| Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome Contributor(s): Long, Pamela O. (Author) |
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ISBN: 022659128X ISBN-13: 9780226591285 Publisher: University of Chicago Press OUR PRICE: $47.52 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - Italy - History | Europe - Renaissance - Architecture | History - Renaissance |
| Dewey: 307.341 |
| LCCN: 2018019731 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 7" W x 9.9" (1.70 lbs) 368 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Italy - Chronological Period - 16th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the "engineering pope" Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects--sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before. This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome's structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period--most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome. |
Contributor Bio(s): Long, Pamela O.: - Pamela O. Long is an independent historian of late medieval and early modern Europe and of the history of science and technology. Her books include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance and Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600. |