The Impact of Public Opinion on the Urban Building Process in Baroque Rome

FAIN: FA-51965-05

Dorothy Metzger Habel
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Using a collection of primary documents that are descriptive and interpretive, I propose to frame a book on the urban building process in mid-17th century Rome. This evidence will yield a clearer sense of the realistic constraints on urban design and a more complete understanding of the culture that gave form and meaning to the urban fabric. This study extends my earlier work by focusing not on the pope as mastermind, but on the process of building the city. Moreover, this body of documentary evidence substantiates the emergence of a public voice in baroque Rome, reactive to the pope's imagined city and newly active in the definition of Rome's built form.