Engineering the Eternal City: Power, Knowledge, and Urbanization in Counter-Reformation Rome, 1560-1590

FAIN: FB-53208-07

Pamela O. Long
Unaffiliated independent scholar

This project is a cultural and social history of engineering in Counter-Reformation Rome during a thirty year period. During this period, Catholic reform and the renovation of the city went hand in hand. Aqueducts were repaired, fountains built, streets paved, and obelisks transported to new prominent sites aligning newly straightened streets.The study focuses on processes of conflict, negotiation, and work, rather than on finished structures. The complex political and patronage situation in Rome led to numerous writings on practical engineering projects and their association with the study of antiquities, ancient texts, and other traditions of learning, thereby facilitating the rising status of technical and practical culture.

Associated Products

Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Book)
Title: Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome
Author: Pamela O. Long
Abstract: Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/engineering-the-eternal-city-infrastructure-topography-and-the-culture-of-knowledge-in-late-sixteenth-century-rome/oclc/1028881404&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226543796
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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