In Rome, since the early
Middle Ages, while the political and representative heart of the city seemed to have remained on the Capitoline Hill, the area of the ancient developed into one of the most densely populated districts (
abitato). The maze of narrow alleys was criss-crossed by three narrow thoroughfares: the (lit. "papal road"), inhabited by curial employees; the (lit. "pilgrims' road") artisan and business road; and the (lit. "straight road", a name common to many roads in medieval Rome). This was used above all by pilgrims
coming from the north and was home to small businesses. The three roads converged to the north towards the
Angels' Bridge, which was therefore the bottleneck of the city's traffic. As
Dante Alighieri described in the
Divine Comedy, in 1300
Pope Boniface VIII () ordered a two-way traffic system to be set up to avoid traffic jams or panic as a response to the dense crowds on Angels' Bridge. After
Pope Martin V () returned to Rome in 1420 at the end of the
Western Schism, the influx of pilgrims increased significantly again, especially in the
Jubilee years. On 29 December 1450, the last day of the Holy Year, a stampede broke out on the bridge that killed more than 300 people. As a result of the catastrophe,
Pope Nicholas V (), the first Renaissance pope who systematically dealt with Roman town planning, ordered the Angels' Bridge to be cleared of stalls and shops; the first urban planning measures in the area were initiated, defining in his programme the abovementioned three streets as the city's main ones. Starting with Nicholas, the policy of the popes was to leave the control of the Capitoline Hill area to the Roman nobility, concentrating urban development on the Tiber bend and the Vatican, made important by the pilgrimage to Saint Peter and the jubilees. In 1475,
Pope Sixtus IV () ordered the Ponte Sisto, named after him, to be built across the Tiber in order to relieve the pilgrimage route across the Angels' Bridge and to connect the
rioni of Regola and
Trastevere. At the same time he ordered the restoration of
Via Pelegrinorum and the area around the ''
Campo de' Fiori. According to the chronicler Stefano Infessura, however, strategic reasons aside from reducing traffic were also important for these projects. Until then it had been very difficult for the pope to carry out urban interventions within the Aurelian Walls, mainly because of the power of the noble families of folk background, but Sixtus could use the revenues of the jubilee to carry out the works in the city. When the holy year was over, he changed the responsibilities of the Conservatori'' (the chief magistrates of Rome's
commune), who until then had the power to curb papal initiatives in Rome, and reinforced the possibility of
expropriating land and buildings for public utility. Aim of the pope was the reduction of the property income of the local nobility, and the redevelopment of the three main streets of the city. The successors of Sixtus IV,
Innocent VIII ();
Alexander VI (); and
Pius III (), continued the Sistine urban planning policy, often completing the works begun by Pope della Rovere. Among them, in 1497 Alexander VI ordered the widening of the
Via Peregrinorum and the opening of the
Porta Settimiana through the
Aurelian Walls. The latter work was a precondition for the future construction of
Via della Lungara on the right bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to
St. Peter's Basilica.
The project of Pope Julius II In addition to reconstructing
St. Peter's Basilica, Julius II implemented multiple projects in the framework of Rome's
urban renewal (
Renovatio Romae) in the Ponte,
Parione,
Sant'Eustachio and
Colonna rioni, a task which was started forty years before by his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV. One of the most important projects was the creation of two new straight streets on the left and right banks of the Tiber: the Via Giulia on the left bank, a new grand avenue through the most densely populated quarter of Rome, from the Ponte Sisto to the
Florentine merchant quarter on the Tiber bend, and the
Via della Lungara along the right bank, a straight road from the
Porta Settimiana in Trastevere to the
Hospital of Santo Spirito in the
Borgo. Both roads–designed by the pope's favourite architect Donato Bramante– flanked the Tiber and were closely connected to it. The Lungara had the dual aim to relieve the pilgrimage route to Saint Peter and transport goods coming from the
Via Aurelia and the
Via Portuense roads towards the centre of the city. Moreover, the street, overlooking the river, was going to represent the place of the cultured and refined
leisure time of the Roman upper class, who built there some of the most luxurious suburban residences in the city. The two streets, surrounded by palaces, including
that of the pope's banker,
Agostino Chigi, would have formed "a kind of city within the city, a garden city along the Tiber". The main goal behind these plans was to superimpose to medieval Rome's disorderly building mesh a regular road network having the Tiber as focus; together with the new
Via Alessandrina that Alexander VI opened in the Borgo and the
Via dei Pettinari that connected the Trastevere on one bank and the
Campidoglio on the other, the
