Review: “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome by Dorothy Metzger Habel

Abstract

Dorothy Metzger Habel “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013, 320 pp., 119 b/w illus. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271055732 Any reader who loves Rome, studies the early modern period in art history, and holds dear the history of architecture will find much to admire in Dorothy Metzger Habel’s study of construction and urban planning in seventeenth-century Rome. “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process in Baroque Rome digs deep into archival records to tell compelling stories about how the building trades functioned and who got to boss whom around, along with what were the obstacles, snags, and goals faced by those who helped to shape baroque Rome. One who studies urbanism is going to relish her accounts and revel in this insider’s view of how architecture and urban development worked when the pope was the king of Rome. Habel’s chronicle of the building industry in seventeenth-century Rome begins with urban renewal in Piazza Colonna (with spillover into Piazza Navona), followed by a detailed study of the ways in which one of the most ambitious projects of the seventeenth century, the building of Piazza San Pietro, both collided with and influenced nearly every other building project in Rome during the reign of Pope Alexander VII (1655–67). We learn from the author that she “hears voices” from the past. Such a phrase sounds ever-so-slightly eerie, as it is meant to do. Rome itself is, after all, haunted by its past and has been, off and on, built and built over many times. In the introduction, Habel tells us that her original conception of this project was to write essays, a way of proceeding that calls upon an early modern form of prose. To “essay” is to attempt or try. Her essaying, she had assumed, would include archival research and also follow fairly well-established methods in architectural history. But, in the end, she turns to what she calls something …