Roma explicada

In 1748 the architect Giambattista Nolli published this map of Rome. It was so accurate that in the 1970s, the Italian government was still using it as the basis for city maps and using it as a reference for urban planning. Rome is divided into three main sections: the ancient part of Rome, where you'll find the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and other ancient sites like the Circus Maximus and the Baths of Caracalla.

Then we have the Renaissance and Baroque part of Rome, this is where the most famous buildings and squares are located, including the Vatican City and St. Peter's Square on the other side of the river. And then there is this place called Trastevere, which means “on the other side of the Tiber”, which is the name of the river, and here you will find many palaces and villas from the Renaissance period.

We are going to focus on this part of the city, because thanks to Renaissance and Baroque artists and architects , these public spaces became not only a center for tourists and artists, but also a point of inspiration for the whole world. western. Everything is within a walkable distance, and you will find the most wonderful buildings, fountains and streets that make walking in Rome a more fascinating experience than walking in almost any other city in the world.

This whole city is like a museum full of architectural masterpieces. If you think about the Renaissance, in general Italian architects had this thought: "we want to be like the Romans", but they thought about it from an intellectual point of view, they looked at the forms of the Romans: domes, pediments, columns, half arches. point, geometry, symmetry, but they didn't focus so much on the infrastructure technology of the Romans, and in 1585, Sixtus V is elected Pope, and he recovers this other aspect of what it is to be a Roman and he is very interested in the infrastructure, the construction of roads, construction of bridges, construction of aqueducts.

The final shape of Renaissance Rome is mainly due to the pontificate of Sixtus V, he was in the papacy for only five years, it was a relatively short period of time, but during that time he undertook all these projects to modernize Rome. Medieval Rome was a disaster, although it was home to important centers of religious pilgrimage, the disordered system of streets in the city impeded circulation and reduced the visibility of spectators on its monuments. In addition, the city was sacked by invading armies several times, and had been sacked in 1527.

So many of the roads and aqueducts had not worked since Roman antiquity in the imperial period. When Sixtus V assumed the papacy, only one ancient Roman aqueduct was still in service delivering drinking water, it was the Aqua Virgo, and it brought water close to the area where we now have the Trevi Fountain, but water was needed in many other parts of the city. The Pope had a competent architect, Domenico Fontana, to whom he entrusted the task of restoring the ancient Alexandrina aqueduct and bringing water to other parts of Rome.

So this fountain, called Acqua Felice, may seem like just another pompous and grandiose piece of baroque architecture, but it's so much more than that. Acqua Felice is the head of the ancient Alexandrina aqueduct which was restored by him to bring drinking water to 27 new fountains located all over Rome, a great achievement. With the restoration of the ancient aqueducts, it was possible to make more fountains work in the city of Rome and more people could have drinking water, Sixtus V also drained swamps that had been places where malaria mosquitoes bred, and restored some old roads and bridges that had been destroyed and had fallen into disuse.

This outline represents the Aurelian Walls, built by Aurelian the Roman Emperor in the 3rd century. So, in ancient Rome, Rome was this size, and in Renaissance and Baroque times, Rome was this size, this is a huge disappointment if you happen to be the Pope, and what Sixtus V wanted to do it was to improve Rome, so he undertook this great urban planning project. The main program of works carried out by Sixto consisted of connecting key points of the city.

Rome was a great pilgrimage city, so he opened several wide and long main streets that would create a connection between the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome: St. Peter's; Saint John Lateran; Saint Mary the Greater; Saint Paul Outside the Walls; and San Lorenzo Extramuros, the five primitive churches, and the two to which special veneration was later granted: Santa Cruz in Jerusalem and San Sebastián. With this the ambition of making Rome a worthy capital of Christianity was realized.

Sixtus V, however, was not only interested in facilitating religious ceremonial. He was perfectly aware of the role that the new streets could play in generating population growth in the mostly uninhabited neighborhoods. So he built a series of false roads with false facades, these incredibly thin walls that you can see on Nolli's map, which actually had farmland behind it with farm animals like cows and chickens, and the ambition with these false facades was define the edge of the street, no matter what happens behind the edge of the street.

