Because the Quirinal was far from St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Palace, places for the performance of papal ecclesiastic ritual, the functions of the curia were kept separate from those of the papal administration. Thus, by 1741, Pope Benedict XIV’s receptions of foreign state officials were social events freed of ecclesiastical traditions and held in the recently built Coffee House in the courtyard of the Quirinal Palace. Witte’s thesis dovetails with Paolo Prodi’s analysis of the papal court, which argues that the authority of the papacy was not diminished in this period, as is commonly held (Paolo Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modem Europe, trans. Susan Haskins, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Rather it rivaled that of other European rulers, specifically Louis XIV of France, in its effectiveness. One anticipates a book-length study from Witte, to flesh out this thesis as it applies to the Quirinal.

Tommaso Manfredi focuses on architectural and urbanistic interventions on the Pincian Hill, which was underdeveloped as of the early eighteenth century. He credits the efforts of the widowed Queen of Poland, Maria Casimira Sobieski, who took up residence in this region from 1701 to 1714 and sought to become a cultural doyenne by creating urban spectacle and theatrical events inspired by those in and around the Palazzo della Cancelleria. Manfredi argues that the presence of the queen and her son spurred on the development of this area, including, he suggests, the realization of the Spanish Steps, a project long in the conception stage.

Through careful archival research, Manfredi has unearthed a multitude of new facts and crafted fresh insights from them. Two stand out. First, he reveals how Maria Casimira’s focus on the Pincian was motivated by her aspirations for political and cultural power. Born a noblewoman in France, and mother to a contested heir to the Polish crown, her alliances were difficult to fathom and were suspect in a Roman society anxious about its diplomatic position during the Wars of Spanish and Polish Succession. One of the ways she attempted to overcome this social distance was to become an active member of the Accademia degli Arcadi, well known at this time for its sponsorship of poetry performances and theatrical events, and supported by some elites of Roman society. She was drawn to the Pincian Hill, the site of the ancient Gardens of Lucullus, a pastoral world that evoked the Arcadia extolled by the academy. Secondly, although generally she strove to abide by Roman social norms, Maria Casimira frequently violated them. The designs she implemented to transform the awkward space in front of and around the palace into a place for urban spectacle were necessarily nontraditional. Equally nontraditional was the placement of her theater in the renovated Villa Torres, located a distance from the palace, on the opposite side of the street from her stately residence. It required the creation of a bridge spanning the street to connect the sites or, rather, to connect the Palazzo Zuccari with a neighbor’s palace whose back entrance allowed her entry to the villa. Theater, bridge, loggia, piazza—all these became sites of performativity. Throughout, Manfredi provides a vivid sense of the rusticity of the Pincian Hill before the construction of the Spanish Steps, especially in the tale of how an honored guest, Pope Clement XI, had to wend his way through unpaved roads and palatial backyards to participate in Maria Casimira’s theatrical events.

Joan Barclay Lloyd’s essay guides the reader along the Via Appia, from the Piazza di Porta Capena to the Porta S. Sebastiano, a section that constituted part of the Passeggiata Archeologica. This archaeological park, opened after decades of gestation in 1917, allowed visitors to Italy’s new capital to stroll among the city’s ancient and medieval monuments. The essay reads like a highly researched guidebook, one in a long tradition of itinerario. Readers pause at buildings, ruins, or mere traces of edifices—the church of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo, the Baths of Caracalla, and the twelfth-century mills along the now vanished Marana River—and receive rich explanations of their role in Roman history. Barclay Lloyd requires the reader to take frequent voyages through historical time to explain how land use of a site changed or was transferred elsewhere in the city. For those who cannot get enough of the city’s biography, this is useful information.

Two innovative essays treat the wanderings of artists in and beyond the sites of Rome. Lisa Beaven’s “Claude Lorrain and La Crescenza: The Tiber Valley in the Seventeenth Century” follows the painter as he trod north of the Ponte Molle along the Tevere, through the Roman Campagna, in the summers of the 1640s. Prominent topographical features (such as the Monte Mario) and buildings (such as the Casale at La Crescenza) are identified in Claude’s illustrations, sketches, and paintings. Beyond that, Beaven engages with ecological history and considers the climatic conditions of seventeenth-century Italy as a way to make sense of his landscapes. This period coincides with the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling from 1500 to 1700. In the 1640s, the summers were particularly cool and rainy, and crops failed. Malaria and famine, then, marked the Roman Campagna. Beyond being an empathetic traveler alongside Claude, crossing paths with the occasional victim of malaria, we now see his paintings differently. The emptied landscapes, relatively devoid of lush woodlands and marked by eroded river banks, signal the environmental impact of the weather. Similarly, the pastoral elements, such as cows and herders, in lieu of agricultural workers, make sense to the viewer. Read in conjunction with Mirka Beneš’s analysis of the pastoral tradition in terms of economic history and market shifts, Beaven’s essay facilitates a novel appreciation of Claude’s paintings (Mirka Beneš, “Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain: Myths and Realities of the Roman Campagna,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, eds., Mirka Beneš and Dianne Harris, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 88–113).