Lungara and Via Giulia created a quadrilateral network of modern roads in the city's chaotic web of narrow streets. In the original project Via Giulia was supposed to reach the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Borgo through the rebuilt ''
Nero's Bridge''. This project had a secondary, celebrative goal to promote the
Pontiff as the unifier of Italy and the renewer of Rome; in 1506, after the end of the
plague, Julius overthrew the powerful
Baglioni and
Bentivoglio families, conquering their strongholds of
Perugia and
Bologna as testified in an inscription along the
Via dei Banchi Nuovi. Aside from serving as a means of communication and representation for the Church, the road was supposed to host the city's new layman's administrative centre. A drawing by Donato Bramante discovered by
Luitpold Frommel in the
Uffizi shows a new huge administrative complex, the
Palazzo dei Tribunali. All the
notaries and courts operating in Rome had to be centralised in this building: among them, the tribunal of the
Conservatori, for centuries located on the Capitoline Hill and traditionally controlled by the
Roman nobility. This decision would therefore put an end to the chaos caused by various jurisdictions subject to ecclesiastical and secular authority, putting the justice under the pope's control. Bramante's sketch shows also a representative square (the
Foro Iulio) opened along the new street and facing the
Palazzo dei Tribunali and the old
Cancelleria (today's Palazzo Sforza-Cesarini). The square was not far from the
Apostolic Camera (the pope's treasury) in
Palazzo Riario and the new
Palazzo della Zecca (lit. "papal mint") erected by Bramante at the edge of
Via dei Banchi Nuovi (also named
Canale di Ponte). By this road lay the merchants' and bankers' houses and offices, like the
Altoviti, Ghinucci,
Acciaiuoli,
Chigi and
Fugger. Close economic ties with Tuscan bankers like
Agostino Chigi were sought and promoted. As a resulting consequence of the project, the area around the Vatican and Trastevere would have been enhanced at the detriment of the Capitoline Hill, symbol of the Roman nobility's power. The plan was thus intended to separate the papacy from the city's powerful noble families (the
baroni), particularly the
Orsini and
Colonna families, who until then had been the Pontiff's most trusted allies, replacing them with a new organisation formed by
Papal legates. Around 1508 the executive phase of the project started: the pope ordered Bramante to start
expropriating and demolishing properties in the densely populated
Campo Marzio to create the new street.
Giorgio Vasari wrote: In August 1511 the life of Julius II was seriously threatened by an illness. Due to that, the feuding Orsini and Colonna families and the other Barons reached an agreement (known as the
Pax Romana), in order to ask at the upcoming
conclave the restoration of the
commune authority and the abolition of various taxes. The pope's prompt recovery made the possibility of conclave fade away; Julius, under pressure from abroad, came to terms with the nobles, propagandizing the anti-papal pact as an agreement in his favour and revoking several decisions taken against the
comune. Among these, he granted the Capitoline court jurisdiction over all cases between Roman citizens, except those pending before the
Sacra Rota. This decision caused the interruption of the works for the new road and the
Palazzo dei Tribunali, whose project was definitively abandoned when the pope died, while the planned square in front of it was forgotten. Apart from a few
rusticated blocks between the
Via del Gonfalone and the
Vicolo del Cefalo, today nothing remains of the
palazzo.
Via Giulia in the 16th century by
Giuseppe Vasi (1759) After the death of Julius II in 1513, the demographic situation in Rome had changed: because of the
wars in Italy, a large number of
Lombards had emigrated to the city, settling in the northern area of the Campo Marzio, where
their national church already existed. This caused a shift in the centre of gravity of the city's development, which excluded Via Giulia. Despite that, Julius' successor,
Pope Leo X () from the
House of Medici, continued the work, favoring the northern end of the road, that is the stretch between the unfinished
Palazzo dei Tribunali and the banking district, where his Florentine countrymen lived and the Florentine merchant community worked. With the bull of 29 January 1519, the pope granted the Florentine
Compagnia della Pietà the construction of the
church of San Giovanni, located also at the northern edge of the road and destined to be the
parish of all Florentines living in Rome. The church was to become the symbol of Florentine economic and financial dominance in Rome, being at the centre of the area occupied by the banks, the
fondachi and the residences of the Tuscan bourgeoisie and nobility living in the pope's capital. Here, important artists, such as
Raphael and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, acquired plots of land or built palaces. In spite of these activities, the urban planning project that was at the base of the road was left unfinished. The decision to relinquish the reconstruction of
Nero's bridge, the lack of connection with the Angels' Bridge and the Borgo and the abandonment of the plan for the centralisation of the courts meant that the road became an unused fragment of an abandoned project. The central and southern parts of the street suffered most for this situation. The area south of the