The city today is completely urbanized, but traces of these false facades can still be seen in the gardens of Palazzo Quirinale, or along this street that goes towards Porta Pia, where these baroque churches seem to respect the continuity of the wall, but at the same time At the same time they are identified as a monument within the city, and if you look at them from the side, you don't see any church, you see how completely autonomous the façade of the church behind is. This diagram of Rome leaves out so many things, that it shows you what the main idea is, we have the main gates of the city, Piazza del Popolo and Porta Pia establishing these main axes, Porta Pia goes directly to Palazzo Quirinale, which was the Pope's Summer Palace, and then we have the Trident, these three paths that come out of Piazza del Popolo. The first was to have directly connected the isolated church of Santa Croce in Jerusalem with the Piazza del Popolo, located some 4 kilometers away via Santa Maria Maggiore, but the architect was forced to finish the street in front of the church of Santa Trinita dei Monti due to the steep slopes of the hill.

But thanks to that, a magnificent staircase - the Scala di Spagna - that led down the side of the hill towards the Piazza di Spagna, and from there, the street would continue to the Piazza del Popolo. Conscious of his own limited time, Sixtus V devised a unique method to ensure that his successors would be forced to continue implementing his program of connecting the main points of Rome. He placed obelisks at the points where, over the next few centuries, the most important squares would develop: in the future Piazza del Popolo, at the intersection of the three routes; in Santa María la Mayor; in front of San Juan de Letrán; and, the most significant in terms of its later effects, in front of the still unfinished Basilica of Saint Peter.

Urban design doesn't have to change everything in a moment, actually the best thing that can happen in terms of urban design is to put a plan in place and allow history to complete it. Therefore, later popes added more obelisks at other intersections in the street system, such as the one at the top of the Spanish Steps, the one in Piazza del Quirinale, in front of the Pantheon, and in Piazza Navona. And the most surprising thing is that all the streets of Rome end in a visual finishing touch, be it an obelisk, the facade of a church or the facade of an interesting building.

And if you are moving through the city, you know where you are going because each obelisk is visible from the next, it is a big city, it is a tangled city, but we are moving with direction and with an understanding of how the city works thanks to these interventions . placed there by Sixtus V. The central street of the Tridente leads directly to Piazza Venezia and the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, a national monument of the 20th century.

Behind this is the Capitol, Campidoglio in Italian. The Capitol is the hill where the temple of Jupiter was located in Roman antiquity. Since the beginning of Rome, This was always the place where power was centralized, the most important hill among the Seven Hills of Rome.

Throughout the Middle Ages and continuing into the Renaissance it became the seat of secular government, the Town Hall. But in the medieval period, the Capitol was as messy a place as so many others in Rome; the famous hill had no shape whatsoever, literally plowed by horseshoes, bushes growing haphazardly over broken ground. In 1537 Michelangelo was commissioned with a project for a monumental plaza on the site.

Michelangelo is perhaps the most talented among the versatile architects of the Italian Renaissance. As the focal point of his plan for the Capitol, the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius (the only surviving equestrian statue from ancient Rome ) was erected on a pedestal . The square is not a perfect enclosure.

The three buildings form a trapezoid whose narrowest side opens on the slope of the hill, in which the monumental access stairway was placed, slightly wider at the top than at the bottom. The piazza is a small space, 55 m at its widest and 41 m at its narrowest, between the two buildings that flank it. This false perspective effect, imposed on Michelangelo by the existing alignments, accentuates the importance of the Palazzo del Senatore.

The unity and coherence of the design were achieved thanks to the shape of the oval and its two-dimensional star-shaped pattern. Immediately below the Capitol is the Roman Forum, and immediately in front of it, in the other direction, you have the expanse of Rome moving towards the Vatican. So the secular seat of power not only conceptually draws a line between the two Romes, the Renaissance Rome of the Vatican and the pagan Rome of classical antiquity, but also physically draws the line.

And the third street of the Tridente met this point called Porto di Ripetta, it was a river port that was demolished in the early 1900s because the river overflowed all the time, so they put up a big wall to prevent flooding, and it's really tragic because now the relationship of Rome with its river is lousy, and before there was this wonderful baroque opening towards the river, but you can still see it on Nolli's map and some old photographs. I mentioned how Sixto's plan is established by these two main axes, and at one point, these axes intersect, and the way that Sixto's architect, Domenico Fontana, marked this special moment within the plan, was to chamfer all the corners. at 45 degrees and put a fountain at each corner, hence the name of that intersection, Le Quattro Fontane, the four fountains.

