Chapter 4. Paths and Edges: The Street Ecology of City Centres and Neighbourhoods

Nevola, Fabrizio

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Chapter 4. Paths and Edges: The Street Ecology of City Centres and Neighbourhoods

Fabrizio Nevola

Street Life in Renaissance Italy

Writing in Book II, ‘Di prospettiva’ (‘On perspective’), of his treatise on architecture (first published 1545), the Bolognese painter and architect Sebastiano Serlio is describing here the first of three main types of stage-set design for classical theatre: comic, tragic and satyric (or...

Author

Fabrizio Nevola

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.135-185

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00290.4

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22185

Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)City planning--Italy--HistoryPublic spaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalySerlio, Sebastiano 1475-1554Architecture, Renaissance--Classical influencesShopping--ItalyPictorial maps, Renaissance

Chapter 4. Paths and Edges: The Street Ecology of City Centres and Neighbourhoods

The buildings should be those of private persons, as it might be of citizens, lawyers, merchants, parasites and other similar sorts. But above all there should be a prostitute’s house, you shouldn’t forget a tavern, and a temple is very important.1Serlio, 1618–19, fol. 45v (Book II was first published in 1545).

Writing in Book II, ‘Di prospettiva’ (‘On perspective’), of his treatise on architecture (first published 1545), the Bolognese painter and architect Sebastiano Serlio is describing here the first of three main types of stage-set design for classical theatre: comic, tragic and satyric (or pastoral).2Ibid., fols 45v–47v. He goes on to discuss in greater detail the variety of building types chosen, and their arrangement to create a fixed scenery, in which the lower houses appear at the front, while complex massing and careful arrangement of porticoes, balconies and jetties create a sense of movement and space appropriate to the sorts of drama that play out in comedies. He contrasts the scena comica with an alternative urban stage set suited to tragedies, in which:

the buildings should be of grand personages, on account of the fact that the accidents of lovers, ill-fated events, violent and cruel deaths [. . .] always take place in the houses of lords, dukes, great princes and indeed kings [. . .] there will be no buildings that are not in some way noble.3Ibid., fol. 46r.

If we turn to the woodcut illustrations that accompany Serlio’s text, these contrasts are thrown into sharper relief (figs 66 and 67). Both scenes are presented in what was to become the familiar format for a perspectival or fixed stage set – a rigorous gridded paving system, set out to convey a tight geometric composition, depicting a streetscape receding towards a central point at the back of the stage.4On the origins of the fixed stage set, see Cruciani, 1983; and, more recently, Beltramini and Burns, 2008. The ‘comic scene’ stands out for its architectural variety, where a rich mix of Gothic and classical forms combines to shape a diverse urban environment. The scene is closed off in the background by a medieval bell-tower attached to an elegantly classical church or ‘temple’. At the front, to the viewer’s left, is a rather humble house, largely built of wood, and yet decorated with a simple coat of arms between the upper floor windows; it is labelled ‘RUF’ (an abbreviated form of ruffiana, ‘prostitute’ – the word Serlio uses in the text) by the door, marking it out as the brothel. On the other side of the street, in the foreground, a wide Gothic-porticoed structure supports a wood-beamed upper-floor balcony, perhaps to be understood as a useful feature allowing actors to enter the stage from this raised vantage point. Most of the other buildings resemble Quattrocento palaces, with the exception of the most prominent of those in the middle ground, a complicated building containing a shop counter on the ground floor and a grand two-light Gothic window on the first floor, and topped by a jettied upper level. The whole building is liberally decorated with coats of arms (one of which may be that of a Medici cardinal), while the shop counter is probably arranged to serve food – it is a tavern, identified in Serlio’s text as the ‘hosteria della luna’ (‘At the sign of the moon’).

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Description: Design for a comic scene by Serlio, Sebastiano

66. Sebastiano Serlio, design for a ‘comic scene’, woodcut from ‘Di prospettiva’, Book II of Tutte le opere di architettura (Venice, 1619), fol. 45v, Getty Research Institute, Getty Center, Los Angeles.

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Description: Design for a tragic scene by Serlio, Sebastiano

67. Sebastiano Serlio, design for a ‘tragic scene’, woodcut from ‘Di prospettiva’, Book II of Tutte le opere di architettura (Venice, 1619), fol. 46v, Getty Research Institute, Getty Center, Los Angeles.

In marked contrast, the ‘tragic scene’ draws on a far more uniform architectural vocabulary. The scene recedes to a focal point comprising a triumphal arch topped by statuary, behind which can be glimpsed an obelisk and a pyramid in the immediate background. The foreground is framed by classical arcaded structures. On the left, what appears to be an arch with an attic bearing an inscription is decorated with full-figure and low-relief sculptures, while, on the right, a two-storey loggia may serve a similar function to its Gothic counterpart in the ‘comic scene’, providing a prominent point for dramatic action. The architecture all seems to be made of stone, and echoes the classical style prevalent in elite circles by the mid-sixteenth century.

The two textual commentaries, with their respective illustrations, present a contrast between the ‘comic scene’, where the mixed use and varied styles of the architecture imitate the streetscape that would have been prevalent in the cities of the time, and the ‘tragic scene’, where a far more uniformly applied classical style would have resonated with some of the most up-to-date urban-renewal projects of the period. Serlio’s comments appear to imply a moral distinction between the lowly goings-on of comedic drama and the more exalted actions that were the subject matter of tragedies, and in so doing make a case for the primacy of the classical style of architecture.5See Onians, 1988, pp. 282–6, which develops comments of Panofsky, 1955, p. 234. Serlio’s advice resonates with the changing forms of urban-scale architectural intervention and street design in the mid-sixteenth century, as he champions the uniform application by ruling elites of classical design to the built environment, with the result that the city itself became a visual expression of rule by ‘lords, dukes, great princes and indeed kings’.6This interpretation was first proposed in relation to built interventions by urban elites in Siena, in Nevola, 1999, p. 63. To an extent, this view was shaped by the priorities of patronage, as Serlio acknowledged by referencing the liberality of princes as central to the production values of revival classical theatre.7Serlio, 1618–19, fol. 47v, referring to Girolamo Genga’s work for Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Nevertheless, it is more than coincidental that fixed stage designs created during the sixteenth century were predominantly in the classical style and were made for ruling elites and princes, whose magnanimity was reflected in the splendid new theatres themselves.

Serlio’s text, as we have seen, offers additional commentary regarding the design and purpose of the buildings, but dwells more on the practicalities of stage design, directed at architects who might follow his advice. An interesting passage on this subject considers the inclusion of human figures in the painted fictive architecture, such as women on balconies or looking out from windows.8Ibid., fol. 46v. The author disapproves of the practice, stating that ‘they cannot move, and yet they represent life’, and suggests that inanimate or motionless objects should be depicted instead, such as statues or sleeping animals.9Ibid. He prefers the device of hiding lights behind the windows, to make buildings appear inhabited. In addressing the issue of how the trompe l’œil deceives the viewer, he raises the distinction between the architectural setting – the stage set – and the live action played out by the actors on stage. This brings home the degree to which the proposed fictive architecture of the stage set marks the edges of the frame that is a stage, making the street the main field within which the dramatic action of the play is performed. While this is, to some extent, of course, obvious, Serlio’s comments offer an interesting gloss on the public-facing nature of urban design in the sixteenth century, where built façades address the street, framing the everyday and exceptional actions that play out in the public realm.

As will be argued in this chapter, during the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 street design became a key instrument of urban renewal, and with this the built form of streets changed significantly. While we have already addressed in some depth the legislative measures and bureaucratic offices that supervised this renewal process (Chapter 1) and the social interactions that shaped those spaces (Chapter 2), this chapter turns to the architectural interventions that altered the built form of streets. It considers the gradual process of urban specialisation and segregation, which operated through the early modern period, as mixed-use urban environments gave way to spaces that were increasingly socially and professionally stratified. The discussion will focus on the buildings and large-scale renewal projects that modified or radically transformed parts of the city, so as to reveal how architecture came together on an urban scale to create distinct environments and street ecologies, defined not simply by single units, but by the collective association of multiple parts.

Mixed-use streets: Living and working around Renaissance streets

Serlio’s ‘comic scene’ provides valuable clues as to the appearance of the street-scapes prevalent in Renaissance Italy, mixing, as it does, styles, functions and social groups. The view undoubtedly condenses and simplifies the urban scene; nevertheless, a combination of a local church, a tavern and some shops, in addition to a range of housing types, would have been standard in most neighbourhoods, and is, indeed, reminiscent of both painted depictions of contemporary urban environments and extant examples of built centres across the peninsula. It offers a hybrid between street and piazza; the foreground stage (which is six paving modules deep) offers a clean edge, behind which the scene’s property line recedes by jagged steps, narrowing into little more than an alley leading to the centrally placed church portal. This is a built environment that has evolved over time. The Romanesque campanile (‘bell-tower’) has outlived the church it was built for, which has been replaced in a classicising style common in the latter part of the fifteenth century; a range of ground-floor porticoes provides continuity of function, delivered through a range of styles spanning as much as three hundred years.10On porticoes and the range of form these took in Bologna from the 12th century onwards, see Bocchi, 1990.

The urban process – that is, the gradual transformation of urban environments – tends to be slow, and as such the ex novo creation of streets (such as that presented in the ‘tragic scene’, and examples of which are discussed later in this chapter) was an exception, albeit these instances have tended to receive greater attention in the scholarship.11For the ‘urban process’, see Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994a; Kostof, 1992, p. 280. More usually, streets were shaped by a process of subtraction and addition, as individual buildings, property boundaries or sight-lines were modified or substituted; institutional interventions worked to make streets wider or straighter, but individual patrons might intervene to transform specific buildings. It is this two-pronged action that was most commonly responsible for urban-scale transformation of districts and neighbourhoods, yet the predominant condition across cities as a whole was surely one of consolidation and evolution as opposed to one of dramatic transformation.

Continuity, then, was a dominant trait in the city fabric and the urban life transacted on a day-to-day basis in the streets. Broadly speaking, patterns of urban use were already well-established within cities by the fifteenth century; it was around the city centre that the most important religious and government institutions were housed, usually in monumental buildings facing large open public spaces.12These (intentionally) general comments can be supported from scholarship on the Renaissance city, including Anderson, 2013, pp. 141–75; Benevolo, 1993, ch. 3; Friedrichs, 1995, ch. 1; Lilley, 2002, ch. 5. City halls and cathedrals were relatively permeable buildings, to which significant numbers of citizens had regular access for the purposes of bureaucracy, governance or devotion. Many of the city’s trades and professions also clustered in the centre, with shops, workshops and more ephemeral benches and stalls lining the streets around centrally positioned marketplaces; it was in these largely outdoor spaces that most everyday life and socio-economic interaction took place.13For a recent survey, see Romano, 2015, pp. 71–108. While the scale of city centres varied, a common arrangement tended to result in the grouping of the city’s dominant families in these same areas, so that the more important streets were often made up of buildings that accommodated both residential and commercial functions. By contrast, further from the centre, neighbourhoods gravitating around, perhaps, a local church and the more limited services provided by bakeries and taverns, were predominantly residential, even though artisan housing often incorporated spaces for work and production.14Cavallo, 2006.

These broadly defined patterns of urban use were subject to change, as civic authorities or local rulers sought to rationalise or improve parts of the city, particularly around the centre. So, for instance, revisiting an example of street improvement discussed in Chapter 1, we shall start by considering the changes made in Mantua by Marquis Ludovico II Gonzaga. This project renewed the street network, extending south beyond the fortified Gonzaga palace enclave on the large open space of piazza San Pietro (now piazza Sordello), to create a thoroughfare from Porta San Pietro in the north, through the civic centre, past the church of Sant’Andrea and on towards the new church of San Sebastiano near the bridge across the lake in the south-eastern extremity of the city (see fig. 10).15Burns, 1981, pp. 28–9, 39–43; Cantatore, 2003. This north–south axis in described in Carpeggiani, 1994, pp. 182–3, as an ‘asse gonzaghesco’. The area benefited from prolonged and steady investment, promoted by the marquis from around 1460. Besides the improvement of the infrastructure, the architecture was also subject to significant changes during the same period. Starting from Porta San Pietro, which formed part of the city’s oldest stretch of walls (pre-dating the twelfth century), an arcade runs along the north-west side of the street for more than 200 metres (fig. 68). About forty arches create a continuous covered pedestrian walkway, parallel to the street, each bay of which contains a shop opening; the arcade, in turn, supports housing on the upper floors and has the effect of creating a unified façade addressing the street. The columns and capitals that form the arcade are all made of the same white stone, and, although many are carved in the all’antica style dominant in the second half of the fifteenth century, some adopt a simpler Doric style that would appear to date to the first half of the sixteenth century. Simply moulded terracotta egg and dart cornices run along below the roof guttering, and some of the arches are finished with quite finely worked all’antica decoration. While documents confirm that the arcade formed part of Ludovico’s plans for the urban improvement of this central commercial district, stylistic evidence indicates that it took some decades to complete.16Forster, 1994, pp. 166–72; see also Carpeggiani, 1994, pp. 182–3 and n. 30. Although Gonzaga will pushed through the project, and some architectural oversight controlled its appearance, it is unclear who funded the actual execution of the building work; it was probably financed by the owners of the properties along the street, who stood to benefit from the rental income from the well-placed shops in the city’s commercial centre.17Forster, 1994, pp. 169–71, proposed Alberti as having oversight of the project, though this is not supported by documents. A new merchants’ loggia, which formed part of the arcade, faced onto the piazza del Broletto and presided over the business activity concentrated in the area.

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Description: Arcade, along via Broletto towards piazza delle Erbe by Unknown

68. Arcade, along via Broletto towards piazza delle Erbe, Mantua.

Facing the arcade on the south-east side of the street, a sequence of piazzas opened up – first the piazza del Broletto and then the larger piazza delle Erbe beyond; these were framed by buildings that had housed the city’s administrative institutions from as early as the twelfth century. Here, too, Ludovico modified the existing medieval fabric, rather than rebuilding from scratch. Thus, the city’s judicial offices, originally housed in the Broletto, were remodelled to form part of the new Palazzo del Podestà; these interventions rationalised the internal arrangement of the building, though greater attention was afforded to the exterior façade towards the large open market space of piazza delle Erbe (fig. 69).18Burns, 1981, p. 29; Cantatore, 2003, pp. 447–52; Forster, 1994, pp. 168–9. Here, a severe brick-built façade, punctured by stone-framed, rectangular windows, gave order to the piazza, reinforced by a new arcade lining its eastern edge, along the front of the Palazzo della Ragione. The renovated piazza was completed by the erection of a clock tower on its southern corner, furnished with a state-of-the-art clock installed by Bartolomeo Manfredi ‘dell’orologio’ in 1473.19Forster, 1994, pp. 172–3, notes the political implications of Gonzaga patronage controlling civic time; see also Signorini, 2011. The clock tower is attributed to the court architect Luca Fancelli (built 1471–2). Combined with the continuous arcade on the north side, these interventions significantly regularised the piazza, marking with some emphasis Gonzaga authority over the political, legal and commercial life of the city through the promotion of this renewal campaign.20A long tradition links the overall project to the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti, though it is not proven that his letter to the marquis of 27 February 1460 (Chambers and Martineau, 1981, pp. 126–7 (Howard Burns)), set out a blueprint for this area, as first suggested by Burns, 1981, p. 29.

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Description: Palazzo del Podestà (right) by Fancelli, Luca

69. Palazzo del Podestà (right), Mantua, viewed from piazza delle Erbe.

Clearly, then, a concerted effort was made during the two decades before Ludovico’s death in 1478 to reorder this central urban area, made up of a sequence of piazzas linked together by a street. While large-scale building campaigns were undertaken, much of the earlier built fabric was maintained, some of it subsumed into the masking façades of new buildings, while significant portions of medieval architecture also remained visible. For example, at its south end the piazza delle Erbe was closed off by the remarkable house of the merchant Boniforte da Concorezzo, a richly decorated, three-storey structure completed in 1455, a few years before the Gonzaga interventions began (fig. 70).21The inscription on the architrave reads: (ZO) HANBONIFORT DA CONCHOREZO AFAT FAR QUESTA OPERA DELANO 1455 – IOHANES-BONIFORT DE CONCORESIO HOC OPUS FIERI FECIT SUB ANNO DOMINI 1455; see Forster, 1994, p. 162 and n. 1. The unusual house fuses classicising innovations with late Gothic flourishes; an open loggia on the ground floor differs from surrounding buildings in using an architrave, as opposed to the arcading favoured elsewhere in the piazza and the city more generally. It is supported on graceful free-standing columns of pink Verona marble, topped with all’antica capitals embellished with the owner’s coat of arms, while the architrave is charmingly decorated with examples of the luxury items sold in the shop. The rectangular frames of the upper storey windows, formed of elegantly moulded brickwork, are set with late-Gothic ogival windows. Neighbouring properties to the east of the house continue the architrave solution to the ground-floor arcades, introducing an element of variety to the buildings framing the piazza.22Alberti’s letter suggests plans to remodel the 11th-century rotunda of San Lorenzo, which were never carried out.

