Review: Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome, by Pamela O. Long

Abstract

Pamela O. Long Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 368 pp., 73 b/w illus. $135 (cloth), ISBN 9780226543796; $45 (paper), ISBN 9780226591285 Giacomo Della Porta (1532–1602) was a northern Italian sculptor and stucco worker by training who moved to Rome in the late 1550s. He remade himself in the years that followed as an architect and surveyor, receiving several notable commissions, especially for civic building projects. He eventually became a leading architect and overseer of one of the era's most complicated hydraulic engineering works, the restoration of Rome's Acqua Vergine, the last ancient Roman aqueduct that still partially functioned in the sixteenth century. Stefano Duperac (ca. 1525–1604) was a Parisian painter and engraver who lived and worked in Rome in the 1560s–70s. During his successful career there as an artist, Duperac, like Della Porta, became fascinated with the study of Roman antiquities. He cultivated friendships with prominent antiquarians, ultimately becoming one himself. He also applied his extensive knowledge and experience to the study of cartography, which led to his producing innovative antiquarian maps of the city; after he returned to Paris, he continued to practice as a painter, architect, and garden designer. Domenico Fontana (1543–1607) was a stonemason and stucco worker who arrived in Rome in 1563 to join family members in a large architectural workshop. He eventually headed the family business and received building commissions from prominent church officials. As papal architect to Pope Sixtus V, he planned and coordinated the tricky project to move the Vatican obelisk to its present location in Saint Peter's Square and then published a definitive (if self-serving) treatise on the subject. These are just a few examples from the ambitious and protean cast of characters populating Pamela O. Long's Engineering the Eternal City . The story Long tells is firmly rooted in time and place: this is a book about later sixteenth-century Rome, concentrating on the roughly three …