And at this intersection, we also have this little corner church made by one of my favorite architects: Francesco Borromini, probably one of the most beautiful churches in Rome. Here you can see a mapping of all the obelisks and all the streets that Sixtus put to connect the important sites of Rome. If we look at the way they come together, these early Christian churches form a cross that intersects at the Colosseum, so the Colosseum itself becomes a point of interest, and there was a project to put a church inside the Colosseum, and that It becomes interesting because even though it was never built, the idea of ​​an oval courtyard, already suggested here by the appropriation of the Colosseum, is something that other people start to operate on: Bernini puts a large oval courtyard in the Vatican with an obelisk at the top.

center, and Valadier puts a huge oval courtyard in Piazza del Popolo with an obelisk in the center. Piazza del Popolo was the main entrance gate to the city even since Roman times. And you can see that here two twin domed churches were built at the angles formed by the three streets, and this trapezoidal plaza that existed during the time of Sixtus with the obelisk in the center, was rebuilt much later in the oval space that we have.

today, again, later generations develop the guidelines of the initial plan. The Spanish Steps, also built later, between 1721 and 1725, and it is the only example in the history of urbanism where a staircase does not simply lead to a square in front of a monumental structure that is the church, but where the stairs themselves become the visual and spatial center. Before they were built you had to climb these smaller stairs at the back, but what happens here in the Plaza de España is an example of this baroque era theatrics, or the tendency of the city to be seen as a stage .

You have a series of extended terraces that become stages, and the rhythm is strange because it stretches and contracts over and over again, and you constantly experience different things, it's moments like these that redirect your view to other parts of the city , and you go on this very shallow slope, so that you appreciate the materiality of the stone and the changing aspects of this topographically complex city, and also when you reach the top you see Rome in a different way, you don't see the bases of the churches , you see the domes of the churches, and the city becomes almost like a valley with ideal pavilions, only the domes floating above. It is called the Plaza de Spagna because in the Spanish embassy it is located at the base of the stairs. The houses, palaces and churches of Piazza Navona are exactly adapted to the layout of the Roman circus built by Emperor Domitian in the first century AD; in effect, the well-preserved ruins, corresponding to the old stands and corridors, are contained in the foundations of the square.

You can see that the plan of the square has the same shape as the plan of a Roman circus. The definitive spatial organization of the square was carried out by Bernini in the 17th century. The long and narrow shape of the space meant that all views had to be designed as oblique perspectives.

The plaza contains three exquisitely modeled fountains whose cascading waters are enhanced by the surrounding houses and the two churches of Santiago de los Españoles and Santa Inés. There are more fountains in Rome than in any other city in the world, and this is the greatest of all the fountains in Rome, The Trevi Fountain. The original design was by Bernini and its construction stopped after the death of the Pope who commissioned it and it was completed in the 18th century by Nicola Salvi.

It's a great idea, to make a fountain that is part of the city, and he does it by attaching the fountain to the facade of a building. And the very concept of the fountain is: a building that collapses and turns into rustication. Rustication in architecture means giving the stone a deliberately rough surface.

In this way the marble of the Trevi Fountain looks like living rock, and then the water runs out of the building, and you have these wild horses, and these classical heroic figures all over the place, but essentially what's happening in the Trevi Fountain is , gets its power by doing this direct confrontation between a natural condition and a cultural condition, you start to see how architecture just can't hold up in a world where nature is so powerful, and architecture starts to dissolve into nature. And this is something that Bernini has done in other places, for example, we saw the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, where he is very interested in hyperrustication, or finding a way to make things carved by man become like nature. The great St.

Peter's Basilica was built between 1506 and 1626, but lacked a proper forecourt until 1655, when Bernini completed the two main parts of a complex consisting of three linked plazas. These spaces are the piazza retta, located exactly in front of the church, and the immense piazza obliqua, enclosed by the semicircular colonnades. The third phase, Piazza Rusticucci, was never fully completed and is represented only by the avenue opened by Mussolini that connects San Pietro with the Tiber river.

Bernini had to incorporate in his project, chosen in competition with the most prominent contemporary architects, the central obelisk built by Sixtus V in 1586 and the two fountains built by Maderno in 1613. The scale of both the church and the adjacent spaces is enormous: the piazza retta is 125 m wide facing the eastern façade of the church, narrowing to 91 m on its side adjoining the piazza obliqua, by 98 m background; The obliqua square, for its part, is not a true ellipse but consists of two semicircles with an approximate radius of 79 m and a rectangle in the middle, resulting in a total width of 198 m. Sixtus's plan was so successful that a very similar plan was executed in Paris some three hundred years later, where many long, wide streets were opened up to connect important moments within the city through the disorderly medieval urban layout.

And since then it has continued to influence other cities around the world, many of which have been planned with this same scheme. You can find a lot more of Rome on my channel, so go check it out and subscribe if you like it. Thank you very much for staying until the end, I hope you enjoyed and learned, please like this video because it helps me a lot to continue and see you very soon in the next episode.

Until then!