Tiber with Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome (Victorian Photographs by Robert MacPherson)

Facing south and overlooking the Tiber River toward the Castel Sant’Angelo and beyond to the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, this view—in one of the earliest photographs of the cityscape—features some of Rome’s most important landmarks. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, this vantage point had been popular with painters such as J.M.W. Turner, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Karl Kaufmann, all of whom produced interpretative images of this scene. Late in the nineteenth century, photographers took advantage of both the emerging technology, as well as the popularity of the view and adopted the perspective for the more easily producible, more affordable, and more portable,  tourist photographs like the one pictured here.