Building the Third Rome: Italy, the Vatican, and the new district in Prati di Castello, 1870–1895

Abstract

When the Italian army breached the Aurelian walls at Porta Pia in 1870 and Rome was seized from the pope, the city could not have been more unlike a contemporary European capital city. In the years after it became Italy’s capital, Rome underwent a process of radical urban renewal. This article, focusing on the creation of a new neighbourhood in Prati di Castello – the area north-east of the Vatican – frames Rome’s transformation as part of the ‘culture wars’ between the Church and the new Italian state. The decision to postpone the creation of the new district in Prati until the 1880s and the way it was then carried out reflect the wider shift of Italian politics from Cavour’s notion of ‘a free Church in a free State’ to the more combative anticlericalism of the Left after 1876. Against this background, Prati emerged as a political landscape in which competing powers articulated their aspirations and values, negotiated their respective authorities, and transmitted political ideas.