COVE

Severed from both the medieval brick wall of the convent by which it was once flanked on the right, as well as the stone buttressing that fortified it on the left, and missing several of the original segments, the arch was in a precarious state of decay at the turn of the 19th century. The somewhat controversial decision in the early 1820s to dismantle and reconstruct the arch—replacing, for example, the missing marble columns with locally sourced travertine stone—as a freestanding structure rather than preserve the monument in its current state, resulted in a structure that by the early...

The Roman Forum (Foro Romano, in Italian) was once the heart of the ancient Roman Empire, including many of its government buildings. The site was scavanged for raw materials at various times since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the nineteenth century, the site began to be cleared of debris and restoration projects were undertaken. It is now a tourist site filled with architectural fragments and ruins. 

Having served a multitude of unrelated functions—from a bullring to a wool factory, and having suffered the effects of both fires and earthquakes, in 1749 Pope Benedict XIV declared the Colosseum a sacred site based on the likely erroneous belief that Christian martyrs had been sacrificed to the lions in the arena. He subsequently banned the pillaging of its stones for use in the construction and restoration of other buildings, and the ruin became less of a tourist destination and more of a stop on a religious pilgrimage. By the 19th century, botanists were flocking to the building to...

The current version of St. Peter's Dome was designed by Michelangelo in 1547. A native Tuscan, Michelangelo would have looked as much, if not more, to the Duomo of Florence as to the Pantheon for both artistic inspiration and architectural guidance. Ovoid in shape—unlike the hemispherical dome of the Pantheon—and rising steeply, the upward thrust of St. Peter’s dome illustrates the movement away from the balance and symmetry by which the Renaissance was defined, and toward the mannerist tendencies for exaggeration that will develop into the baroque. Michelangelo died in 1564 leaving the...

Reflecting the cumulative efforts of no less than a half dozen significant architects, spanning the succession of twenty pontifcates, and witnessing the passage of one hundred and twenty years from groundbreaking to consecration, St. Peter’s Basilica (Basilica di San Pietro) is the culmination a two-thousand year campaign to both formally and grandly mark the presumed burial site of St. Peter, the first bishop of Rome, and erect an unprecedented and unparalleled paean to Catholicism. Replacement of the neglected and dilapidated 4th-century church built by Constantine, the Roman Empire’s...

The Piazza del Campidoglio (on top of the Campitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome) includes such statues as Castor and Pollux perched atop pedestals at the head of the Cordonata (ramp) and to either side of the entrance to the piazza; the Trophies of Marius flanking the Discouri; and a replica of the 2nd century CE bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius situated at its center. Here, one can also find the Musei Capitolini (Capitoline Museums—the cluster of buildings that circumscribe the trapezoidal-shaped piazza on the Capitoline Hill, the geographical and ceremonial center...

Described by Murray in the 1858 edition of his guidebook as one of “the three principle artists in photography at Rome” (Crawford 360), Robert MacPherson, whose work is pictured here, was the first photographer to be granted access to, and given permission to document the interior of, the Vatican Palace. In discussing exposure times dictated by the collodio-albumen technique—which was best suited for subjects requiring long exposure—he employed in the process, he stated that ”[w]here the light was deficient…in one or two cases, even an exposure of two days was necessary to produce a good...