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Description: House of the merchant Boniforte da Concorezzo by Unknown

70. House of the merchant Boniforte da Concorezzo, 1455, piazza delle Erbe, Mantua.

Beyond the piazza delle Erbe stands the small piazza Sant’Andrea, which became the focus of perhaps the most ambitious of the marquis’ plans, begun only in 1472 with the start of work on the massive new church of Sant’Andrea, designed by Leon Battista Alberti (fig. 71).23Chambers and Martineau, 1981, pp. 126–7 (Howard Burns). Construction was delayed by the resistance of the abbot of the Benedictine community that officiated the church. The porticoed façade onto the piazza was among the first elements to be completed (by 1494), and the rigorously classical design, modelled on a Roman triumphal arch, is interestingly flanked by the only surviving element of the earlier church, a Gothic bell-tower completed in 1414.24Burns, 1998, pp. 149–56, with earlier bibliography. The remaining three sides of the small piazza are lined with undistinguished buildings, most of them having a ground-floor open arcade; architectural elements such as capitals and columns indicate re-use of salvage materials from earlier centuries, which make it difficult to date the portico, though it seems logical to consider this as having formed a part of the Gonzaga plans. Stone markers on the corner of the piazza, dating to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, show the arms of the Gonzaga accompanied by those of the city government; they define a boundary of the market area (fig. 72), and confirm that the commercial vocation of the site pre-dated Ludovico’s renewal campaign.25For these boundary markers, see Bottoni, 1840, p. 15; Gionta, 1844, p. 71; Pisani, n.d., pp. 8–9.

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Description: Church of Sant’Andrea by Alberti, Leon Battista

71. Church of Sant’Andrea, 1472–94, Mantua.

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Description: The arms of the Gonzaga and of the city government by Unknown

72. The arms of the Gonzaga and of the city government, set up as markers on the corner of the piazza Sant’Andrea, Mantua.

South from the piazza facing Sant’Andrea, the street continues to be lined with arcades (along the modern-day piazza Marconi); again, a number of the capitals appear to be salvaged materials, though a preponderance of late-fifteenth-century all’antica Corinthianesque capitals indicates that this area was also subject to improvements during the period. Here, too, a remarkable survival stands out from the streetscape – the Viani house, whose frescoed façade of putti and classical motifs includes a much damaged scene of the Clemency of Alexander, executed towards the end of the fifteenth century as part of a more extensive restoration of the house.26Vischi, 2009. For the decree in favour of Viano de Vianis, supporting the building project, ASMn, Decreti, 24, fol. 87r (12 September 1492), see also Ferlisi, 2006, p. 74 and n. 7. The building may offer an insight into a wider practice of fresco and sgraffito decoration of plaster façades in the city, though it is also interesting to note that, in spite of the splendid exterior, the house is no larger than its neighbours and conforms to the standard two-bay design prevalent in the area.27L’Occaso, 2009, notes that the practice was concentrated in the half-century following 1460.

In short, we can conclude that the large-scale architectural intervention along a section of Mantua’s central street network almost half a kilometre long was achieved by a carefully managed integration of previously existing buildings, with remodelling and new construction. A predominant style can be identified in the all’antica forms prevalent during the latter part of the fifteenth century, but this was not uniformly applied, and various buildings stand out as being from earlier periods. Although individual elements – or set pieces, as we might consider them – emerge as ‘monuments’ of Renaissance design, the overall picture is rather more complex. From a classic perspectival photographic viewpoint, Sant’Andrea can be seen as an isolated and magnificent example of the renewed language of classical architecture, chiming with Alberti’s description of the design, in his architectural treatise, as having been inspired by the Etruscan temple.28Burns, 1981, p. 127. And yet the building dominates a relatively small, irregular and crowded piazza, bounded by a variety of quite ordinary buildings, and retains a Gothic bell-tower that is mismatched with the severe classical façade. Much the same might be said for the regularised piazza delle Erbe, framed by the new façade of the Palazzo del Podestà and the portico connecting it to the symmetrically aligned Torre dell’Orologio. Here again, a set piece of institutional architecture needs to be qualified by the less regular forms of the portico on the south and west sides of the piazza, which hug the flank of Sant’Andrea, providing precious shop space around the market square. Thus, if we consider the new buildings within the wider urban context into which they were inserted, the variety of building types and styles, and the collective image these create for the viewer moving through the spaces, the resulting urban environment has much in common with the varied formulation of Serlio’s ‘comic scene’.

Nevertheless, it is also essential to remember that, as Marquis Ludovico pushed through his plans to renovate the centre of Mantua, so simultaneously he expressed his power upon the canvas of the city, bending the local authorities that presided over local government and trade to his interests, and crushing the resistance of the monastic congregation of Sant’Andrea by securing a papal intervention to place the church under the direct control of his son Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. Further, by directing his attention beyond the fortified precinct of the family’s sprawling court residence, he ensured that the street renewal served a programmatic function by extending the family’s influence in capillary fashion across the city as a whole, and, in particular, towards the new construction sites around the San Sebastiano complex.29For the stone markers that document Gonzaga influence on Mantua’s expansion, see Chapters 1 and 5. In the light of these motivations, we might say that the path etched by the enhanced street network served a political function, while the buildings that line its edges retained a variety of purposes, primarily characterised, in this central area of Mantua, by the commercial vocation of the extended market precinct.

The Mantua example is interesting for highlighting the multiple and overlapping uses of urban space and the varied purposes that might be attributed to urban renewal campaigns. While the Gonzaga family accrued status from the political, diplomatic and ceremonial functions of the reordered space, on an everyday level an outstanding improvement was made to the way the space functioned as a commercial hub, with fixed shops and comfortable porticoes for its users. As Kurt Forster has noted, it therefore serves as a reminder that, all too often, analysis of urban planning interventions privileges idealised formal qualities over an understanding of the complex socio-economic factors shaping both their design and their everyday use.30Forster, 1994, pp. 162–6, provides an extended polemic against the formal analysis of the Renaissance piazza as governed by principles of order and symmetry, severed from a contextualized understanding of such spaces. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to attach greater significance to radically transformative urban interventions than to the more gradual or iterative processes that nevertheless altered countless streetscapes during the Renaissance.31Forster, 1994, p. 164, singles out Pienza, Vigevano, piazza San Marco (Venice) and the reordering of the Capitoline (Rome) as the archetypal transformative interventions, and notes that Lotz, 1977, remains a reference point in the limited scholarship on the piazza. Moreover, the Mantua example problematises the simplistic separation of street and piazza as distinct units of urban design; as we have seen, the interventions in Mantua affected a sequence of spaces, including small and large squares, but also street intersections along the central spine of a main street. Documentary records, as well as the built evidence, reveal the different elements of the project to have been understood as a coherent whole, so that when Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga visited the ongoing works in January 1464 his review was accomplished as an urban walk rather than a site inspection, and ‘the route he took was along the street through the town to see those new buildings.’32See Chapter 1, p. 36, for an extended quotation, taken from Calzona, 2003, p. 578.

The cardinal was especially impressed by the porticoes lined with shops, and it is certainly the case that trade and the permanent improvement of the built infrastructure that supported commerce was a major factor in urban change from the second half of the fifteenth century. In Ferrara, for instance, a series of interventions around the cathedral and the ducal residence facing it were carried out in 1473, as part of widespread improvements to the city fabric in preparation for the arrival of Ercole d’Este’s bride, Eleonora d’Aragona (daughter of King Ferrante of Naples), on 3 July.33Severi, 1982, p. 234; Tuohy, 1996, pp. 63–5; see also Folin, 1997, pp. 359–66. Significantly, it was at this time that the distinctive shops lining the south flank of the cathedral were rebuilt in stone, giving a more dignified and permanent home to the strazzaroli (‘silk merchants’), who had plied their trade from this site from the fourteenth century (fig. 73).34Severi, 1982, p. 234, notes that the strazzaroli shops were documented from 1322 and cites the contemporary ‘Diario ferrarese’, 1473 (Diario ferrarese, 1928). Tuohy, 1996, p. 63, notes that the balcony was used as a viewing platform for the wedding of Eleonora (1473) and the funeral of Niccolò d’Este (1476). This permanent arrangement created a raised stone base for the handsomely carved marble viewing balcony of the Loggia dei Merciai, on the south-west corner of the cathedral. In turn, from 1492 a stone loggia was erected along the front of the Palazzo Ducale, backed by shops that were let out to tenants, many of them in some way or another employed at court.35Tuohy, 1996, pp. 88–9; they were destroyed by fire in 1532 and not replaced. Here, too, rent-generating income from shops remained a priority in the city centre, and the ducal palace tenants included a carpenter, bricklayers, a draper and a tailor.36Ibid., p. 89. Above these shops, on the piano nobile of the ducal palace Corte block, the vast new Sala Grande reception room faced out onto the street and piazza, providing a dominant viewpoint over this central space. It is this regularised urban space – at once a street and a piazza – that forms the centrepiece of the late-fifteenth-century woodcut view of Ferrara in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria (see fig. 24); continuous shop arcading can be seen along the southern façade of the cathedral as well as along the front of the ducal palace complex, while distinctive shop openings are also visible at ground-floor level along the axial street leading towards the gate that encloses this central precinct. While the bird’s-eye perspective provides a synthetic view of the city as a whole, there can be little doubt that the paved central area is intended to stand out as a well-ordered centrepiece, albeit one that it is composed of varied architectures and stepped alignments in the streetscape, again reminiscent of the mixed-use and stylistically varied ‘comic scene’ later depicted by Serlio.

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Description: Loggia dei Merciai by Alberti, Leon Battista

73. Loggia dei Merciai, Ferrara, 1473, and the flank of the cathedral of San Giorgio.

Shops and streets

In privileging the redevelopment of central streets through the provision of well-ordered infrastructures that supported trade and industry, Ferrara and Mantua were far from unique. Growing attention to consumption in the early modern period has led to a great deal of new research on the locations and practices of shopping in Italy before 1600.37From a growing literature, see Calabi, 1997; Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005; and bibliography in notes that follow. As shown in the examples of Mantua and Ferrara, mixed-use building types were the norm in many central urban areas, as residential property was confined to upper floors, while ground floors (and sometimes mezzanines) were occupied by shops. Municipalities’ growing attention to the fostering of trade was heavily conditioned by urban morphology, so that legislation regulating the distribution and clustering of trades, industry and commerce in cities tended to segregate these on sensory (aesthetic, acoustic, olfactory), rather than purely functional grounds; such measures led increasingly to the concentration of luxury trades along cities’ main streets. Consequently, the ground floors of buildings lining these principal arteries frequently contained shops or other spaces that functioned in the economic cycle of industry, trade and exchange, such as warehouses or artisans’ workshops.38Friedman, 1992, pp. 82–6.

To an extent, of course, this was a long-established situation in Italy’s industrial trading cities. An aerial view of the town of San Gimignano provides a useful guide to understanding the power of streets in channelling movement and focusing commercial activity, with a hierarchy of streets developing in relation to centrality and the resulting traffic flow of users.39The power of the street to focus movement is discussed in Rykwert, 1978, p. 15; see also essays in Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994b; Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–213. On the semantic distinction of a hierarchy denoted by the variants of strada, via and chiasso, see Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 41–3; for equivalents in Florence, see Spilner, 1987, ch. 4. San Gimignano, like nearby Siena, is a ‘daughter of the road’, a town whose flourishing medieval trade owed everything to its location on the via Francigena, the primary trade and pilgrim route linking northern Europe and Rome.40Sestan, 1968. For a more general consideration of urban morphology as determinant and indicator of urban types, see Kostof, 1991. For the via Francigena as determinant factor in San Gimignano’s economic expansion, see Fiumi, 1961, pp. 28–33, 149–152. During the peak of the city’s merchant fortunes from the twelfth into the fourteenth centuries, the ground floor of almost all the properties lining the main street contained shops and warehouses (fig. 74).41Fiumi, 1961, pp. 152–3. Although perhaps an extreme case, the town’s location on the most important north–south pilgrimage artery to Rome and the socio-economic practices associated with its position were instrumental in defining its commercial success and its urban form, as well as the typology of the architecture along its central street.42Ibid. p. 28. A useful summary of pilgrim routes to Rome can be found in Belli Barsali, 1985.

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Description: Via San Giovanni by Bazzecchi, Ivo

74. Via San Giovanni, San Gimignano. Photograph by Ivo Bazzecchi, c. 1960.

Much the same can be said for the main street running through San Gimignano’s southern neighbour, Siena, another city with an urban morphology determined by the predominance of north–south traffic and likewise dependent on its location on the via Francigena.43Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–145, esp. 95–8, 124–8; Nevola, 2020. While this main thoroughfare had long been the focus of trade, from around 1460 a series of government policies actively promoted the clustering of luxury botteghe (‘shops’) along the central section of the strada Romana as part of a wide-ranging policy to make the street into a showcase for the city as a whole. To underline Siena’s ambitions to foster trade, the central intersection of the strada, known as the croce del Travaglio, adjacent to the market on the piazza del Campo, was given monumental form by the erection of a marble loggia housing the corporation of the city guilds, the Loggia della Mercanzia (fig. 75).44Nevola, 2007, p. 124; see also Hansen, 1992. As early as 1399, the city authorities had agreed funding for the project, observing that, ‘on account of the main street, all foreigners come past this place, from wherever they come to Siena’; however, its construction and decoration continued well into the second half of the fifteenth century.45Hansen, 1992, citing ASS, Consiglio Generale, 199, fol. 71v (28 December 1399).

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Description: Loggia della Mercanzia by Sano di Matteo

75. Loggia della Mercanzia, on the Croce del Travaglio, Siena.

Meanwhile, an extensive building programme along the street saw private citizens – often benefiting from public subsidies or tax incentives – invest in new houses and palaces, most of which were designed to accommodate ground-floor shops.46Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–145. The coincidence, along a single street, of prime residential and commercial real estate meant that design solutions had to be found to accommodate shops even within the new type of domestic palazzo, as high rents made it worthwhile for patrons to retain shops even in the most prestigious homes.47Discussed further in Chapter 6. So, for instance, in 1507 Andrea di Nanni Piccolomini – the brother of Pope Pius III and nephew of Pius II – stipulated in his will that a number of shops were to be purchased in Siena to enlarge the endowment that maintained the family’s interests in the cathedral church of Pienza. He was evidently keenly aware of urban commercial property values, noting that:

the shops should be located from the piazza Tolomei, along the strada towards piazza Piccolomini, turning from that piazza [Piccolomini] towards San Martino, and entering into [via del] Porrione, and along it towards the piazza del Campo, and anywhere on the Campo, so rising to Porta Salaria and following the strada to the croce del Travaglio.48ASS, Consorteria Piccolomini, 17, fol. 87ff. (28 January 1507); see also Nevola, 2011b.

Andrea’s will effectively defines the commercial heart of Siena; coincidentally his own grand new home stood within this same perimeter, and, unsurprisingly, the entire ground floor was lined with rent-producing shops, as indeed was the adjacent family loggia (fig. 76).49Nevola, 2007, p. 128; Nevola, 2011b, pp. 154–6.

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Description: Palazzo Piccolomini (left) by Rossellino, Bernardo

76. Palazzo Piccolomini (left), Siena.

A combination of government policies and private patronage significantly modified the built form of the central section of Siena’s strada Romana in the half-century following 1460 (see fig. 19), regularising this privileged pathway through the city and embellishing its edges through architectural improvements to the façades projecting onto it. These works were enforced by the ufficiali sopra l’ornato, the office founded for the specific purpose of supervising city improvements, who

work incessantly [. . .] and renew the city’s appearance with appropriate and fine works, and especially by removal of overhangs from the most prominent sites. This is particularly the case in the street of Camollia [the northern section of the strada Romana], because visitors to the city see that street more than any other. And it is already clear how fine the street has become from the demolition of many of these overhangs.50ASS, Concistoro, 2125, fol. 39 (18 December 1465).

Citizens of varied financial standing were called upon to participate in the renewal campaign, some doing little more than remove overhanging structures that projected onto the street from simple two-bay houses.51Nevola, 2007, pp. 101–6. Other interventions were significantly more ambitious, such as the grand new five-bay palace built for the papal banker Ambrogio Spannocchi from 1473, in the most up-to-date Florentine style to a design provided by Benedetto da Maiano (fig. 77).52Ibid., pp. 116–18, with earlier bibliography. Although considerable sums were expended to furnish the palace with a small piazza set back from the main street, it is notable that the Spannocchi palace façade is towards the main street, as are the ground-floor shop openings. This and the palaces of a number of other elite families – including the Cinughi, del Vecchio, Bichi, Trecerchi and Tolomei – combined to create an almost unbroken curtain of elegant and tall façades along the strada to the croce del Travaglio and beyond, all of them lined with multiple ground-floor openings that accommodated shops.53For further details on named examples, see ibid.

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Description: Palazzo Spannocchi, Florence by Lombardi, Paolo

77. Palazzo Spannocchi, Florence, from 1473, viewed from the north. Photograph by Paolo Lombardi, c. 1870.

Civic policies promoted the concentration of trade along the city’s main thoroughfare, and benefited from the collective effects of aesthetic improvements to the built fabric, though the financial burden of these changes was largely borne by individual resident owners, tenants and shopkeepers. As in Mantua, we should be mindful of distinct – sometimes competing – priorities for urban improvement: the civic self-fashioning along the strada Romana created winners and losers, largely advancing the interests of the merchant elite, while creating significant challenges for traders such as butchers (who were zoned out of central areas), and less wealthy citizens (some of whom were unable to manage the high costs of renovating their houses).54For resistance to zoning policies directed at butchers, see Chapter 1; Costantini, 2016. To an extent, we might understand this process through the modern-day concept of gentrification, as the convergence of elite residential and commercial interests inevitably altered the socio-economic composition of the population resident along the city’s main street.55Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2013. In contrast to such processes, however, property values declined sharply off the main street, ensuring a degree of diversity in neighbourhood composition and a range of housing types, even in central areas.56For examples, see Nevola, 2016.

