Crafts and trades in mid-18th century Rome toponymy

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The toponymy shown in the map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli (1748) indicates many streets, alleys, squares named after crafts or trades.

The map records also several churches and oratories that carry reference to a craft or to a trade in their name. This paper illustrates their location, general nature, and syntax of these urban components and show that this lay-out is less casual than one would expect. Simple conjectures about if and how these data may carry information on the actual distribution of crafts and trades in late-baroque Rome are proposed.

1. Nolli’s map

1.1. Rome in the mid-18th century

The city represented in the map published by Giambattista Nolli in 1748 is probably the most beautiful and architecturally significant city of its time. It is the fabulous destination of the Grand Tour, the product of marvelous transformations of the medieval fabric during the Renaissance and especially during more than hundred years of the diffused transformations of Baroque and late-Baroque architecture and urban design. It is also a city that is becoming a true “capital” with important functional additions of not only extraordinary urban spaces (such as piazze and strade, especially from the papacy of Alexander VII Chigi (1655-67) on) but also high-ranking services and administrative buildings (harbors, granaries, educational, prisons, hospitals, theatres, custom houses, cemeteries).

Though at a slower pace than in other European cities undergoing the transformations deriving from major demographic and industrial changes, production and commerce activities kept concentrating in Rome’s urban fabric. Despite the presence of an ambitious infrastructural system made of roads and hydraulic network, starting with the late 16th century, after the papacy of Sixtus V Peretti (1585-90), Rome was being regenerated and densified rather than expanded. Between the late 16th century and the second half of the 19th century, when Rome became the administrative capital of the new Italian Kingdom, the overall layout of the city remained substantially the same.

Rome as it is represented in the Nolli map is still a city, a large one, made of traditional, mostly medieval fabric and patterns. Its mix of building types and intertwined coexistence of residential, administrative, service and production uses have made it a paradigm for present day urban designers. The map by Nolli is the first “scientific” map of Rome and its first ichnography, after many three-dimensional representations, since the publication of the coarse map by Bufalini of 1551. When compared with present maps and aero-photographs it proves to be surprisingly accurate in consideration of the date of its production.

Because of its figure-ground format as well as its being a cherished image of a pre-industrial city, the map of Rome by Nolli has been extraordinarily familiar, popular and fashionable among architects, at least for half a century. In 1978, it was the basis for the exhibition “Roma interrotta”:[1] a milestone in the recent history of architecture and urban design. The University of Oregon has produced a well-known website dedicated to it: possibly the most important on the subject worldwide.[2]

The map was the product of many years of surveys. It is a “package” made of three maps: a large one made of twelve plates, a small one in one plate and a reproduction and graphic update of the precedent map, made by Bufalini about two centuries before. The study in this paper is based on the findings in the large map which is the most detailed and copious of data.[3]

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