Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome. By Pamela O. Long (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018) 369 pp. $45.00

Abstract

Between 1560 and 1590, the tumbledown flood-prone Rome of ancient ruins, clogged streets, and water shortages was re-imagined and re-engineered into a city much closer to what it is today. Through the initiatives of four popes, including the great builder Sixtus V, and a host of architect/engineers, noted artists, simple artisans, map makers, cardinals, civic officials, and private citizens, the city enjoyed a remarkable imaginative moment. One of the surprising and previously unknown (at least to me) stories that Long uncovers was a proposal from Sixtus V to rebuild the Colosseum by turning it into a woolen-cloth factory, complete with housing for poor workers. This was just one of the revitalizing projects, many of which succeeded. The repairs on two ancient aqueducts made possible the famous fountains of Rome and an abundant water supply for the parched inhabitants, especially those who could not afford water delivered by water carriers. Large-scale engineering kept the city in a flurry of activity: Masons repaired the ancient walls, built new palaces and churches; sewers were cleared; streets were redesigned, straightened, widened, and paved; popes had obelisks transported from their ancient sites to more propitious ones that celebrated the universal church; and physicians attempted to evaluate the healthfulness of Tiber water. Cartographers and lithographers relied on surveys to represent these renovations and to imagine new ones, fulfilling a growing demand for images of the ancient and modern city. “Reenvisioning Rome on paper and remaking Rome as a physical entity,” as Long puts it, “went hand in hand” (162).Long’s approach reveals much about urban history because she works outside the usual disciplinary boundaries. The history of the engineering in the Renaissance does not fit into the history of science or architecture or urban planning. Although huge engineering projects were undertaken in the period, there were no engineers, engineering guilds, or engineering courses in the universities and no concept of an autonomous profession that adhered to commonly accepted principles and technologies. Long has become well-known among scholars of the Renaissance for identifying vital intellectual and practical endeavours that occurred without the support of any ostensible institutional structures and that do not fit well within the concerns of the modern disciplines. She calls these “‘trading zones’—arenas in which substantive communication occurred between university-educated people and those trained in artisanal workshops or in other practical/technical venues” (4).1 Expertise was unlicensed, even untutored, the result of discussions, arguments, and provisional planning among practitioners from a variety of backgrounds.These debates and interactions among artisans and the learned produced the crucial foundation for the empirical sciences that evolved in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The refurbished infrastructure of sixteenth-century Rome exemplified a process of creative inquiry dependent more on interpersonal interactions than on freedom of publication and conscience. There is no little irony in the fact that papal Rome silenced Galileo, but that same Rome produced one of the most vital trading zones, anticipating the melding of theory and practice characteristic of modern science. Long’s thesis in this book and her previous works forces scholars to rethink the very origins of science as an endeavor that first thrived outside of the universities, academies, and scientific societies.To make her case about the power of interpersonal interactions, Long’s brilliant research allows her to populate her book with fascinating stories about friends and rivals. One of the great debates of the period involved the location of the ancient Roman forum, known from literature but lost among the ruins. Trained as a painter, Pirro Ligorio became an expert on Roman antiquities by training his eye to see what others missed. Ligorio joined forces with Benedetto Egio, a priest and humanist who knew the Latin sources. Their rival was Bartolomeo Marliani, the author of a popular guidebook to Rome. The fierce mutual antagonism between the two camps expressed in printed texts and maps became a virtual primer on method, an example of the vigorous engineering culture of late sixteenth-century Rome.