In Rome – the destination of so much of the pilgrimage traffic that came through Siena and San Gimignano – a complex network of medieval streets criss-crossed the residential centre of the city. This area was most easily navigated by four major axes, which pre-dated the numerous papal interventions of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that sought to regularise the city’s layout and rationalise circulation. Entering the city from the north at Porta del Popolo, the Corso (or via Lata) led straight to the Capitoline Hill, while a series of east–west axes converged towards the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the main access point across the river Tiber, which connected the main part of the city to the Vatican precinct (see fig. 27).57On these and other streets in the ceremonial life of Rome, see Fagiolo, 1997a; on the ritual and processional uses of the streets, see Ingersoll, 1985; Temple, 2011, pp. 34–93. The via Recta (later Coronari) was the northernmost of these lateral routes, while the via Papalis charted a central route through the city’s banking district, close to the bridge, towards the vast open space of the piazza Navona (also known as piazza in Agone), near the centre. The route took its name from the pope, and the accession of each new pontiff was marked by a procession (the possesso) along this street and others on this side of the Tiber, in which he took possession of the city by moving through its thoroughfares in an elaborate ritual ceremony connecting the Vatican in the west to St John Lateran in the east of the city.58Cafà, 2010; Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 171–92; Temple, 2011, pp. 56ff. Finally, the via Peregrinorum (‘street of the pilgrims’), as the name suggests, provided perhaps the most important east – west route for easing and rationalising the movement of outsiders through the city; it was considered to retrace the route of the ancient Roman via Triumphalis through what had become the most densely populated part of the post-antique city (the abitato), to its civic administrative centre at the Capitoline.59Temple, 2011, pp. 40–42, with reference to Biondo Flavio, Roma triumphans (1459), Book X, describing the route with reference to contemporary landmarks: the Pons Neronianus, Santi Celso e Giuliano, San Lorenzo in Damaso, Campo dei Fiori, Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, San Giorgio in Velabro, the Capitol.

As in the examples discussed above, it was around these main streets that many of the residences of the urban elite clustered, while service industries, luxury retail, and artisan shops and workshops more broadly were also concentrated along them during the fifteenth century.60Modigliani, 1998; further studies of rental patterns and income in Rome are Vaquero Pineiro, 1999; Vaquero Pineiro, 2007. In particular, the via Peregrinorum (also known as the via Mercatoria, the street of merchants), which passed through a number of the open spaces, including the city’s main market space at Campo dei Fiori, emerged as the principal commercial street in the city and was lined with shops on the ground floors of properties along most of its route.61For a minute survey of shops around Campo dei Fiori, illustrated with maps, detailing 148 shops in the immediate vicinity, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 145–209, 211–59. Looking back on the renewal of the city initiated during the pontificate of Sixtus IV and continued into the following century, Marcello Alberini noted that, before Sixtus’ interventions:

it was not possible to see order in Rome, but rather disorder and disharmony of the buildings and the streets [. . .] so that if people that lived before our times were to see [the city] again now, they would judge it for the marvellous buildings and the magnificent streets as being more beautiful and more noble.62Ibid., p. 163, citing Alberini, 1997, p. 487.

A somewhat bombastic contemporary account of the city’s good fortunes during the pontificate of Sixtus IV noted of the via Peregrinorum that ‘it is here Golden Rome that you lay your wealth: where gleams the immense road now very beautiful [. . .] in this space[,] whatever is hidden in the earth may be seen’.63Temple, 2011, p. 56 and n. 50, citing Aurelio Brandolini, ‘De laudibus ac rebus gestis Sixti IV’, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vat. Lat. 5008. That magnificence and abundance of material goods was in evidence above all along the route from Campo dei Fiori to Ponte Sant’Angelo, where luxury goods, as well as services aimed at pilgrims and travellers jostled for visibility in the densely packed thoroughfare. Later drawings confirm what the documents reveal to be a street filled with a variety of merchandise, and trades such as shoe shops and farriers to deal with the worn feet and hooves of travellers, and inns and taverns for them to rest, as well as luxury goods such as gold, armour and spices, giving way to bankers in the final approach to the bridge crossing to St Peter’s.64Modigliani, 1998, pp. 200–5, with documents; see also Friedman, 2012.

The high demand for shop space again heavily conditioned the design of houses and palaces. A rare survival of housing built around the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the house of Pietro Paolo della Zecca, fills a triangular plot on the spur between the via Peregrinorum and via di Monserrato, and was designed with broad, open shop spaces on the intersection and on the façade towards the main street (fig. 78).65Pietro Paolo Francisci was known as ‘della Zecca’ as he was manager of the city mint during the pontificate of Paul II Barbo (1464–71); Giovannoni, 1931. The residential upper floors are defined by simple round-arched stone-framed windows and a top-floor open loggia, which also took advantage of the vantage point created by the corner location to enhance the building’s visibility along the street. In so doing, the house adopted comparable strategies to those applied at the Palazzo della Cancelleria (from 1486), the sumptuous residence of the pope’s nephew Cardinal Raffaele Riario, just a few hundred metres further east along the via Peregrinorum (fig. 79). Eleven shops were included in the via Peregrinorum façade of the Cancelleria, as reparation to the chapter of the titular church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, which had owned shops that were demolished to make way for the vast new palace.66For the reparations, and also for the prolonged debate over income from the shops, see Schiavo, 1964, pp. 75–6; see also Frommel, 1998a, pp. 411–16; Modigliani, 1998, p. 198.

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Description: House of Pietro Paolo della Zecca by Unknown

78. House of Pietro Paolo della Zecca, c. 1475–1500, via dei Pellegrini, Rome.

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Description: Palazzo Cancelleria by Pontelli, Baccio; Sangallo, Antonio da, the elder

79. Palazzo Cancelleria, from 1486, shop opening in the façade on via dei Pellegrini, Rome.

The great density of commercial activity in this area helps to explain the high rents commanded by the Cancelleria shops; the chapter of San Lorenzo had derived an annual rental income of 240 ducats from its shops, and it seems evident that a number of shopkeepers depended upon these spaces for their livelihoods.67For a discussion of shops along the via Peregrinorum, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 176–209, and map XIX. While the façade along the via Peregrinorum is not the principal elevation of the Palazzo della Cancellaria (which, instead, addresses a purpose-built piazza, running north–south at a right angle to the Campo dei Fiori), it is nevertheless highly visible. A prow-like balcony, adorned with the Riario arms and an extended inscription, projects into the via Peregrinorum and towards the Campo dei Fiori to ensure visibility on ceremonial occasions (fig. 80).68On ceremonial balconies as privileged sites along processional routes, see Tamburini, 1997, pp. 185–90; Frommel, 1998a, pp. 413–14, highlights the projecting balcony and corner tower element at the Cancelleria. Thus, far from being relegated to a side street, away from the principal facade, the shops faced onto the busiest thoroughfare in the neighbourhood, which, as we have seen, was one of the city’s most important arteries.

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Description: Palazzo Cancelleria by Unknown

80. Palazzo Cancelleria, from the corner of via dei Pellegrini, Rome. Photograph from the second half of the 19th century.

It seems that the commercial potential of sites located on the city’s principal thoroughfares almost certainly conditioned palace design elsewhere in early sixteenth-century Rome, a period during which the palazzo type was at the peak of its architectural development.69For further discussion of palace design and streets, see Chapter 6; brief comments on the determinant influence on palace design of urban placement, see Conforti, 2008, p. 133; Nevola, 2011b; Welch, 2005, pp. 134–5. A sampling of palaces in Renaissance Rome, perhaps unsurprisingly, reveals that new palaces constructed along the city’s main through routes – whether these were the original pilgrimage routes, or new papal streets – were likely to contain shops on the ground floor (fig. 81).70Nevola, 2011b, pp. 160ff., discusses a sample, drawn from Frommel, 1973, in which a full 50 per cent of the palaces contained shops. Among the new streets, the via Alessandrina or borgo Nuovo, cut in honour of Pope Alexander VI Borgia from 1498, constitutes perhaps the clearest example of economic policy and architectural design coming together to forge a new form of palace façade.71For via Alessandrina see Chapter 1; Howe, 1992; Petrucci, 1997; for a detailed study of the Borgo and via Alessandrina, see d’Amelio, 2008. Via Alessandrina was the natural extension, on the Vatican side of the Tiber, of the main streets in the abitato that converged on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and it served the function on the west side of the river of funnelling the dense curial and pilgrim traffic towards St Peter’s basilica.72For the flourishing trade around St Peter’s, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 259–84; Pecchiai, 1951. The palaces built along this privileged pathway leading to the Vatican precinct almost uniformly adopted design solutions that provided ground-floor shops, to capitalise on access to passing custom.

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Description: Nuova pianta di Roma by Nolli, Giovanni Battista

81. Map of Rome showing major arteries (dotted lines) and the locations of forty-two palaces built 1500–40 (black blocks), as surveyed in Christoph L. Frommel, Der Romische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance (Tubingen, 1973). The palaces that contain shops at street level are marked with a solid red line (manipulated version of Giambattista Nolli, Nuova pianta di Roma, 1748, etching, by the author with Peter Lowe).

Numerous examples reveal how powerfully trade conditioned street design and architecture, as the infrastructure of market areas extended well beyond the public spaces reserved for temporary stalls, piercing the enclosing walls of surrounding buildings and opening up the ground-floor façades that lined adjoining streets, so as to shape the appearance of entire neighbourhoods. As the evidence from Rome shows, trade and industry conditioned the development of the distinctive typology of the residential palazzo in those locations where there was a significant potential for rental income, and this applied widely in other cities too.73Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–8, challenges a prevalent view that the palace type in Florence abandoned shops from the mid-15th century; for a broad selection of comparative examples, see Battilotti, Belli and Belluzzi, 2011; Calabi, 2008. So irresistible was the lure of lucrative rents from shop premises, that they can be found in the most unexpected locations contiguous to market and commercial areas, even in civic buildings – as, for example, in the base of the bell-towers of the city halls of Siena (Torre del Mangia) and Ferrara (Torre di Rigobello), beneath the huge archway that bisects the Palazzo del Podestà in Fabriano (fig. 82), and distributed around the ground floor of the archbishop’s palace in Florence.74The current archbishop’s palace in Florence dates to the late 16th century, but the original bishop’s palace also contained shops; Dameron, 1991, pp. 154–7; Miller, 2000, p. 105. There were as many as fifty shops in the Palazzo Arcivescovile in the 15th century; Belli, 2008, p. 84; Welch, 2005, pp. 127–30. When the medieval church of San Donato in Spoleto was deconsecrated in the sixteenth century to make way for a civic fountain on the piazza del Mercato, a few surviving chapels were even remodelled as shops, still visible along the via del Palazzo dei Duchi (fig. 83).75Sansi, 1869, p. 198.

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Description: Shops incorporated into the volta (arch or tunnel) of the Palazzo del Podestà...

82. Shops incorporated into the volta (arch or tunnel) of the Palazzo del Podestà, Fabriano.

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Description: Shops on via del Palazzo dei Duchi by Unknown

83. Shops on via del Palazzo dei Duchi, Spoleto. They were created from chapels remaining after the demolition of the church of San Donato in the 16th century.

Shops were, indeed, not uncommon accessories to church designs and religious architecture more generally. As on the south side of the cathedral of Ferrara, and the flanks of the new church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua and the church of San Giacomo di Rialto in Venice – all places where churches abutted central commercial districts – the exterior perimeters of churches might be built to include shops;76Welch, 2005, pp. 127–9. this situation can be observed at the church of San Martino in Siena, close to the central market on the piazza del Campo, and the later Santa Maria ad Ogni Bene dei Sette Dolori in Naples.77For San Martino, see Nevola, 2007, p. 74; for Naples, see Calaresu, 2016, p. 120.

We shall return later in this chapter to the wider impact of religious properties on the make-up of some city streets, but here it is worth noting that the sort of compromise reached in the construction of the vast new Palazzo della Cancelleria was not unique. That such concerns persisted well into the seventeenth century is confirmed by a debate preserved in the minutes of a meeting held in 1639, as part of a discussion led by Virgilio Spada, prior of the Oratorian congregation of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome, regarding plans for their Oratorio complex.78Incisa della Rocchetta and Connors, 1981, pp. 203–4, doc. 139; my thanks to Joe Connors for drawing my attention to this document. The congregation noted the possible risks associated with the addition of shops at the street level of their monastic complex, including the possibility of fire spreading from them, and concerns over decorum related to the proximity of female shop-owners to the clergy living above. A dominant concern was the fear of criticism that, in the ‘best site in Rome[,] they should take away so much from the public weal’ by failing to provide shops and accommodation for second-hand dealers; and at the same time there was the sacrifice of potential annual rental income of over 500 scudi for commercial premises if they decided against including these in the new development.79Ibid., pp. 203–4. A compromise solution was reached: the risks to clerical propriety were mitigated by means of a design that omitted mezzanine windows so the monastic quarters were not overlooked, but shop spaces for rent were retained, and these faced onto the prime real estate along via Papalis (via del Governo Vecchio).80The building does not adopt a uniform solution, though a number of original shop openings can be identified along via del Governo Vecchio and via della Chiesa Nuova. Although this is a somewhat specific instance, it serves to illustrate the issues that were at stake, and confirms the degree to which the design of mixed-use building types largely depended upon location in the city, as the potential for shops to generate rental income was linked to their proximity to the city’s principal thoroughfares.

Again, as we have seen with the examples of Mantua and Ferrara, porticoes were a common feature of city-centre urban infrastructure, which facilitated interactions in public space. They provided a standardised ground-floor covered walkway in front of shops, which was free from traffic and eased pedestrian movement in many cities, especially those north of the Apennines; the most extensive extant early networks survive in Bologna and other cities and towns of the Po valley.81Bocchi, 1990; Bocchi, 1993b; Calabi, 2004, pp. 103–12; Calabi and Morachiello, 1987. More piecemeal survivals reveal some use of porticoes in Rome and Naples, though in these cases there is evidence of their removal on the grounds of internal security. In other instances, such as the well-documented example of Vigevano – a satellite town of Milan, controlled by the Sforza family – the creation of central squares with continuous façades of porticoes has been interpreted as a strategy by means of which a ruling family imposed its authority by masking the institutions of local government. Vigevano was remodelled from 1492 on Ludovico il Moro’s orders, with the likely involvement of Leonardo da Vinci and Donato Bramante, to create a porticoed piazza, which reorientated the city’s layout by turning the civic centre into a grand anteroom (fig. 84), leading towards the Sforza castle, accessed via a triumphal flight of steps behind the screen of the arcade.82Lotz, 1977; Schofield, 1992–3. Similarly, following Pope Julius II della Rovere’s conquest of Ascoli Piceno for the Papal States in 1506, a regularised portico was erected around the town’s central piazza, which was subsequently adorned with papal portrait statues.83Lotz, 1977, pp. 80–81; Julius II is depicted in the sculpture dominating the piazza from an elaborate niche above the monumental side entrance to the church of San Francesco, while Paul III is shown on the Palazzo dei Capitani del Popolo. Among a number of comparable examples from around the same period are the incomplete porticoed central piazza and streets created for Sixtus IV’s nephew Girolamo Riario at Imola in the decades following 1474, and the construction of a monumental 53-bay portico lungo (fig. 85), facing the residence of Alberto III Pio in Carpi, following his imperial investiture as count in 1509.84Zaggia, 1999; Zaggia, 2016; for Carpi, see Svalduz, 2001. Notwithstanding the political context and meaning of such interventions, it is also clear that these porticoes served a functional purpose: they invariably opened onto shops, creating a mixed-use urban environment ordered along classicising principles.85As noted above, Forster, 1994, pp. 162–6, makes the important point that architectural interventions are all too often viewed only as acts of princely patronage, divorced from any practical considerations.

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84. Piazza Ducale, Vigevano, from 1492, viewed from the east end of the square, with the Castello Visconteo Sforzesco visible on the left.

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Description: Piazza and Castello Alberto III Pio (Piazza dei Martiri) by Unknown

85. Piazza and Castello Alberto III Pio (now piazza dei Martiri), Carpi, with the portico lungo, built after 1509.

While central city squares were frequently the primary objective of renewal campaigns, another aspect that emerges from the examples discussed here is the degree to which we might question the sharp distinction between street and piazza in central urban areas, given that a relatively continuous set of usage patterns unified these spaces and the activities transacted around them. Where extensive systems of porticoes were developed – as, for instance, in Bologna – a degree of continuity was created between arcaded piazzas and the street network, which reinforced the function of porticoes as a city-wide amenity of covered walkways. It is such a network that the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua sought to develop, while the more circumscribed interventions of shorter-lived dynasties, such as the Pio in Carpi, remained focused on the central sites of government and trade. Where porticoes were absent, or indeed legislated against, as in papal Rome at the time of Sixtus IV, the distribution of mixed-use buildings along the city’s principal streets reveals a degree of continuity in the treatment of façades projecting onto open market spaces and the streets to which they were connected.

Notwithstanding cities where it barely figured, there can be little doubt that the arcaded portico, which tended to employ all’antica style capitals and other classicising details, emerged as a distinctive new element in urban-scale architectural interventions during the second half of the fifteenth century in Italy. It is striking that the word portico is one of the most commonly occurring architectural terms in Filarete’s Trattato di architettura (c. 1460–64), albeit, of course, it does not always refer to outdoor arcaded structures.86Filarete, 1972, contains more than 200 instances; in many cases, the word refers to arcades inside buildings, including courtyards and churches. Filarete’s imagined ideal city was laid out symmetrically and was rigorously zoned, but his comments nonetheless help to provide a theoretical context for the widespread implementation of arcading in the central squares and streets of Italian cities between 1460 and 1520. In Book VIII he notes:

The piazza will have six points of entry, two on each end, and one on each axis; and around these porticoes, will be distributed those that work silver, and on the other side will be the merchants and trades according to how you think best. This piazza will be filled with shops beneath the arcades, so that each will have space to conduct his business.87Filarete, 1972, Book VIII.