In “The Virtual Rome of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” Donato Esposito reconstructs Reynolds’s now dispersed collection of drawings and prints of works of art that the painter had seen in Rome. It includes the artist’s own sketches, as well as works by others, most of which were purchased by Reynolds in London’s auction houses after he had returned from Rome. These include many figural studies, from well-known and lesser-known sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works in St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palace, as well as in the churches and palaces of Rome. The essay is structured to suggest that the collection served as a memory palace for Reynolds to reminisce about the places he had visited and studied, which he subsequently used to build a body of his own work. The information provides an extraordinary opportunity to view Rome through the eyes of the English artist, moving from site to site, spotlighting what attracted the artist’s attention among all the art in Rome. It will be an invaluable reference work for Reynolds scholars.

Other essays deal with representations of Rome’s sites. Anyone leafing through the volumes of Amato Frutaz’s Le piante di Roma has surely felt thrilled and overwhelmed by the array of detailed maps of Rome. Louis Cellauro, in his “Roma Antiqva Restored: The Renaissance Archaeological Plan,” provides a means to categorize and make sense of the maps from the latter sixteenth century. He segregates those that illustrate the most significant topographical features of the city and a few major ancient monuments from those that present a fully reconstructed city, albeit one that is highly conjectural, in a panoramic view. After careful observation, Cellauro outlines a general history of graphic conventions in both these types of maps, spotlighting Pirro Ligorio’s innovations. In addition, he notes how the archaeological maps were altered, in content as well as in form, after the first discovery of the Forma Urbis fragments in 1561. He also connects the flourishing production of archaeological maps in these decades with the sustained destruction of ancient Roman monuments during this period. The maps made visible and permanent that which was fast disappearing.

Marshall’s “The Campo Vaccino: Order and Fragment from Palladio to Piranesi” is an analysis of ruin paintings, specifically those that represent damaged columns in the Roman Forum in the eighteenth century. Marshall’s acute observations suggest that earlier ruin painters were attached to preconceived notions of what Roman columns looked like, derived from architectural treatises such as il Vignola’s and Palladio’s. By Giovanni Paolo Panini’s time, painters did not abide by this practice; instead, they used objective recording, especially of the columns still standing in the Forum, which had been neglected by the sixteenth-century treatise writers because they defied the kind of easy classification established in Vitruvius’s text. Piranesi, the observer par excellence, Marshall concludes, fully rejected those classifications and catalogued the creative array of the Forum’s columns in his 1761 Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani. In addition, Marshall argues that early ruin painters used a template for creating the illusion of damage, while Panini, like his colleague Piranesi, observed the cracks and pockmarks on the ancient marble columns firsthand and devised methods of representing them. The conclusions are not surprising: empirical observation of the eighteenth century trumps received knowledge of centuries before. But Marshall’s use of the representation of cracks in marble to prove the point is riveting.

Lastly, John Weretka attends to the appearance of Rome’s understudied early eighteenth-century churches. He applies a theoretical framework—not usefully, in this author’s opinion—to make sense of these many overlooked churches. The often flatly decorated facades of these churches functioned differently from those of the aedicular churches of the Catholic Reformation, with facade elements that crescendo outward toward their fronting piazza. The early eighteenth-century facades are more consonant with adjacent buildings, although why this is so is not fully explored. Instead, Weretka’s great service to the scholarship is in highlighting the number and variety of these churches.

The essays collected in The Site of Rome are reminiscent in some ways of Italo Calvino’s multiple narratives of Venice in Invisible Cities. The essays have differing vantage points, but all enrich the reader’s understanding of the topography of early modern Rome. Now we know what the wooden stakes sticking out of the Tiber are for, which coat-of-arms held Joshua Reynolds’s attention, and why the Palazzo Zuccari housed a convent. Taken as a whole, the essays present a mesmerizing history of the physical city and its representation, one not necessarily available to those studying its major monuments and its most heralded historical figures. In this respect, The Site of Rome might serve as a model in crafting a new type of architectural history of the city.