[La Nuova Topografia di Roma] — Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, and the Villa Borghese.

Description

This sheet from Giambattista Nolli’s La Nuova Topografia di Roma of 1748 covers Rome’s northern gateway quarter, from Porta del Popolo and the great piazza within it southward along the three radiating streets of the tridente to the Spanish Steps and the Pincian Hill.

It is the sheet that every Grand Tour traveler would have recognized first: the view that greeted anyone arriving in Rome from the north, entering through the gate in the Aurelian Wall and finding before them one of the most deliberately composed urban spaces in Europe.

The Map in Detail

Porta del Popolo sits near the upper center of the sheet, the Tiber curving past to its left, with the gardens of Santa Maria del Popolo and the Villa Giustiniana flanking the gate. Within the piazza, the twin churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto frame the mouth of the tridente, the three radiating streets — the Strada di Ripetta along the river, the Strada del Corso through the center, and the Strada del Babuino to the right — that the papacy had cut through the medieval fabric to distribute arriving pilgrims and traffic throughout the city. All three are clearly legible as white corridors cutting through the dense black mass of the Campo Marzio district.

The Spanish Steps, completed just two decades before Nolli’s survey, are visible on the Pincian slope to the right, Nolli’s precise survey capturing even the slight asymmetry in their construction caused by the irregular terrain. Above them, the Villa Borghese spreads across the upper right of the sheet, its walled gardens, formal parterres, and wooded boschi plotted in careful detail. To the right, the Villa Ludovisi and the church of the Cappuccini mark the edge of the inhabited city as it gives way to the open Pincian landscape.

Historical Context

For the throngs of artists, writers, diplomats, and aristocrats who made the Grand Tour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Porta del Popolo was the threshold of Rome itself, the moment when the journey ended, and the Eternal City began. The piazza inside it had been deliberately designed to make that arrival as theatrically overwhelming as possible, the twin churches and the opening of the tridente presenting the traveler with an immediate sense of the city’s scale and order.

The three radiating streets were a product of the same papal urban planning that shaped much of Baroque Rome, an infrastructure of movement designed to connect the city’s dispersed pilgrimage churches and make the metropolis navigable. The Spanish Steps, built between 1723 and 1725 to connect the Piazza di Spagna at the foot of the Pincian Hill to the French church of Trinità dei Monti at its summit, were a recent addition when Nolli surveyed them, their Rococo curves still fresh. The complete Nolli map description notes that his survey was precise enough to record the slight asymmetry in the steps’ construction, a consequence of the irregular space available on the hillside.

The Villa Borghese, laid out in the early seventeenth century for Cardinal Scipione Borghese and celebrated for its sculpture collection and landscape gardens, appears here in the form it would retain until the nineteenth century, when it was opened to the public and eventually given to the city of Rome.

Publication History and Census

This sheet is one of twelve that together compose Nolli’s La Nuova Topografia di Roma, published in Rome in 1748. The complete map measures approximately 6.75 by 5.5 feet when assembled. Institutional copies are recorded at the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, among others. Individual sheets are rarely sold on the market; we only do so here because our copy is incomplete.