Similar comments accompany his account of the administrative and commercial district, with the implication that these porticoes offered an elegant solution to two requirements – namely, providing the necessary space for shops and their users, while hiding from sight the activities of less aesthetic traders, such as butchers and fishmongers.88Ibid., Book X. More generally, the treatise literature of the period seems to have acknowledged the demand for mixed-use provision in housing to accommodate the needs of trade. Thus, while Vitruvius’ writings were not fully understood in the fifteenth century, his treatise clearly acknowledged a functional hierarchy of residential types, responding to the professional needs of their incumbents: ‘those who deal in farm produce must have stalls and shops in their entrance courts’, while bankers and merchants require more luxurious surroundings.89Vitruvius, 1960, p. 182 (Book VI.5). Leon Battista Alberti’s comments are somewhat ambiguous, as it is not clear whether he intended any class distinctions, but he remarked that, ‘within the city, the shop that lies beneath the house and provides the owner with his livelihood should be better fitted out than his dining room, as would appear more in keeping with his hopes and ambitions.’90Alberti, 1988, p. 152 (Book V, ch. 18); comments in Welch, 2005, p. 125. Later in the fifteenth century, Francesco di Giorgio Martini recommended socially stratified housing types and proposed that luxury retail should cluster around the central city streets; it is to this issue of stratification and zoning that the next section turns.91Martini, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 364–5 (Book III).

Stratification or specialisation: Centres, clusters and peripheries

As the foregoing discussion has shown, change to the urban landscape and network of streets was gradual, and proceeded through cumulative interventions that reshaped the built fabric of many urban centres through the fifteenth century. Running parallel to this process are proposals made in theoretical writings for idealised urban visions, and designs that sought to mirror the socio-political systems they were intended to house; they outlined comprehensive renewal and re-foundation of cities in rigorously classical style and according to principles of order and symmetry. As will be shown, a number of built projects put into practice the principles set out in these theoretical texts, although they were implemented at a range of scales and with varying degrees of success. While it is easy to assume that theory was intended to inform practice, this rarely materialised, and many of the best-known examples of centralised urban design – the so-called ‘ideal city’ – were almost certainly not intended as practical projects that would actually be built.92Eaton, 2002; Lang, 1952. Conversely, it is all too easy to assume that completed urban-renewal projects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were directly influenced by the theoretical principles set out in largely manuscript texts, but there is little evidence to prove this.

The treatise on architecture by Antonio Averlino (known as il Filarete), written for the Duke of Milan Francesco Sforza around 1460–64, includes an unprecedented centralised plan for the new town, Sforzinda, which he dedicated to his patron (see fig. 8). A fortified design on a significant scale, Sforzinda adopted a radial layout, focusing on a central piazza, around which were distributed the cathedral and the ducal palace; main streets radiated outwards to the gates, along which residential and industrial enclaves were distributed according to a socially stratified system. In spite of the compelling visual appeal of its star-shaped walls and rigorously symmetrical design, Sforzinda was little more than a device for the architect to present his patron with a range of building types that would make up the city; with the exception of the Ospedale Maggiore hospital building in Milan, the designs remained unbuilt.93Henderson, 2006, passim; Welch, 1995, pp. 145–66. Much the same can be said for the many centralised designs for fortified towns and cities that Francesco di Giorgio Martini proposed in treatises produced while he was in the employ of Duke Federico da Montefeltro of Urbino (1480s).94Mussini, 2004.

One common theme that emerges from these treatises and the numerous manuscript and later printed texts that followed them, is the overwhelming drive to create stratified and segregated urban forms. Authors from Filarete to Sebastiano Serlio described cities where socio-economic groups were rigorously confined to specific districts, trades were given fixed areas from which to operate, the principal institutions of faith and administration were accorded more central prominence, and the centre of the city was reserved for the residence of the ruler; proximity to the centre signified, while the lowliest, disenfranchised residents and professions were pushed to the city’s edges.95Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. To an extent, of course, this was anyway the configuration of cities, though the fantasies of treatise writers polarised and exaggerated systems that were in reality more complex and polysemous. The distribution of industrial clusters was often topographically contingent upon such variable factors as proximity to water, energy or suppliers, for instance, while elite family enclaves did not always converge around the city’s main streets.

The processes of urban improvement, so widespread through the fifteenth century, generally went hand in hand with an increasing level of specialisation required for specific areas and particular building types. Growing numbers of administrative and bureaucratic offices were provided with purpose-built residences, which occupied significant portions of city-centre real estate; on or around most main squares were the buildings that housed the long-established institutions of civic administration and justice, and usually the residence of the (externally recruited) chief magistrate (the podestà). While, in the majority of cases, the ancient architecture of these buildings expressed the antiquity of the institutions they housed, a number of cities rebuilt or remodelled their town halls – as occurred in Bologna, for instance, during the second half of the fifteenth century, or in Rome, where Michelangelo refashioned the Capitoline complex from 1536.96Bedon, 2009; Benelli, 2004. Such interventions were rarely politically neutral: rather, they usually articulated the changing balance of power among ruling families or individuals, and their encroachment on civic liberties – in the cases just mentioned, the Bentivoglio in Bologna and Pope Paul III in Rome.

Even where such significant alterations were not made, new or expanded offices and their bureaucracies were accommodated in new palaces built in up-to-date classicising style. In Viterbo, for instance – a city whose connections with the papacy dated back to the time of the popes’ temporary relocation there during the thirteenth century (marked by the magnificent papal palace) – the civic centre in the low-lying piazza del Comune (now piazza del Plebiscito) was altered with the addition of the large arcaded Palazzo del Governatore (Palazzo dei Priori), promoted by Pope Sixtus IV from 1481 (fig. 86).97For the early papal presence, see Radke, 1996. For interventions on the piazza del Plebiscito, see Bentivoglio, 2017. As the building’s name suggests, the ample palace was originally designed to house the governor of the ‘Patrimony of St Peter’s in Tuscia’, a new office that signalled the renewed papal control of the city and its region from the papal capital in Rome. Here, then, large-scale architectural interventions gave visual articulation to institutions that altered the balance and exercise of power in the city. It is in this light that Pope Julius II’s ultimately failed plans to create a legal hub for the city of Rome around the Palazzo dei Tribunali on the via Giulia, or the successful centralisation of all the law courts of Naples to the remodelled Castel Capuano (Palazzo dei Tribunali) by the new viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo from 1537, should be understood.98Butters and Pagliara, 2009; Temple, 2011, pp. 94ff. For Naples, see Mangone, 2011.

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Description: Palazzo del Governatore (now Palazzo dei Priori) by Unknown

86. Palazzo del Governatore (now Palazzo dei Priori), Viterbo, from 1481.

Conversely, it might be said, following the end of the brief break in republican government during the lordship of Paolo Guinigi (1400–30), that the city of Lucca reaffirmed its civic independence by similar means; the Palazzo del Podestà (Palazzo Pretorio) was the first of a number of interventions that gave new definition to the independent city state and its administration (fig. 87).99Bule and Nolan, 2003; Nieri and Pacini, 2013. Matteo Civitali’s all’antica palazzo (begun 1494) stands prominently on the piazza San Michele; an open arcaded loggia two bays deep at its base provided a meeting space, while the legal, administrative and residential accommodation reserved for the podestà was on the upper storeys. The piazza surrounding the Romanesque church of San Michele in Foro marked the area occupied by the ancient Roman forum, was an important focus for trade and banking, and was traditionally where many of the city’s notaries had their offices and banchi, so that the placement of the new palace gave greater monumental definition to these elite professions and to the city’s justice system.100For the palace’s functions and what it replaced, see Nieri and Pacini, 2013, pp. 9–23.

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Description: Palazzo del Podestà (now Palazzo Pretorio) by Unknown

87. Palazzo del Podestà (now Palazzo Pretorio), Lucca, from 1494.

It is quite clear from these examples that a process of architectural specialisation altered many cities during the period under review, and an increasing area of numerous urban centres came to be occupied by institutional buildings. So, for instance, following the conquest of Brescia by Venice in 1426, as part of the expansion of its terraferma dominions, a new central square was developed, where the local government eventually took up residence in the magnificent all’antica Palazzo della Loggia (fig. 88).101Hemsoll, 1988, pp. 167–8, considers the rival, though complementary, ambitions of the Venetians, and the local civic pride and image, and how these were resolved. The strikingly classicising building was begun around 1490 but not completed until the middle of the following century; it housed the offices of the local government, and was flanked on the same piazza by the expansive headquarters of the government-sponsored petty-loan bank, the Monte di Pietà. By the latter part of the fifteenth century, many cities throughout Italy had established similar institutional pawnbrokers, which provided petty loans at rates intended to undercut those charged by Jewish moneylenders.102From an extensive literature, see Meneghin, 1974; Muzzarelli, 2001; Puglisi and Barcham, 2008. Heavily promoted through the preaching of Franciscan friars – such as Bernardino da Feltre, whose sermons also whipped up anti-Semitic sentiments – Monti sprang up across Italy, satisfying a need for credit among large sections of the urban population, while adopting a transactional context of charity and devotion.103Katz, 2008, pp. 8–10; Rubin, 1999. Monti tended to be housed in structures whose central location, size and magnificence advertised their presence to would-be users, and, because they were usually established with government backing, they frequently display the arms of the municipality. Such civic promotion is evident in Bassano del Grappa, where the Monte was set up in 1492 and housed in a building previously used as a city grain store on the market square (fig. 89), while in Siena the Monte was established in 1472 in the requisitioned residence of a leading family in the city’s banking quarter on the main street.104Catoni, 2012; Nevola, 2007, p. 108; Pulin, 1985, pp. 34–40.

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Description: Palazzo della Loggia by Unknown

88. Palazzo della Loggia, Brescia, from c. 1490.

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89. Monte di Pietà, Bassano del Grappa.

As has already been noted, central church authorities had a long-established monumental presence in the city centre (either on the central civic piazza or on a separate square), which was usually expressed in the form of a cathedral, baptistery and episcopal palace; in some cases, a more functional cathedral works office and workshop (opera) might also form part of the architectural ensemble. Beyond the localised distribution of parish churches across cities, mendicant orders had from the mid-thirteenth century established their convents on the city’s outer edges, where land was more readily available and they could reach their core audiences.105For an overview of the growth strategies (and previous scholarship), see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 89–118. Perhaps counter-intuitively from a demographic perspective, despite the decline in population owing to the Black Death and subsequent further instances of plague, the urban footprint of many religious institutions grew in size during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as convents and monasteries expanded to occupy larger sites, in part thanks to increased private patronage, which endowed them with land and sustained their building campaigns.106Ibid., pp. 46–51, 89–91, with a discussion of the tendency towards ‘gigantism in convent architecture’ (p. 46). Hand in hand with this growth in convent architecture, there developed the enormous appeal of public sermons provided by the mendicant orders, which was given concrete expression in the dedication of large tracts of land to open spaces in front of convent churches to accommodate the vast audiences of the most successful sermon cycles.107Ibid., pp. 89–118, 124–31. While the huge new religious complexes certainly marked the urban landscape, perhaps even more significant were these great piazzas, which created a constellation of open spaces that was usually outside the central areas of the city, where the episcopal authorities, government institutions and market areas were concentrated.

Much the same can be said for hospitals and other charitable institutions, which were again often confined to less central areas – indeed, often sharing the same city locations with the convents: the spatial demands of specialist accommodation, such as segregated dormitories or areas of confinement for specific maladies, could occupy quite extensive tracts of land.108Henderson, 2006, pp. 7–25, 148–57. Hospitals were frequently adorned with public façades, often lined with grand arcaded porticoes, which projected the image of these charitable institutions onto the cityscape, while providing shelter for visitors and users.109Ibid., pp. 70–81. Filippo Brunelleschi’s famous reformulation of the arcaded loggia for the new Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence (fig. 90), decorated with illustrative maiolica roundels depicting the very swaddled orphans that the institution was built to house, had many imitators, including the Ospedale di San Paolo in the same city, as well as the Ospedale del Ceppo in Pistoia (fig. 91) and the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan.110Ibid., pp. 73–8; Goldthwaite and Rearick, 1977; Welch, 1995, pp. 145–66. Hospitals performed a variety of functions – including care of the sick, the poor, orphans and travellers – and their welfare mandate was clearly and publicly expressed by architectural means: the conventional structure of the courtyard was turned inside out to provide an external loggia for the accommodation of the needy. While Brunelleschi devised a simple all’antica interpretation of this form, earlier welfare institutions located on central public spaces had also used loggias and open doorways to articulate their offering of civic-sponsored welfare – as, for instance, the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, or the Bigallo in Florence, both of which occupied sites adjacent to the cathedral. As we shall see, thanks to testamentary bequests, hospitals, like the mendicant orders, frequently emerged as major city landlords, and consequently had a determining role in shaping streetscapes, especially at the residential urban periphery.

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Description: Ospedale degli Innocenti by Brunelleschi, Filippo

90. Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence, from 1419.

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Description: Ospedale del Ceppo by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo

91. Ospedale del Ceppo, Pistoia, from c. 1514.

Returning to the city centre, significant urban-scale interventions extended and reordered networks of shops beyond the central market spaces, which nevertheless retained their role as a key instrument for the spatial control of trade and industry within the city, given that the majority of early modern commercial and industrial spaces were part of the pre-existing building stock. It is important to keep sight of the fact that these carefully orchestrated urban spaces also lent themselves to more informal usage, which often sought to capitalise on the benefits accrued to central areas through the concentration of trade. So, for instance, pedlars and sellers of street food or produce from the countryside often found spaces in the market areas to sell their wares, while these same spaces might offer rich pickings for beggars and orphans collecting alms.111Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016; Terpstra, 2010; Tomas, 2006; Welch, 2005. While such less-regulated activities animated the street life of commercial centres, conscious efforts were made to group trades and industries in particular areas; street names often corroborate statute and other evidence of the confinement of particular trades to specific streets or sectors of a city’s market area.112Romano, 2015, pp. 89–94. Major trading cities such as Venice and Florence had a very extensive, and expanding built infrastructure, which supported industry and commerce, and occupied large sections of the urban core.113Belli, 2008, provides an overview. For the animated nature of the marketplace, see (most recently) Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 26–38. Over the fifteenth century, and particularly during the sixteenth, the narrow streets and crowded buildings of these medieval market districts, packed with shops and workshops, were regularised through monumental built interventions and legislative measures. As is well known, the Rialto area is the central node of Venice’s trading district, and the streets and squares around it were subject to a prolonged and systematic campaign of architectural renewal – including the new bridge (1591), lined with shops – following a devastating fire in the area in 1514.114Calabi, 2004, pp. 103–12; Calabi and Morachiello, 1987; Howard, 2002, pp. 152–4. The renewal of the Rialto pre-dated the fire: work on the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi dated back to the 1480s, and on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi began in 1505. Improved amenities were provided in Florence, with such new buildings as the Loggia del Mercato Nuovo (from 1547), a focus for silk and other luxury wares, and the Loggia del Pesce (1567) for the exclusive use of fishmongers, while legislative measures also altered the visibility of particular trades, as in the case of the 1593 exclusion of butchers from the shops that lined the two sides of the Ponte Vecchio, in order to make space for grouping goldsmiths there.115Battilotti, Belli and Belluzzi, 2011, pp. 73–88, 93–6 (Amedeo Belluzzi); Conforti, 1993; Flanigan, 2008.

Besides the marketplaces themselves, elegant buildings were erected by various trades and professions to provide spaces for guild members to meet and pursue their professional interests, but also, generally, to increase their visibility within the city. In addition, centrally located loggias and palaces were built for the merchants’ regulatory body (the mercanzia) in cities such as Bologna, Florence, Siena and Perugia, while the bureaucratic needs of increasingly paper-based transactions were reinforced through the office buildings of notaries (for example, in Siena and Bologna).116For an overview of some of these offices, see Romano, 2015, pp. 43–70, esp. 52–3, 66–70; a comparative study is Friedman, 1998. The impact of new buildings such as these on the meaning of urban spaces could be significant, accentuating the significance of trade bodies, and underlining the collective fortunes of a city to outside visitors. Moreover, it is clear that from the mid-fifteenth century, throughout Italy, city authorities actively promoted the construction of purpose-built structures, designed to provide multiple ground-floor shop spaces and accommodating other facilities above. An early prototype of the model can be seen in Padua, where the fourteenth-century law courts on the upper floor of the Palazzo della Ragione presided over the market square of the piazza delle Erbe; the ground floor of the vast palace provided extensive additional spaces for the strictly zoned trades operating in the area.117Romano, 2015, pp. 76–82. The monumental scale of this arcaded palace of justice was far from unique in Italy, and was famously re-imagined in the classical forms of Andrea Palladio’s Basilica on the central piazza of Vicenza, where elegant stone arcades mask an earlier functional building, which included ground-floor shops (fig. 92).118Beltramini and Burns, 2008, pp. 80–89 (Guido Beltramini), with earlier bibliography; see also Burns, 1975, pp. 21–2, 24–5. Palladio’s design for the Basilica (from 1549) did not significantly alter the building’s functions, but gave the piazza monumental order, while retaining the essentially commercial functions of the adjacent public spaces, including a market square on the south side of the building.

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Description: Basilica (Palazzo della Ragione) by Palladio, Andrea

92. Andrea Palladio, Basilica (Palazzo della Ragione), from 1549, piazza dei Signori, Vicenza.

An approach to the redevelopment of central urban areas that combined varied functions within a single building often led to magnificent new structures that had retail outlets on the ground floor and offices or housing above. One early example of such interventions is the redevelopment of the piazza Sopramuro (now Matteotti) in Perugia, a complex site that had originally been created during the later thirteenth century, when massive piers and arches were erected on the city’s ancient walls to support a new piazza above (Sopramuro, ‘above the wall’).119Rossi, 1887, pp. 5–7; Silvestrelli, 2008, pp. 277–8. This large, centrally located open space was used for diverse commercial and administrative functions, and from the mid-1450s these took on permanent form, under the supervision of the charitable institution of Santa Maria della Misericordia, in a new purpose-built block containing shops, which runs along the eastern side of the piazza (see fig. 94).120Silvestrelli, 2008, notes the tiratoio (‘fuller’s shed’) of the local wool industry; Rossi, 1887, pp. 5–7, notes that the piazza was paved and became a site of public executions, and that a papal bull of Nicholas V (13 May 1453) awarded the hospital rights to redevelop the site (p. 28). Full documentation survives for the building campaign: ASP, OSMM, Fabbriche diverse, vols 3, 8. For further discussion of the underpinnings for the wool tiratoi, see Fioriti, 1992. Richly dressed in travertine stone, the ground-floor Gothic-arched shop openings create a continuous façade along the piazza, giving the space urban definition by cutting off the view to the landscape east of the city. Construction on this complex site appears to have been somewhat protracted, and in 1469 the city government stepped in to lend support for its completion; a number of beautifully sculpted plaques, bearing the date 1472, the Misericordia’s monogram and the griffin symbol of Perugia, testify to the completion date (fig. 95).121Rossi, 1887, pp. 28–9, with discussion of Lombard masons who executed projects; for detailed construction accounts, see ASP, OSMM, Fabbriche diverse, vols 3 and 8 passim. It was at this time that the adjoining Palazzo del Capitano was constructed to house law courts and prisons, as well as the residence of the city’s magistrate, using similar materials, but a more up-to-date all’antica style (fig. 93).122Rossi, 1887, pp. 47–52, includes contract for the palazzo, which was to be built in stone. A figure of Justice over the entrance proclaimed clearly the building’s function and the units of measure of length, inscribed on a stone set into the wall to the left of the door, confirm the supervisory role over the marketplace of the building’s occupant, while the prominent first-floor stone balcony was used by the town-crier.

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Description: Palazzo del Capitano by Antonio, Gasparino di; Matteo, Leone di

93. Palazzo del Capitano, from c. 1475, piazza Sopramuro (now piazza Matteotti), Perugia.

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Description: Studium Generale (now Università Vecchia) by Unknown

94. Studium Generale (now Università Vecchia), c. 1455, piazza Sopramuro (now piazza Matteotti), Perugia.

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Description: Coat of arms of Santa Maria della Misericordia by Unknown

95. Coat of arms of Santa Maria della Misericordia, 1472, over a doorway on the ground floor of the Università Vecchia, Perugia.

Interestingly, the proximity of the city magistracies appears to have inhibited uptake of rentals on the shops and, indeed, access to them by consumers, some of whom, at least, feared prosecution. In 1476 a law was passed that forbade public officials from ‘arresting, obliging or in any way importuning or molesting any citizen, countryside-dweller or foreigner for any sort of debt – whether public or private – in those shops or within the space of 10 feet from their doorways, to be marked by a stone line’.123Ibid., p. 30 (5 December 1476). A couple of years later, Pope Sixtus IV reduced this safety zone to 5 feet, but the measure appears nevertheless to have been successful, as tenants now competed for the shops; the artist Perugino had a shop there for thirteen years, while Federico and Cesariano del Roscetto had a goldsmiths’ workshop, which may also have operated as the city mint.124For Sixtus IV (13 January 1478), see Rossi, 1887, p. 31; for Perugino’s tenancy, 1501–13, documented in ASP, OSMM, Entrate e uscite di denari e generi diversi, 47 (1501–2), fol. 23v, see Silvestrelli, 2008, p. 279. A final phase in the comprehensive redevelopment of the Sopramuro site followed in 1483, when a papal bull issued by Sixtus ordered the construction of a second floor over the shop development, to be used to house the city’s studio (university) (fig. 94).125Rossi, 1887, p. 32; Silvestrelli, 2008, with documents. This new addition stands out from the earlier shops by the prominent display of the della Rovere papal escutcheon, as well as the use of rectangular cross-mullioned framed windows, inscribed with references to the pope, the university and the Misericordia, which again oversaw the development. Finally, in 1516, the city’s Monte di Pietà was relocated to one of the existing shops, thus bringing together into one purpose-built block a variety of the city’s public institutions, as well as numerous shops.

In Arezzo the large-scale redevelopment of the north-eastern side of the piazza Grande by the construction of what came to be known as the Loggia Vasari has much in common with the Sopramuro project, both in terms of the regularisation it achieved of this central urban space, and because this, too, was a large-scale urban intervention overseen by a charitable institution (fig. 96). The powerful city confraternity, the Fraternita dei Laici, was already a major landowner around Arezzo’s principal public square, the piazza del Comune, where it had accumulated a significant number of income-generating shops received from testamentary bequests, and in the first half of the fifteenth century had commissioned grand new headquarters, designed by Bernardo Rossellino.126AFLA, Contabilità, 1206 (1456), 1320 (1557–74), list properties; for an overview of architectural development, see Antoniella, 1985, pp. xxxii–xxxvii. When a Monte di Pietà was set up in Arezzo in 1473, this was also managed by the Fraternita, and from 1484 it was housed in a new building behind their headquarters, which included a purpose-built range of shops along what is today via Vasari; a painting by Bartolomeo della Gatta shows the piazza, with a shop tucked into the façade, to make the most of rental income on the main square (fig. 97). Significant changes to the piazza followed from 1560, when, on a site above the square, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici built a fortress to control Arezzo, which resulted in the demolition of the civic administrative buildings of the Palazzo del Comune and Palazzo del Popolo.127Lasansky, 2004, pp. 109–10. A decade later, following a major bequest, which included significant additional properties on the upper edge of the piazza, the Fraternita oversaw a complex building campaign that resulted in an extensive arcaded palace, designed by Giorgio Vasari (begun 1570, and completed by Alfonso Parigi).128Conforti, 1993, pp. 243–55; Mercantini, 1980; Satkowski, 1993. Interestingly, Vasari’s design was executed in blocks, so that, as ground-floor shops were completed, so they were immediately made available to rent by members of the Fraternita.129AFLA, Contabilità, 1321 (1574–96), listed by shop numbers. The city’s old butchers’ shops were also relocated as a result of the project. Ample spaces on the upper floors – which included accommodation as well as a theatre, and a bridge connecting it directly with the Fraternita headquarters across the street – evidently owe much to Vasari’s earlier design for the Uffizi in Florence. While the piazza has been much modified, the Loggia Vasari stands out as a unifying structure which extends beyond the perimeter of the main square, connecting it to Arezzo’s principal thoroughfare with a continuous arcade.130For the remodelling of the piazza in the Fascist era, see Lasansky, 2004, pp. 109–13, 129–38.

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Description: The headquarters of the Fraternita dei Laici (left) and the Loggia Vasari (right) by...

96. The headquarters of the Fraternita dei Laici (left), 1484, and the Loggia Vasari (right), from 1570, piazza Grande, Arezzo.

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Description: Saint Roch Intercedes for Arezzo by Bartolomeo della Gatta

97. Bartolomeo della Gatta, Saint Roch Intercedes for Arezzo, 1479, tempera on panel, Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Arezzo.

Numerous examples of comparable large-scale building projects, which satisfied diverse functions while also creating a sense of ordered magnificence, can be documented in the later fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. While many such developments were focused on the city centre, what might be termed industrial complexes confined to the urban edges also contributed to the process of renewal and specialisation. So, for instance, quite a simple block was developed in the third quarter of the fifteenth century to accommodate the butchers of Siena, zoned away from city’s main streets on the grounds of aesthetics and hygiene, and relocated to a marginal site close to the fountain of Fontebranda (see fig. 49).131Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8. Far more magnificent, but achieving a similar purpose, was the development of a site along the Rio in Mantua (from 1536), designed and overseen by Giulio Romano in his capacity as superiore delle strade (‘superintendent of the streets’), to house the fish market and, on a lower level running alongside the canal, the butchers (fig. 98).132Fiore, 1998b; see also Belluzzi, 1989, pp. 333–5.

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Description: The fish market (pescherie) and premises for the butchers (beccherie) by Romano,...

98. The fish market (pescherie), crossing the canal (background), and premises for the butchers (beccherie) running alongside it in Mantua, designed by Giulio Romano, and built from 1536.

While mixed-use property types and residential arrangements were prevalent in the early modern city, a process of specialisation of building types unquestionably altered the architectural composition and vista of the streets during the period 1450–1600. As civic, administrative, religious and charitable institutions multiplied, so the buildings that they occupied adopted increasingly monumental forms, often in the prevalent all’antica style, which would have made them all the more remarkable as new interventions, quite different from earlier building types and styles. These buildings did much to give physical expression to the distinctions between the institutions, professions and activities that they housed, while their location within the city consolidated patterns of association that gave greater spatial definition to particular realms of urban life: the market, the administrative function, central and distributed sites of devotion and charity, and so on. Nevertheless, individual buildings, however monumental, do not make a city, and it is the rich connective fabric between them that forms the urban ecosystem, articulated around streets and public spaces. As I argued in the opening chapter, while government bodies could legislate to modify or transform the built environment, this could be achieved only through a distributed collective endeavour in which the wider urban community participated.

Stratified residential enclaves: Palace streets and row-housing

It was almost certainly residential architecture – especially that of the urban elites – that most dramatically changed the appearance of the Renaissance city. The typology of the palazzo is considered in detail in Chapter 6, where a comparative analysis is offered of the relationship between social life and the built form of these huge urban monoliths. Here, the focus is on the impact of such buildings on urban design and the process of segregation and specialisation, for it was perhaps on the question of housing types and how these visually articulated the status of their owners that architectural theorists had most to say, expressing views that quite closely correlate to cities as built.133See the opening sections of Chapter 6; see also Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. Broadly speaking, theorists from Filarete to Serlio argued that the dimensions of houses were an expression of the status of their owners, and also advocated a degree of socio-economic zoning, whereby professional elites were more centrally placed and artisan housing was pushed out to the periphery. As the first part of this chapter has suggested, contrary to such theories, mixed use was prevalent in most urban contexts, where even in quite circumscribed districts a rich variety of residential property types attests varied socio-economic conditions, a situation that is regularly borne out by documentary evidence. Nevertheless, the proliferation of palazzi from the mid-fifteenth century put significant pressure on real estate along preferred streets, as the large size of these buildings often required the purchase and consolidation of multiple plots of land, thus squeezing out previous owners; this was even sometimes achieved through ‘eminent domain’ legislation, which favoured patrons of new palaces at the expense of their less wealthy neighbours.134Instances are discussed in Chapter 1; for similar legislation in Sforza dominions issued in 1493, see Calabi, 2001, p. 5. Policies were widely applied by the city authorities to encourage urban renewal, and private patronage of domestic architecture was incentivised by a variety of means, so that palaces became an increasingly common feature of the streetscape. In so doing, the authorities contributed to altering the collective image and identity of the city by creating ever denser residential districts, where the magnificent houses of the urban elites clustered.135Further discussion in Chapter 6; see also Friedman, 1992. The Grand Canal of Venice is an early exemplar of the façadism of the Renaissance street as directed at audiences of visitors and spectators, and finds parallels in such fifteenth-century developments as the strada Romana in Siena and the via Tornabuoni in Florence.136For Venice, see Howard, 2002, pp. 100ff.; for Siena, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 75–145; for Florence, see Marino and Paolini, 2014.

Processes of urban transformation were accentuated by the increasingly widespread phenomenon of the palace street, promoted through the particular impetus of urban ruling groups or through government policies that specifically required large-scale participation by elites. As was shown Chapter 1, papal Rome was something of a testbed for the development of new streets laid out to create a sense of ordered magnificence; although usually promoted by and dedicated to a pontiff, these projects were realised through what was often a protracted process of collective patronage, whereby palaces and churches gave concrete form to the ideals of the individuals who had launched them. The names of streets such as the via Alessandrina and via Giulia associated them with the popes who commanded that they be laid out, and the carrying through of such far-reaching campaigns was effectively an expression of ‘building against time’; this valuable formulation conveys how building projects could resist the entropy that might follow the death of their initial patron, and articulates an approach to the future-proofing of large-scale constructions – such as St Peter’s in Rome – which took decades and sometimes centuries to complete.137Burns, 1995; for a discussion of ‘retrosynthesis’, see Trachtenberg, 2010, pp. 386–411. For perhaps the most detailed example of longue durée urbanism, see Salerno, Spezzaferro and Tafuri, 1973. So, then, the central street of Duke Ercole d’Este’s urban extension of Ferrara, the via degli Angeli (now corso Ercole I), was paved and dignified by the construction of major new palaces, particularly around its primary intersection, where the Este residence of the Palazzo dei Diamanti was erected, but it was well into the nineteenth century before it became built up in the form that is visible today (see fig. 141). Along the via Alessandrina in Rome and the via degli Angeli in Ferrara – much as in the diminutive ‘city’ of Pope Pius II at Pienza – it was courtiers and close supporters of the project’s primary patron who contributed to its success by the addition of a palace of their own to the scheme.138For Ercole’s Addizione Erculea, see Chapter 1. For the obligation felt by patron–courtiers, no more eloquent example can be provided than that expressed in the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga with his father, with reference to the onerous construction expenditure expected of him by Pope Pius II; Chambers, 1976.

Palace-street developments tended to originate as projects that sought to give architectural definition to groups of families and individuals, more often than not of a ruling elite; although they may in some ways resemble the residential arrangements of modern-day gated communities, they had a more specific political purpose in spatially defining a self-constituted, often exclusive ruling group. The little-known example of the redevelopment of the via del Capitano – the main street leading to the cathedral piazza in Siena – was effected in the decade after 1487, when a regime change installed a new government dominated by a tight group of merchant elite families; it was exclusively individuals from this new oligarchy, including Giacoppo Petrucci, Antonio Bichi and Agostino Chigi, and the Borghesi, Pecci and Piccolomini, who participated in the project.139Nevola, 2007, pp. 178–84. The via del Capitano redevelopment was executed at speed, in part because it was located on land large sections of which were expropriated from a major institutional landowner, the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, so that the new palaces to some extent resulted from the new regime’s asset-stripping of a civic institution.140Ibid., pp. 178–9, with archival references. Similarly, via Maggio in Florence (see fig. 56), a street that was transformed by the construction of numerous elite palaces in a couple of decades around the turn of the sixteenth century, was made possible by the systematic targeting of an area previously occupied by workers in the wool trade, and was given final impetus by preparations for the grand ceremonial entry of Pope Leo X in 1513.141Ibid., pp. 163–4, with documents (and earlier scholarship).

As in the case of via Maggio, palace-lined streets were especially well suited to the triumphal processions that increasingly formed a part of the ceremonial life of the city; on these occasions the overwhelmingly classicising forms of the newly built palaces that framed the public spaces of the street created a built extension to the ephemeral decorations of triumphal arches and set pieces. Streets such as the strada San Michele and piazza Maggiore in Parma (1530s), the strada Gambara in Piacenza (1543), and via Nuova (now via Mazzini, c. 1545) in Perugia are all instances of the Farnese family’s understanding of the powerful effect of palace streets in the redefinition of urban centres, all of them constructed thanks to forced sales and expropriations.142Calabi, 2001, p. 36; see also Adorni, 1982, pp. 39–43. For Perugia, see Algeri, 1975, pp. 195–6, and other essays in the same collection. Within this urban typology, the strada Nuova in Genoa (from 1550; fig. 99) is the best-known example of a purpose-built street lined with palaces; created by members of a tight-knit group of the city’s oldest noble families, it is attributed to the planning oversight of the architect Galeazzo Alessi.143Gorse, 1997. The project required significant amounts of centrally placed real estate, much of which was expropriated thanks to special legislation, with the added benefit of relocating the city brothel; these measures led to the creation of what has been described as a ‘linear piazza’, a set piece of urban design that was regularly used for ceremonial purposes.144Ibid., p. 326. For a detailed discussion of the brothel, see also Chapter 3; see also Stevens Crawshaw, 2016. Over the course of three decades, ten palaces were built to line the street, all of them executed in a classical style that created a harmonious urban ensemble; this became widely known throughout Europe, thanks to Peter Paul Rubens’ illustrated publication I palazzi di Genova of 1622.145Rubens, 1622/1968. Moreover, the street was regularly put to use as a centrepiece for civic ceremonial, with duties of hospitality to visiting dignitaries enjoined on the palace owners of Genoa’s ‘Republican court’.146Gorse, 1997, pp. 313–17; for a detailed critical discussion of the complex rolli system of hospitality duties, see Altavista, 2013, which challenges the interpretation of Poleggi, 1998. Unquestionably this short street, lined exclusively with palaces built according to the most up-to-date classical language, stands as an undiluted example of social stratification, in which the urban elite shaped a built environment closely resembling the stage-set designs evoked by Serlio’s ‘tragic scene’.

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Description: Strada Nuova (now via Garibaldi) by Unknown

99. Strada Nuova (now via Garibaldi), from 1550, Genoa.

At the other end of the social spectrum, and usually confined to the outer edges of cities, the residential arrangements of the vast majority of working urban populations can also be understood to articulate the process of social stratification. Entire districts, especially outside the commercial and residential centres, would have been subject to quite limited modification during the Renaissance period, as the simple and relatively standardised housing established for the mass of the urban population during the century before the Black Death was not often subject to major rebuilding.147For new streets laid out in the 13th and 14th centuries, see Friedman, 2009; Spilner, 1987. In Florence, for instance, the narrow row-housing developments, built as part of the late-thirteenth-century and early-fourteenth-century urbanisation of church-owned lands on the city’s periphery, were largely still in place when seventeenth-century public-health officials visited these streets three hundred years later.148Cipolla, 1976; Eckstein, 2016; Spilner, 1987, ch. 4, and esp. ch. 5 (on neighbourhoods).

Religious orders were frequently the developers of blocks of row-housing on large tracts of land adjacent to their religious houses away from the centre.149For general comments, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 111–18. In Florence, for instance, the order of San Salvatore di Camaldoli in Oltrarno was instrumental in the development of the Camaldoli district close to the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, while the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio built property around their convent on the eastern side of the city, where the Frati della Penitenza also developed the via dei Pilastri and part of borgo Pinti.150Spilner, 1987, pp. 301–5, 307–9, 309–13; see also Orgera, 1976. Realising that such developments provided a stable rental income, religious houses based outside Florence also invested in housing projects in the city: for example, the Cistercians of San Salvatore at Settimo, from around 1320, developed a large site along borgo San Paolo (modern-day via Palazzuolo) and via della Scala in Florence.151Spilner, 1987, pp. 275–301; so successful a process was this that they reinvested profits into further purchase and development. Institutional landlords contributed to the urbanisation of Florence before 1348; housing tended to be arranged in a standardised format, at right angles to the street on narrow plots, so that all could benefit from a street-front aspect and ‘the public street [. . .] became the principal organiser of urban space.’152Ibid., pp. 325–8.

What is quite remarkable is that more than two centuries later some of the very same streets were still owned by the same institutional landlords, and comparable houses were still being let out to similar tenants.153Jamison, 2016, though without mention of the medieval development of these properties. So, for instance, in the sixteenth century, in the working-class district of Camaldoli, to the west of the Carmelite church, over 50 per cent of properties still belonged to the Camaldolese; this was the area that had been developed in the fourteenth century, and many of the tenancies passed through male hereditary leases down to the 1561 tax census.154Ibid., pp. 78–9, notes that Eckstein, 1995, p. 33, records the same landlords; Spilner, 1987, pp. 301–5 (with map). By this time, of course, a number of new institutions had also entered the rental market, such as the religious order of Knights of San Jacopo, who owned a large block of 134 contiguous properties near piazza Santa Maria Novella.155For San Jacopo, see Jamison, 2016, pp. 78–80; for a listing of the top twenty institutional landlords, see ibid., p. 74, table 4.7. Above all, it is hospitals that stand out; the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova was, with the Ospedale degli Innocenti, among the largest institutional landlords in Florence by 1561, in part as a result of gifts received through testamentary bequests.156Ibid., pp. 76–7. Besides these two major foundations, property was the main asset for most hospitals, and they derived their income from letting houses, shops and stalls in the market, while their farms furnished them with the produce they needed to deliver their essential services.157Henderson, 2006, pp. 61–3; Jamison, 2016, p. 74, table 4.7. By 1561 the Innocenti had become the third largest institutional landlord in Florence, owning properties across the city, followed closely by Santa Maria Nuova, whose portfolio had expanded greatly from the mid-fourteenth and through the fifteenth century; by the time of an inventory of 1486, the majority of their estate was made up of lettable properties in streets around the hospital, though they also owned some profitable mixed-use properties close to the city’s commercial and industrial centre.158Diana, 2003, pp. 443–9; Diana, 2005.

The majority of institutionally owned houses were developed on plots of land on the urban edges, which were laid out in straight streets, usually a minimum of 10 braccia (5.83 metres) wide.159Spilner, 1987, pp. 250–56. For popular housing, see Cataldi, 1987; Giovannoni, 1931; Zevi, 1997. Houses were commonly built on sites that were narrow on the street front but deep, so that they included some land behind; this pattern resulted in terrace or row-housing developments, many of which survive to modern times in the footprint of buildings and sometimes even in their general outward appearance. These institutionally owned properties on the edges of the city tended to command significantly lower rents than privately held rental properties; it was in such houses, outside the centre, that the majority of the city’s working population lived, in relatively homogenous residential neighbourhoods.160For rental rates, see Jamison, 2016, pp. 68–70. It can be suggested that a form of social stratification was built into urban design, and this situation perhaps became more polarised as the land-hungry palace developments of the elites occupied increasing amounts of prime real estate.

In addition to creating a distinctive street scene, consisting of serried ranks of similar houses, with their two-bay design – a door and window on the ground floor and pairs of windows on the floors above – these institutionally owned residential enclaves were also identified by physical markers. Institutions that held large-scale property portfolios, comprising rental housing outside the city centre, or shops around market areas, fixed signs to the buildings to mark their ownership, though these are easily overlooked and are rarely commented upon. Text and image often come together in simple inscribed plaques that reveal entire blocks of the city to have been owned by institutional landlords, whose letting strategies shaped a streetscape of what were often multiple-occupancy row-houses or multi-storey apartment buildings. As has been noted, the mid-sixteenth-century Florentine census documents large blocks of property holdings, and the records pertaining to the Knights of San Jacopo report that their properties were numbered above each door, with a crucifix marking the edges of the precinct.161Ibid., pp. 78–80 and n. 38. More common are the chance survivals of the landlords’ signs, sometimes numbered, and displaying the symbols of the Innocenti, Sant’Ambrogio, the Misericordia, Bigallo and so on.162Henderson, 2006, pp. 18–20, notes a number of these, but associates them with the site of the hospital foundations themselves, as opposed to their land holdings.

In marking their properties, the institutions followed the same practices as elite families, who not only adorned their own homes with their arms and names, but often also inscribed these on secondary properties that made up their rental portfolios. Much the same occurred in other cities: in Rome, for example, the properties of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (figs 100–102) and those of the confraternity of San Salvatore ad Sancta Sanctorum were marked, in Siena those owned by the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala.163For Rome, see McDougall, 2013–14; for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, see Salerno, Spezzaferro and Tafuri, 1973, pp. 260–69. For Siena, see ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 1332 (1455–1578), listing of rental properties; ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 110 (1452–1711), for sales of properties bequeathed but not required. While articulating ownership of the individual buildings, which passed promiscuously from one tenant to another, these markers also gave a collective impression of the power and reach of the charitable institutions that managed them, extending the symbolic value of their monumental headquarters.

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Description: San Giovanni dei Fiorentini by Unknown

100. Landlords’ signs, sometimes numbered, displaying the symbols of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (in via dei Cimatori), Rome.

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Description: Capitolo San Pietro by Unknown

101. Landlords’ signs, sometimes numbered, displaying the symbols of Capitolo San Pietro (in via Cappellari), Rome.

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102. Landlords’ signs, sometimes numbered, displaying the symbols of Tor de Specchi (in vicolo de’ Sugarelli), Rome.

The evidence here discussed for Florence appears to have followed patterns that applied widely across the peninsula, where outlying residential districts, streets and neighbourhoods were shaped by major institutional or charitable property owners and landlords.164For the mendicant orders’ role in urbanisation, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 111–18. In Venice, for instance, entire property blocks, laid out as quite distinctive small grids of parallel streets (or corti) with row-housing or apartment blocks, can be found in predominantly peripheral areas, and often resulted from targeted charitable investments typical of the city’s decentralised welfare structures.165These comments on Venice largely rely on Trincanato, 1965; for a general discussion and a catalogue of examples, see Trincanato, 1948, pp. 65–8. For a brief introduction to this charity, see d’Andrea, 2013; Pullan, 1971. For instance, a number of blocks set back from the Fondamenta delle Procuratie in Dorsoduro (close to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore), comprising seventy-four houses, were developed thanks to a bequest in the 1502 will of Filippo Tron for indigent families, and were managed by the Procuratori della Commissaria de Ultra.166Trincanato, 1948, pp. 298–9 (will dated 8 November 1502). These provveditori had oversight of the urban districts of Dorsoduro, Santa Croce and San Polo. Pullan, 1971, pp. 182–3, notes that Dorsodouro was the poorest district in the city. Significant areas of the sestriere of Castello were built up to create housing for workers and mariners associated with the Arsenale, including a block around corte (or calle) Colonna, later reordered as the Marinaressa. There were plenty of exceptions to this decentralised arrangement in the densely packed city: the corte San Marco development was built on a more central site under the will of Pietro Olivieri in 1515, which required that twenty-four houses be constructed for let at strictly controlled rents to members of the Confraternity of the Scuola di San Marco who had large families; a similar arrangement seems to have been applied to the twenty-six low-rent row-houses along the calle del Paradiso (near Santa Maria in Formosa), which formed part of Pellegrina Foscari’s dowry when she married Alvise Mocenigo in 1491.167For the mariners’ block, see Trincanato, 1948, pp. 158–69; for the San Marco development (the will is dated 25 Oct 1515, though the block was perhaps built only in the 17th century), see ibid., pp. 65, 305–6; for calle del Paradiso, see Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 200–03.

As in Florence, so too in cities like Siena, Bologna and Verona, where the city’s principal hospitals emerged as major property owners from the fourteenth century, managing rental holdings that contributed to the housing arrangements of large portions of the urban population.168Garbellotti, 2007, pp. 126–8; Sneider, 2007. The account books of Siena’s Santa Maria della Scala reveal strategic decision-making that led to the consolidation of property portfolios: the hospital benefited from a steady income from high-value rents for such properties as centrally located shops, and was able to subsidise rents for housing, some available to hospital employees but much more to those, such as widows, requiring charitable support.169ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 1332 (1455–1578), the tenants of rental properties. Properties that were bequeathed to the hospital but were not required for rental or other purposes were auctioned off at regular intervals to raise funds that contributed to the hospital’s running costs.170ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 110 (1452–1711). In Rome, hospitals were also active in urban development and housing, as is evidenced in the fascinating example of the urbanisation, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, of the ‘trident’ of streets converging on Porta del Popolo.171Benvenuto and di Cioccio, 1986; Zanchettin, 2005a; Zanchettin, 2005b. Here the hospitals of San Rocco and San Giacomo degli Incurabili, as large landowners in the urban periphery, sold off parcels of land to property developers, including the architects Baldassarre Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.172Benvenuto and di Cioccio, 1986; Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 147–51. The site, bounded on either side by the main arteries of via di Ripetta and the Corso, was divided up for residential accommodation and organised into blocks along a new grid of orthogonally ordered streets.173Zanchettin, 2005b, figs 21, 22. While the initial plans included residences for the architects themselves, the proximity of the city port and concentration of transient dockworkers denoted this as a working-class neighbourhood, which by the end of the century had become the principal zone designated for prostitutes.174See Chapter 3 for discussion of the luoghi; see also Storey, 2008, pp. 73–81; Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 147–8. Architects probably reserved houses on the site as a means of deriving a greater share of the profits from the development.

Mapping the city

If we return to the examples of Sebastiano Serlio’s urban stage-set designs, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, it is clear that in his treatise he presented a comparison between the everyday settings that provided the characters and plot for comedies, and those more appropriate to the lofty goings-on that were the subject of tragedies. While the buildings that framed the scenes were quite distinct, the open space of the street where much of the drama was played out was obviously broadly similar in both designs, confirming the role of architecture in shaping and conveying meaning on an urban scale. Serlio’s streetscapes were therefore consciously fashioned to create an appropriate setting for drama, and, to an extent at least, echoed the transformations of numerous urban centres of the period. We might go further, and consider their contrasting designs through the analytic system of urban ‘imageability’ defined by Kevin Lynch: ‘to heighten the imageability of the urban environment is to facilitate its visual identification and structuring [. . .] paths, edges, landmarks, nodes, and regions are the building blocks in the process of making firm, differentiated structures at the urban scale’.175Lynch, 1960, p. 95 Both of Serlio’s scenes could be said to include all of Lynch’s elements: they are structured along a path (the open stage of the street), bound by edges (the buildings) and focused around landmarks (larger buildings that fill the vanishing point), while as sites of action they are nodes, and as microcosms of urban life they are regions. Serlio’s achievement is to create a polarised contrast through the careful deployment of ‘differentiated structures at the urban scale’, arranging buildings to convey distinct meanings.

The discussion in this chapter has highlighted the role of particular buildings and building types, as well as broader urban renewal interventions, in refashioning cities and the collective appearance of streets and neighbourhoods. Here, then, the attention has been turned from the paths themselves – the streets and public spaces – to their contours or edges, as defined by the buildings that line and address them.176Ibid.; the ‘edge’ is not defined by the buildings that line the street, but rather as other physical objects (walls, rivers, railway tracks) that act as linear boundaries, though pp. 83–5 also discuss the essential interrelation between elements. We have explored the degree to which changes to the built environment during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries facilitated the legibility of distinct areas within the city, highlighting the governmental, devotional, commercial, industrial and residential character of given zones, as well as the integration that operated across such functional categories. Mixed-use characteristics remained widespread throughout the period, although a tendency towards specialisation and stratification has been shown to have been applied more consistently through built projects and developments by the sixteenth century. Street-scale interventions, in particular, gave monumental definition to ruling elites, and the naming strategies adopted for these interventions communicate the identity of ruler–patrons who promoted them right down to the present day. Thus, streets emerge as a dominant structuring element of urban design, creating (sometimes imposing) legible order on the built fabric of the city.

Of one Italian Renaissance city, Lynch wrote: ‘Florence is a city of powerful character [. . .] of almost oppressive strength’, explaining this as the result of the rich variety of urban elements from which it is assembled.177Ibid., p. 93. He described the ‘highly visible city’, and reflected on ‘the huge and unmistakable dome of the Duomo, flanked by Giotto’s campanile, a point of orientation visible in every section of the city and for miles outside of it’, setting it within the wider landscape of the Arno valley. In so doing, he perhaps knowingly evoked Alberti’s famous comments in the preface to his short treatise Della pittura, which suggested that Brunelleschi’s dome cast its shadow over all of Tuscany, as well as over the many representations of the city that depicted it, standing proud on the skyline.178Alberti, 1966, p. 40. In both text and images, of course, the cathedral dome becomes a synecdoche for the city as a whole, the artifice of its design a metaphor for the ingenuity of an entire artistic generation, its shadow representative of the power of the city over its surrounding territories. As with numerous images of St Zenobius and other patron saints bearing the intercessionary city model of Florence in their arms for presentation at the celestial court, architectural landmarks stand out as recognisable, even iconic features of the city.179Ibid.; see also Camelliti, 2010; Kaftal, 1952; Lucia Nuti (ed.), Atlante storico iconografico delle città toscane, online at http://asict.arte.unipi.it/index.html/ (accessed 7 November 2018).

As these shorthand devotional images of the city became more detailed, the urban landscape arrangement was developed by providing a slightly raised yet distant viewpoint that enabled an all-encompassing perspective on the city. In the remarkably detailed view of Florence (after a lost original of the 1480s by Francesco Rosselli), which is often described as the ‘Catena’ view on account of the chain motif that delimits the frame in the woodcut version, the draughtsman appears on a hillside in the right foreground, in the very act of drawing a survey of the city’s walls (fig. 103).180Friedman, 2001, which discusses the relation between the lost original and the copy from the 1510s preserved in the ‘Catena’ view (p. 72). Spread out before him, in what is usually described as a bird’s-eye perspective (provided by his elevated viewing position), the city of Florence unfolds on either side of the Arno river, significantly distorted to appear even wider, with Brunelleschi’s much enlarged dome assuming centre stage in the composition.181For the dome, see ibid., pp. 62–3. For a broader discussion of Rosselli’s compositional technique in relation to his (lost) view of Rome, see Maier, 2015, pp. 31–47. Landmarks stand out in the view, with major churches, public buildings and residential palaces prominent within the mass of housing; scale is used to underline the importance of buildings such as the Palazzo della Signoria, Orsanmichele, and palaces of the Pitti, Medici and others. However, given the angled vantage point, the city’s public spaces are not in evidence, as the street level is largely out of sight, except for a narrow strip bordering the north bank of the Arno and visible open spaces in front of Santa Maria Novella, San Marco and Santissima Annunziata, as well as glimpses of similar open spaces in front of Santa Croce, the Carmine and Palazzo della Signoria. The view’s aim was not to convey accurate topographic detail, but rather to represent the ideal – inscribed rhetorically in the title Fiorenza – of a prosperous and flourishing city.182Friedman, 2001, pp. 66–7.

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Description: The "Catena" View of Florence by Uberti, Lucantonio degli

103. Francesco Rosselli, bird’s-eye view of Florence from the south-west, the so-called ‘Catena’ view, woodcut, c. 1510, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Preuẞischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

Such images as Rosselli’s, and, indeed, the fragmentary views of Florence that appear in the background of countless altarpieces of the period, capture essentials of the city’s ‘imageability’ but largely overlook its structuring elements of paths, edges and nodes. It was three-quarters of a century before a detailed cartographic representation of Florence, in the shape of Stefano Buonsignori’s map of 1584, laid bare its street network, accurately positioning landmarks and public spaces, as well as the city’s residential neighbourhoods (fig. 104).183Architectural surveys initiated the process of accurate mapping, as in Florence with the urbanisation projects around the via Laura; Elam, 1994; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 90–114. Buonsignori made his map for Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici, during his tenure as court ‘cosmographer’; nowhere is this Medicean association made more evident than in the depiction of the Piazza della Signoria, which is placed at the visual centre of the huge map.184Else, 2009, pp. 168–70. Significantly, in the elaborate display of statuary assembled along the ringhiera (‘raised dais’) that runs along the façade of the Palazzo Vecchio and beyond into the piazza, the new Medici additions of Ammannati’s Neptune fountain and Giambologna’s equestrian monument of Cosimo I are prominently visible, serving to reorder the princely space that supplanted the civic centre following the Medici accession (fig. 105).185As Else, 2009, makes clear, the addition of the Cosimo I equestrian monument appears in the second printing of the map, in 1594, by Girolamo Franceschi; Cole, 2011, pp. 244–82. This is a powerful reminder of the fact that the cartographic gaze is not necessarily objective, and that urban space as it is constituted on the printed page of the map represents the politics of sixteenth-century Medici patronage.186A recurring theme in Fiorani, 2005; and in the more military–political Pollak, 2010. Buonsignori’s was an innovative piece of map-making, combining a traditional axonometric (‘bird’s-eye view’) approach with the more technically accurate ichnographic (‘figure ground’) survey to create an unusual compound view of clear street networks and recognisable elevations.187Else, 2009; Frangenberg, 1994. Thus the key network of streets can be understood – and is, indeed, revealed to be quite similar to the modern layout in most areas – while landmarks also stand out as prominent. Even so, as recent georectification of the map has shown, the survey was not totally accurate and there is significant distortion, especially to the eastern and south-west sides of the city.188Rose, 2016, pp. 16–19.

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Description: Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata by...

104. Stefano Buonsignori, Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, 1584 (repr. Rome, 1690), Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University Library. (Compass north is at the top left of the map.)

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Description: Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, detail...

105. Piazza della Signoria, detail from fig. 104, showing the piazza della Signoria, with the Palazzo Vecchio, the Neptune fountain and the equestrian statue of Cosimo I.

The development of surveying skills, tools and techniques for map-making has been amply documented and researched, but in the present context the intention is to draw a parallel between the desire for increasingly accurate representations, which resulted in city maps, and the processes of urban renewal that form the subject of this chapter.189On surveying techniques, see Maier, 2015, pp. 51–60, 79–99, with earlier bibliography. Turning again to Lynch’s analytic framework, we might say that, while at the start of the fifteenth century many cities already possessed the essential elements for strong visual identification, it was in the subsequent century and a half that systematic efforts were made to order and structure the whole. From the latter part of the fifteenth century, there were certainly technical, strategic, military and political reasons for the proliferation of map-making, collecting and display, but it is also true that this form of representation gave visual expression to the urban-scale interventions that characterised sixteenth-century city planning, and, in fact, shared many of the same objectives.190From a vast literature, see Ballon and Friedman, 2007; de Seta, 2011; Fiorani, 2007. For a recent bibliographic survey, see Nevola, 2018.

Beyond Florence, the proliferation of local saints’ cults was a phenomenon that developed in parallel with the growing autonomy of Italian city states, and the iconography of patron saints often showed them bearing a model of the city.191For a selection of sources, see Frugoni, 1991; Kaftal, 1952; Vauchez, 1995; Vauchez, 1997. In myriad images, the intercessionary agency of the saint as mediator at the celestial court on behalf of the local polity is captured and given expression through the city image that stands for the institutional whole and the body politic. People and buildings are here subsumed – again, a form of synecdoche, as the ‘container’ (the built city) stands for the whole (the population within the city walls). Nevertheless, in such images the city model is an attribute, like the keys of St Peter, which helps to identify the saint, and so it must facilitate the recognition of the city by the formal representation of a distinctive view. In many of these representations, the patron–donor is a very early evangeliser (as in the cases of Sts Emidius, Giminianus and Ercolano), or a recent local arrival at the heavenly court (for example, San Bernardino).192Kaftal, 1952, p. 196 (Bernardine), p. 439 (Geminianus), p. 478 (Herculanus) and so on; for recent treatment, see Camelliti, 2010, pp. 97–121; http://asict.arte.unipi.it/index.html/ (accessed 10 November 2018). In some instances, the connection is even more complexly articulated: in the case of San Petronio at Bologna, for instance, the fifth-century bishop brought a personal experience of Jerusalem and laid out Bologna’s sacred topography to echo that of Jerusalem, through the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Calvary, the Crucifix and the court of Pilate. In holding the city as model he is thus both patron and designer of the city.193Lavin, 1994, p. 676.

As has been suggested above in relation to late-fifteenth-century views of Florence, greater levels of detail characterised the emerging genre of the city view, which was often then more widely distributed in print form by means of simplified woodcut blocks accompanying such popular texts as Jacopo Foresti’s Supplementum chronicarum (Venice, 1490) or Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493).194Ricci, 1993; Sinistri, 1992. For the diffusion of early views of Rome, see Maier, 2015, pp. 33–5. As with Rosselli’s view of Florence, so too his view of Rome recorded immense levels of detail of the antiquities as well as the contemporary city, though the raised northern vantage point from which the compound view is taken again produced a cityscape in which the underlying topography and network of streets was largely absent.195Maier, 2015, pp. 31–45, which relies on an anonymous copy of the map now in the Museo della Città, Mantua, as Rosselli’s original print is also lost. Even the most famous of all Renaissance city views, Jacopo de Barbari’s representation of Venice in 1500, which offers an unprecedented level of detail assembled from multiple vantage points – gathered from the top of the city’s bell-towers and rendered as if from that of the island monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore – provides only an impressionistic account of the city’s street and canal network (fig. 106).196For Barbari, see Howard, 1997; Howard, 2014, p. 31; Romanelli et al., 1999; Schulz, 1978. The bird’s-eye perspective meant that the street and canal level was out of sight, except when these happened to be in alignment with the ideal vantage point; moreover, the central channel of the Grand Canal was artificially widened for greater legibility and to increase the visual impact of the image, while significant compression was applied to the edges of the city, especially on the west (left) side.197Howard, 2014, pp. 31–4; Schulz, 1978, pp. 437–9, with gridded plan to show distortion. The convergence of the eight winds to a point of intersection aligned with the campanile of San Marco, and the presiding presence of the gods of trade and the sea (Mercury and Neptune) are reminders of the moralising purpose of the map, as indeed are the scale and focus provided on the civic centres of the Rialto (trade), San Marco (civic government and devotion) and the Arsenale (maritime strength).198Hopkins, 2014, p. 83. Such features and distortions became quite common in the many views of Venice derived from Barbari’s, which proliferated in the sixteenth century (see fig. 38).199For the 1611 view by Odoardo Fialetti and its precursors, see Howard and McBurney, 2014a.

~

Description: View of Venice by Barbari, Jacopo de'

106. Jacopo de Barbari, Venetie, bird’s-eye view of Venice, 1500, woodcut, British Museum, London.

Although it has rightly been said that, in Barbari’s view, ‘topographical accuracy was not the aim’, nonetheless, the unprecedented level of detail offers a compelling sense of the city, of the variety of building types, the range of densities of buildings, and the variations that can be observed across districts, including the concentration in given areas of warehouses or popular housing.200Ibid., p. 24. Moreover, although the calli and canals are not always visible, their sinuous contours shape the ribbons of façades that the artist carefully delineated, providing an impression of the city’s connectedness. In fact, as studies of Leonardo Bufalini’s 1551 map of Rome have tended to underline, advanced surveying skills were required to achieve such topographic verisimilitude (fig. 107).201Ballon and Friedman, 2007, p. 685, note that ‘the exact configuration of streets remains approximate’; the same point is explored in greater detail in Maier, 2015, pp. 94–5, 104–5. Bufalini’s map was among the first to adopt a pure ichnographic form, focusing primarily on the city’s street network and property blocks occupied by the principal buildings, many of which were delineated in plan. In spite of its inaccuracies, and on occasion because of them, Bufalini’s map affirmed the power of streets to impose order on the city of Rome. By representing the via Lata (via Corso) as wider than it is, he emphasises the street’s function as a strong spine through the redeveloped abitato, while the various new papal streets – via Giulia and Lungara, the piazza del Popolo trident, the Vatican Borgo and so on – are likewise given greater prominence through being depicted as wider than they actually are.202Maier, 2015, pp. 94–5, 104–5, notes that this was, of course, to become the standard approach to city maps, so that modern viewers more readily recognise the achievement. The map was unquestionably important for the history of cartography, offering as it does one of the earliest representations of the city as an ichnographic street map and ground plan, though this approach was not widely imitated.203Ibid., pp. 79–80, 108–17, observes (p. 115) that Bufalini’s map was superseded only by Giovanni Battista Nolli’s map of 1748. In Bufalini’s map we might say that paths and edges are carefully delineated, at the expense of other key elements of urban form, and it is interesting to note that most maps of Rome produced in the half-century that followed reverted to more naturalistic modes of representation, which tended to delineate the appearance of buildings.

~

Description: Roma by Bufalini, Leonardo di Giovanni Pietro

107. Leonardo Bufalini, Roma, 1551, in a copy by Antonio Trevisi, 1930, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome. (Compass north is to the left of the map.)

As one seventeenth-century commentator, Floriano del Buono, put it in 1636: ‘the portrait of a city does not consist of its plan [. . .] but rather the representation of that which the eye can see from a determined height’.204Floriano del Buono, Ritratto overo profilo della città di Bologna (Bologna, 1636), cited in Maier, 2015, p. 114. As is widely recognised, however, city views and partial bird’s-eye representations could rarely be assembled from a single verifiable viewpoint, so artists and cartographers tended to err on the side of making their compositions more compelling and easily legible to their audiences. In this respect, the process of mapping the city was not dissimilar to the numerous built interventions that gradually or dramatically transformed many Italian cities during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as new building typologies, regularised streets, and the clustering of industries or the residences of social groups all acted to impose greater degrees of order and legibility on the complex urban ecosystem. It is significant that ribbon-like patterns of façades in views such as Barbari’s, and serried ranks of buildings edging the street network in works such as Buonsignori’s view of Florence, highlight the role of streets in ordering urban space. These and countless other examples of printed and painted city maps and views are visual documents that attest the increased significance of privileged urban pathways, the main streets and thoroughfares that provided the essential networking of these complex urban systems.205For the Sala Bologna, see discussion in Introduction to Part I, with bibliography; for the surveyor Scipione Dattili called in to prepare the survey, see Fiorani, 2007, pp. 811–12. ~

1 Serlio, 1618–19, fol. 45v (Book II was first published in 1545). »

2 Ibid., fols 45v–47v. »

3 Ibid., fol. 46r. »

4 On the origins of the fixed stage set, see Cruciani, 1983; and, more recently, Beltramini and Burns, 2008. »

5 See Onians, 1988, pp. 282–6, which develops comments of Panofsky, 1955, p. 234. »

6 This interpretation was first proposed in relation to built interventions by urban elites in Siena, in Nevola, 1999, p. 63. »

7 Serlio, 1618–19, fol. 47v, referring to Girolamo Genga’s work for Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. »

8 Ibid., fol. 46v. »

9 Ibid. He prefers the device of hiding lights behind the windows, to make buildings appear inhabited. »

10 On porticoes and the range of form these took in Bologna from the 12th century onwards, see Bocchi, 1990. »

11 For the ‘urban process’, see Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994a; Kostof, 1992, p. 280. »

12 These (intentionally) general comments can be supported from scholarship on the Renaissance city, including Anderson, 2013, pp. 141–75; Benevolo, 1993, ch. 3; Friedrichs, 1995, ch. 1; Lilley, 2002, ch. 5. »

13 For a recent survey, see Romano, 2015, pp. 71–108. »

14 Cavallo, 2006. »

15 Burns, 1981, pp. 28–9, 39–43; Cantatore, 2003. This north–south axis in described in Carpeggiani, 1994, pp. 182–3, as an ‘asse gonzaghesco’. »

16 Forster, 1994, pp. 166–72; see also Carpeggiani, 1994, pp. 182–3 and n. 30. »

17 Forster, 1994, pp. 169–71, proposed Alberti as having oversight of the project, though this is not supported by documents. »

18 Burns, 1981, p. 29; Cantatore, 2003, pp. 447–52; Forster, 1994, pp. 168–9. »

19 Forster, 1994, pp. 172–3, notes the political implications of Gonzaga patronage controlling civic time; see also Signorini, 2011. The clock tower is attributed to the court architect Luca Fancelli (built 1471–2). »

20 A long tradition links the overall project to the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti, though it is not proven that his letter to the marquis of 27 February 1460 (Chambers and Martineau, 1981, pp. 126–7 (Howard Burns)), set out a blueprint for this area, as first suggested by Burns, 1981, p. 29. »

21 The inscription on the architrave reads: (ZO) HANBONIFORT DA CONCHOREZO AFAT FAR QUESTA OPERA DELANO 1455 – IOHANES-BONIFORT DE CONCORESIO HOC OPUS FIERI FECIT SUB ANNO DOMINI 1455; see Forster, 1994, p. 162 and n. 1. »

22 Alberti’s letter suggests plans to remodel the 11th-century rotunda of San Lorenzo, which were never carried out. »

23 Chambers and Martineau, 1981, pp. 126–7 (Howard Burns). Construction was delayed by the resistance of the abbot of the Benedictine community that officiated the church. »

24 Burns, 1998, pp. 149–56, with earlier bibliography. »

25 For these boundary markers, see Bottoni, 1840, p. 15; Gionta, 1844, p. 71; Pisani, n.d., pp. 8–9. »

26 Vischi, 2009. For the decree in favour of Viano de Vianis, supporting the building project, ASMn, Decreti, 24, fol. 87r (12 September 1492), see also Ferlisi, 2006, p. 74 and n. 7. »

27 L’Occaso, 2009, notes that the practice was concentrated in the half-century following 1460. »

28 Burns, 1981, p. 127. »

29 For the stone markers that document Gonzaga influence on Mantua’s expansion, see Chapters 1 and 5. »

30 Forster, 1994, pp. 162–6, provides an extended polemic against the formal analysis of the Renaissance piazza as governed by principles of order and symmetry, severed from a contextualized understanding of such spaces. »

31 Forster, 1994, p. 164, singles out Pienza, Vigevano, piazza San Marco (Venice) and the reordering of the Capitoline (Rome) as the archetypal transformative interventions, and notes that Lotz, 1977, remains a reference point in the limited scholarship on the piazza. »

32 See Chapter 1, p. 36, for an extended quotation, taken from Calzona, 2003, p. 578. »

33 Severi, 1982, p. 234; Tuohy, 1996, pp. 63–5; see also Folin, 1997, pp. 359–66. »

34 Severi, 1982, p. 234, notes that the strazzaroli shops were documented from 1322 and cites the contemporary ‘Diario ferrarese’, 1473 (Diario ferrarese, 1928). Tuohy, 1996, p. 63, notes that the balcony was used as a viewing platform for the wedding of Eleonora (1473) and the funeral of Niccolò d’Este (1476). »

35 Tuohy, 1996, pp. 88–9; they were destroyed by fire in 1532 and not replaced. »

36 Ibid., p. 89. »

37 From a growing literature, see Calabi, 1997; Calabi, 2004; Welch, 2005; and bibliography in notes that follow. »

38 Friedman, 1992, pp. 82–6. »

39 The power of the street to focus movement is discussed in Rykwert, 1978, p. 15; see also essays in Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994b; Kostof, 1992, pp. 189–213. On the semantic distinction of a hierarchy denoted by the variants of strada, via and chiasso, see Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 41–3; for equivalents in Florence, see Spilner, 1987, ch. 4. »

40 Sestan, 1968. For a more general consideration of urban morphology as determinant and indicator of urban types, see Kostof, 1991. For the via Francigena as determinant factor in San Gimignano’s economic expansion, see Fiumi, 1961, pp. 28–33, 149–152. »

41 Fiumi, 1961, pp. 152–3. »

42 Ibid. p. 28. A useful summary of pilgrim routes to Rome can be found in Belli Barsali, 1985. »

43 Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–145, esp. 95–8, 124–8; Nevola, 2020. »

44 Nevola, 2007, p. 124; see also Hansen, 1992. »

45 Hansen, 1992, citing ASS, Consiglio Generale, 199, fol. 71v (28 December 1399). »

46 Nevola, 2007, pp. 91–145. »

47 Discussed further in Chapter 6. »

48 ASS, Consorteria Piccolomini, 17, fol. 87ff. (28 January 1507); see also Nevola, 2011b. »

49 Nevola, 2007, p. 128; Nevola, 2011b, pp. 154–6. »

50 ASS, Concistoro, 2125, fol. 39 (18 December 1465). »

51 Nevola, 2007, pp. 101–6. »

52 Ibid., pp. 116–18, with earlier bibliography. »

53 For further details on named examples, see ibid. »

54 For resistance to zoning policies directed at butchers, see Chapter 1; Costantini, 2016. »

55 Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2013. »

56 For examples, see Nevola, 2016. »

57 On these and other streets in the ceremonial life of Rome, see Fagiolo, 1997a; on the ritual and processional uses of the streets, see Ingersoll, 1985; Temple, 2011, pp. 34–93. »

58 Cafà, 2010; Ingersoll, 1985, pp. 171–92; Temple, 2011, pp. 56ff. »

59 Temple, 2011, pp. 40–42, with reference to Biondo Flavio, Roma triumphans (1459), Book X, describing the route with reference to contemporary landmarks: the Pons Neronianus, Santi Celso e Giuliano, San Lorenzo in Damaso, Campo dei Fiori, Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, San Giorgio in Velabro, the Capitol. »

60 Modigliani, 1998; further studies of rental patterns and income in Rome are Vaquero Pineiro, 1999; Vaquero Pineiro, 2007. »

61 For a minute survey of shops around Campo dei Fiori, illustrated with maps, detailing 148 shops in the immediate vicinity, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 145–209, 211–59. »

62 Ibid., p. 163, citing Alberini, 1997, p. 487. »

63 Temple, 2011, p. 56 and n. 50, citing Aurelio Brandolini, ‘De laudibus ac rebus gestis Sixti IV’, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Vat. Lat. 5008. »

64 Modigliani, 1998, pp. 200–5, with documents; see also Friedman, 2012. »

65 Pietro Paolo Francisci was known as ‘della Zecca’ as he was manager of the city mint during the pontificate of Paul II Barbo (1464–71); Giovannoni, 1931. »

66 For the reparations, and also for the prolonged debate over income from the shops, see Schiavo, 1964, pp. 75–6; see also Frommel, 1998a, pp. 411–16; Modigliani, 1998, p. 198. »

67 For a discussion of shops along the via Peregrinorum, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 176–209, and map XIX. »

68 On ceremonial balconies as privileged sites along processional routes, see Tamburini, 1997, pp. 185–90; Frommel, 1998a, pp. 413–14, highlights the projecting balcony and corner tower element at the Cancelleria. »

69 For further discussion of palace design and streets, see Chapter 6; brief comments on the determinant influence on palace design of urban placement, see Conforti, 2008, p. 133; Nevola, 2011b; Welch, 2005, pp. 134–5. »

70 Nevola, 2011b, pp. 160ff., discusses a sample, drawn from Frommel, 1973, in which a full 50 per cent of the palaces contained shops. »

71 For via Alessandrina see Chapter 1; Howe, 1992; Petrucci, 1997; for a detailed study of the Borgo and via Alessandrina, see d’Amelio, 2008. »

72 For the flourishing trade around St Peter’s, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 259–84; Pecchiai, 1951. »

73 Nevola, 2011b, pp. 163–8, challenges a prevalent view that the palace type in Florence abandoned shops from the mid-15th century; for a broad selection of comparative examples, see Battilotti, Belli and Belluzzi, 2011; Calabi, 2008. »

74 The current archbishop’s palace in Florence dates to the late 16th century, but the original bishop’s palace also contained shops; Dameron, 1991, pp. 154–7; Miller, 2000, p. 105. There were as many as fifty shops in the Palazzo Arcivescovile in the 15th century; Belli, 2008, p. 84; Welch, 2005, pp. 127–30. »

75 Sansi, 1869, p. 198. »

76 Welch, 2005, pp. 127–9. »

77 For San Martino, see Nevola, 2007, p. 74; for Naples, see Calaresu, 2016, p. 120. »

78 Incisa della Rocchetta and Connors, 1981, pp. 203–4, doc. 139; my thanks to Joe Connors for drawing my attention to this document. »

79 Ibid., pp. 203–4. »

80 The building does not adopt a uniform solution, though a number of original shop openings can be identified along via del Governo Vecchio and via della Chiesa Nuova. »

81 Bocchi, 1990; Bocchi, 1993b; Calabi, 2004, pp. 103–12; Calabi and Morachiello, 1987. »

82 Lotz, 1977; Schofield, 1992–3. »

83 Lotz, 1977, pp. 80–81; Julius II is depicted in the sculpture dominating the piazza from an elaborate niche above the monumental side entrance to the church of San Francesco, while Paul III is shown on the Palazzo dei Capitani del Popolo. »

84 Zaggia, 1999; Zaggia, 2016; for Carpi, see Svalduz, 2001. »

85 As noted above, Forster, 1994, pp. 162–6, makes the important point that architectural interventions are all too often viewed only as acts of princely patronage, divorced from any practical considerations. »

86 Filarete, 1972, contains more than 200 instances; in many cases, the word refers to arcades inside buildings, including courtyards and churches. »

87 Filarete, 1972, Book VIII. »

88 Ibid., Book X. »

89 Vitruvius, 1960, p. 182 (Book VI.5). »

90 Alberti, 1988, p. 152 (Book V, ch. 18); comments in Welch, 2005, p. 125. »

91 Martini, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 364–5 (Book III). »

92 Eaton, 2002; Lang, 1952. »

93 Henderson, 2006, passim; Welch, 1995, pp. 145–66. »

94 Mussini, 2004. »

95 Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. »

96 Bedon, 2009; Benelli, 2004. »

97 For the early papal presence, see Radke, 1996. For interventions on the piazza del Plebiscito, see Bentivoglio, 2017. »

98 Butters and Pagliara, 2009; Temple, 2011, pp. 94ff. For Naples, see Mangone, 2011. »

99 Bule and Nolan, 2003; Nieri and Pacini, 2013. »

100 For the palace’s functions and what it replaced, see Nieri and Pacini, 2013, pp. 9–23. »

101 Hemsoll, 1988, pp. 167–8, considers the rival, though complementary, ambitions of the Venetians, and the local civic pride and image, and how these were resolved. »

102 From an extensive literature, see Meneghin, 1974; Muzzarelli, 2001; Puglisi and Barcham, 2008. »

103 Katz, 2008, pp. 8–10; Rubin, 1999. »

104 Catoni, 2012; Nevola, 2007, p. 108; Pulin, 1985, pp. 34–40. »

105 For an overview of the growth strategies (and previous scholarship), see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 89–118. »

106 Ibid., pp. 46–51, 89–91, with a discussion of the tendency towards ‘gigantism in convent architecture’ (p. 46). »

107 Ibid., pp. 89–118, 124–31. »

108 Henderson, 2006, pp. 7–25, 148–57. »

109 Ibid., pp. 70–81. »

110 Ibid., pp. 73–8; Goldthwaite and Rearick, 1977; Welch, 1995, pp. 145–66. »

111 Calaresu and van den Heuvel, 2016; Terpstra, 2010; Tomas, 2006; Welch, 2005. »

112 Romano, 2015, pp. 89–94. »

113 Belli, 2008, provides an overview. For the animated nature of the marketplace, see (most recently) Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 26–38. »

114 Calabi, 2004, pp. 103–12; Calabi and Morachiello, 1987; Howard, 2002, pp. 152–4. The renewal of the Rialto pre-dated the fire: work on the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi dated back to the 1480s, and on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi began in 1505. »

115 Battilotti, Belli and Belluzzi, 2011, pp. 73–88, 93–6 (Amedeo Belluzzi); Conforti, 1993; Flanigan, 2008. »

116 For an overview of some of these offices, see Romano, 2015, pp. 43–70, esp. 52–3, 66–70; a comparative study is Friedman, 1998. »

117 Romano, 2015, pp. 76–82. »

118 Beltramini and Burns, 2008, pp. 80–89 (Guido Beltramini), with earlier bibliography; see also Burns, 1975, pp. 21–2, 24–5. »

119 Rossi, 1887, pp. 5–7; Silvestrelli, 2008, pp. 277–8. »

120 Silvestrelli, 2008, notes the tiratoio (‘fuller’s shed’) of the local wool industry; Rossi, 1887, pp. 5–7, notes that the piazza was paved and became a site of public executions, and that a papal bull of Nicholas V (13 May 1453) awarded the hospital rights to redevelop the site (p. 28). Full documentation survives for the building campaign: ASP, OSMM, Fabbriche diverse, vols 3, 8. For further discussion of the underpinnings for the wool tiratoi, see Fioriti, 1992. »

121 Rossi, 1887, pp. 28–9, with discussion of Lombard masons who executed projects; for detailed construction accounts, see ASP, OSMM, Fabbriche diverse, vols 3 and 8 passim. »

122 Rossi, 1887, pp. 47–52, includes contract for the palazzo, which was to be built in stone. »

123 Ibid., p. 30 (5 December 1476). »

124 For Sixtus IV (13 January 1478), see Rossi, 1887, p. 31; for Perugino’s tenancy, 1501–13, documented in ASP, OSMM, Entrate e uscite di denari e generi diversi, 47 (1501–2), fol. 23v, see Silvestrelli, 2008, p. 279. »

125 Rossi, 1887, p. 32; Silvestrelli, 2008, with documents. »

126 AFLA, Contabilità, 1206 (1456), 1320 (1557–74), list properties; for an overview of architectural development, see Antoniella, 1985, pp. xxxii–xxxvii. »

127 Lasansky, 2004, pp. 109–10. »

128 Conforti, 1993, pp. 243–55; Mercantini, 1980; Satkowski, 1993. »

129 AFLA, Contabilità, 1321 (1574–96), listed by shop numbers. The city’s old butchers’ shops were also relocated as a result of the project. »

130 For the remodelling of the piazza in the Fascist era, see Lasansky, 2004, pp. 109–13, 129–38. »

131 Nevola, 2007, pp. 97–8. »

132 Fiore, 1998b; see also Belluzzi, 1989, pp. 333–5. »

133 See the opening sections of Chapter 6; see also Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. »

134 Instances are discussed in Chapter 1; for similar legislation in Sforza dominions issued in 1493, see Calabi, 2001, p. 5. »

135 Further discussion in Chapter 6; see also Friedman, 1992. »

136 For Venice, see Howard, 2002, pp. 100ff.; for Siena, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 75–145; for Florence, see Marino and Paolini, 2014. »

137 Burns, 1995; for a discussion of ‘retrosynthesis’, see Trachtenberg, 2010, pp. 386–411. For perhaps the most detailed example of longue durée urbanism, see Salerno, Spezzaferro and Tafuri, 1973. »

138 For Ercole’s Addizione Erculea, see Chapter 1. For the obligation felt by patron–courtiers, no more eloquent example can be provided than that expressed in the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga with his father, with reference to the onerous construction expenditure expected of him by Pope Pius II; Chambers, 1976. »

139 Nevola, 2007, pp. 178–84. »

140 Ibid., pp. 178–9, with archival references. »

141 Ibid., pp. 163–4, with documents (and earlier scholarship). »

142 Calabi, 2001, p. 36; see also Adorni, 1982, pp. 39–43. For Perugia, see Algeri, 1975, pp. 195–6, and other essays in the same collection. »

143 Gorse, 1997. »

144 Ibid., p. 326. For a detailed discussion of the brothel, see also Chapter 3; see also Stevens Crawshaw, 2016. »

145 Rubens, 1622/1968. »

146 Gorse, 1997, pp. 313–17; for a detailed critical discussion of the complex rolli system of hospitality duties, see Altavista, 2013, which challenges the interpretation of Poleggi, 1998. »

147 For new streets laid out in the 13th and 14th centuries, see Friedman, 2009; Spilner, 1987. »

148 Cipolla, 1976; Eckstein, 2016; Spilner, 1987, ch. 4, and esp. ch. 5 (on neighbourhoods). »

149 For general comments, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 111–18. »

150 Spilner, 1987, pp. 301–5, 307–9, 309–13; see also Orgera, 1976. »

151 Spilner, 1987, pp. 275–301; so successful a process was this that they reinvested profits into further purchase and development. »

152 Ibid., pp. 325–8. »

153 Jamison, 2016, though without mention of the medieval development of these properties. »

154 Ibid., pp. 78–9, notes that Eckstein, 1995, p. 33, records the same landlords; Spilner, 1987, pp. 301–5 (with map). »

155 For San Jacopo, see Jamison, 2016, pp. 78–80; for a listing of the top twenty institutional landlords, see ibid., p. 74, table 4.7. »

156 Ibid., pp. 76–7. »

157 Henderson, 2006, pp. 61–3; Jamison, 2016, p. 74, table 4.7. »

158 Diana, 2003, pp. 443–9; Diana, 2005. »

159 Spilner, 1987, pp. 250–56. For popular housing, see Cataldi, 1987; Giovannoni, 1931; Zevi, 1997. »

160 For rental rates, see Jamison, 2016, pp. 68–70. »

161 Ibid., pp. 78–80 and n. 38. »

162 Henderson, 2006, pp. 18–20, notes a number of these, but associates them with the site of the hospital foundations themselves, as opposed to their land holdings. »

163 For Rome, see McDougall, 2013–14; for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, see Salerno, Spezzaferro and Tafuri, 1973, pp. 260–69. For Siena, see ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 1332 (1455–1578), listing of rental properties; ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 110 (1452–1711), for sales of properties bequeathed but not required. »

164 For the mendicant orders’ role in urbanisation, see Bruzelius, 2014, pp. 111–18. »

165 These comments on Venice largely rely on Trincanato, 1965; for a general discussion and a catalogue of examples, see Trincanato, 1948, pp. 65–8. For a brief introduction to this charity, see d’Andrea, 2013; Pullan, 1971. »

166 Trincanato, 1948, pp. 298–9 (will dated 8 November 1502). These provveditori had oversight of the urban districts of Dorsoduro, Santa Croce and San Polo. Pullan, 1971, pp. 182–3, notes that Dorsodouro was the poorest district in the city. »

167 For the mariners’ block, see Trincanato, 1948, pp. 158–69; for the San Marco development (the will is dated 25 Oct 1515, though the block was perhaps built only in the 17th century), see ibid., pp. 65, 305–6; for calle del Paradiso, see Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 200–03. »

168 Garbellotti, 2007, pp. 126–8; Sneider, 2007. »

169 ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 1332 (1455–1578), the tenants of rental properties. »

170 ASS, Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, 110 (1452–1711). »

171 Benvenuto and di Cioccio, 1986; Zanchettin, 2005a; Zanchettin, 2005b. »

172 Benvenuto and di Cioccio, 1986; Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 147–51. »

173 Zanchettin, 2005b, figs 21, 22. »

174 See Chapter 3 for discussion of the luoghi; see also Storey, 2008, pp. 73–81; Zanchettin, 2005a, pp. 147–8. Architects probably reserved houses on the site as a means of deriving a greater share of the profits from the development. »

175 Lynch, 1960, p. 95 »

176 Ibid.; the ‘edge’ is not defined by the buildings that line the street, but rather as other physical objects (walls, rivers, railway tracks) that act as linear boundaries, though pp. 83–5 also discuss the essential interrelation between elements. »

177 Ibid., p. 93. »

178 Alberti, 1966, p. 40. »

179 Ibid.; see also Camelliti, 2010; Kaftal, 1952; Lucia Nuti (ed.), Atlante storico iconografico delle città toscane, online at http://asict.arte.unipi.it/index.html/ (accessed 7 November 2018). »

180 Friedman, 2001, which discusses the relation between the lost original and the copy from the 1510s preserved in the ‘Catena’ view (p. 72). »

181 For the dome, see ibid., pp. 62–3. For a broader discussion of Rosselli’s compositional technique in relation to his (lost) view of Rome, see Maier, 2015, pp. 31–47. »

182 Friedman, 2001, pp. 66–7. »

183 Architectural surveys initiated the process of accurate mapping, as in Florence with the urbanisation projects around the via Laura; Elam, 1994; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 90–114. »

184 Else, 2009, pp. 168–70. »

185 As Else, 2009, makes clear, the addition of the Cosimo I equestrian monument appears in the second printing of the map, in 1594, by Girolamo Franceschi; Cole, 2011, pp. 244–82. »

186 A recurring theme in Fiorani, 2005; and in the more military–political Pollak, 2010. »

187 Else, 2009; Frangenberg, 1994. »

188 Rose, 2016, pp. 16–19. »

189 On surveying techniques, see Maier, 2015, pp. 51–60, 79–99, with earlier bibliography. »

190 From a vast literature, see Ballon and Friedman, 2007; de Seta, 2011; Fiorani, 2007. For a recent bibliographic survey, see Nevola, 2018. »

191 For a selection of sources, see Frugoni, 1991; Kaftal, 1952; Vauchez, 1995; Vauchez, 1997. »

192 Kaftal, 1952, p. 196 (Bernardine), p. 439 (Geminianus), p. 478 (Herculanus) and so on; for recent treatment, see Camelliti, 2010, pp. 97–121; http://asict.arte.unipi.it/index.html/ (accessed 10 November 2018). »

193 Lavin, 1994, p. 676. »

194 Ricci, 1993; Sinistri, 1992. For the diffusion of early views of Rome, see Maier, 2015, pp. 33–5. »

195 Maier, 2015, pp. 31–45, which relies on an anonymous copy of the map now in the Museo della Città, Mantua, as Rosselli’s original print is also lost. »

196 For Barbari, see Howard, 1997; Howard, 2014, p. 31; Romanelli et al., 1999; Schulz, 1978. »

197 Howard, 2014, pp. 31–4; Schulz, 1978, pp. 437–9, with gridded plan to show distortion. »

198 Hopkins, 2014, p. 83. »

199 For the 1611 view by Odoardo Fialetti and its precursors, see Howard and McBurney, 2014a. »

200 Ibid., p. 24. »

201 Ballon and Friedman, 2007, p. 685, note that ‘the exact configuration of streets remains approximate’; the same point is explored in greater detail in Maier, 2015, pp. 94–5, 104–5. »

202 Maier, 2015, pp. 94–5, 104–5, notes that this was, of course, to become the standard approach to city maps, so that modern viewers more readily recognise the achievement. »

203 Ibid., pp. 79–80, 108–17, observes (p. 115) that Bufalini’s map was superseded only by Giovanni Battista Nolli’s map of 1748. »

204 Floriano del Buono, Ritratto overo profilo della città di Bologna (Bologna, 1636), cited in Maier, 2015, p. 114. »

205 For the Sala Bologna, see discussion in Introduction to Part I, with bibliography; for the surveyor Scipione Dattili called in to prepare the survey, see Fiorani, 2007, pp. 811–12. »

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