church of San Biagio–the central part of the Via Giulia around the
Monte dei Planca Incoronati, cut in half by the new road with an act of force of the pope against one of the most powerful families of the city nobility– became a slum filled with inns, brothels, and infamous locations like
Piazza Padella, a venue known for duels and stabbings up to the end of the 19th century and demolished in the 1930s. This area, lying between
Via del Gonfalone,
Via delle Carceri,
Via di Monserrato and the Tiber, was a major district of ill-repute since the Middle Ages; a manuscript from 1556 reports about the quarter around the eventually demolished church of
San Niccolò degli Incoronati hosted "... 150 houses of very simple people, whores and dubious persons ...". The degradation of this part of the road is to be attributed to a decision of the Planca themselves, who, in contrast to the popes' objective of creating a prestigious road, preferred to rent their properties to prostitutes and malefactors, subjects who paid higher rents than the artisans. South of the Planca's
monte lay the
Castrum Senense; this quarter (its name
castrum–"fort"–came from the numerous towers that dotted the area at the time), stretching from the church of
Santa Aurea, today
Santo Spirito dei Napoletani towards south, got this name in the Middle Ages because it was mainly inhabited by people from
Siena. At this end of the Via Giulia, the
Farnese family drew up a well-defined architectural development plan, started with the erection of
their residence between 1517 and 1520. The Farnese decided to turn their back against the street, orienting the main façade of their gigantic palace towards
Campo de' Fiori and the centre of the city, and using the road only as a service route. Under
Pope Paul III (),
Cardinal Girolamo Capodiferro decided to build
his palace near the Farnese palace, but he too chose to turn his
palazzo's gardens towards Via Giulia. The decision to avoid the overlooking of the noble residences along the street was probably due to the degraded state of the area, which housed several brothels. Starting with the middle of the sixteenth century there was an attempt to rehabilitate this area by building welfare facilities.
The church and the hospitals of the brotherhood of the Trinity of the Pilgrims () were erected in a place named
Postribolo di Ponte Sisto ("Ponte Sisto's Brothel"). In 1586, architect
Domenico Fontana built on the orders of
Pope Sixtus V () the
Ospizio dei Mendicanti (lit. "Beggar's Hospice") thus marking the southern end of the
Via Giulia. The hospice was established to solve the begging problem in the city and was given a yearly endowment of 150,000
scudi, enough to employ 2,000 people. At the beginning of the 16th century, it had become fashionable for the various nations and city-states to have their own churches built in Rome: these were known as the
chiese nazionali. The
rioni of Regola and Ponte, along the
processional and pilgrim roads, were the preferred locations, and Via Giulia, because of its proximity to Saint Peter and the commercial area, became a favourite place to erect the shrines with the annexed hospitals and inns for the pilgrims. The Florentines, the Sienese, and the Neapolitans had their churches built along the road (the San Giovanni, the
Santa Caterina, and Santo Spirito respectively), while the Bolognese (
San Giovanni e Petronio), Spanish (
Santa Maria in Monserrato), English (
San Tommaso di Canterbury) and Swedish (
Santa Brigida) churches were built in the nearby zones of the
Regola rione. Despite all these construction activities, the character of the street did not change: brotherhoods, nobility, thieves, upper middle class and prostitutes lived next to each other in the street, which remained an axis of service. The poet
Annibal Caro in his comedy
Gli Straccioni ("The Rags") describes the street as an ill-famed place. At the end of the 16th century, Via Giulia's path was defined for good; it ended by the Florentine quarter to the north and the
Ospizio dei Mendicanti to the south. It became less of a major commercial street and more a busy promenade and a place for celebrations, processions (such as that of the
ammantate, poor girls which were dowried by the goldsmiths of
Sant'Eligio degli Orefici) and races. 1645 Antonio Tempesta Via Giulia marked.svg|Via Giulia; Particular from
Almae urbis Romae prospectus by
Antonio Tempesta (1645)
Via Giulia in the 17th century In the baroque period three major works changed the face of the street: to the north, the completion (except for the façade) of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, a work by Carlo Maderno; in the centre, the construction of the
Carceri Nuove (lit. "New Prisons") based on a project by
Antonio Del Grande; to the south, the reconstruction of
Palazzo Falconieri, by Francesco Borromini. San Giovanni, thanks to its slender dome, gave the street a
vanishing point; the prisons, erected near the never-built palace of the courts of the Bramante, revived Julius II's idea of bringing the
Justitia Papalis into the street; Palazzo Falconieri, finally, added value to the street in an area characterised until then only by
Palazzo Farnese, which turns its back on Via Giulia. Beside these works are worth of mention the churches of Sant'Anna dei Bresciani and
Santa Maria del Suffragio, and various renovations and mergers, such as that of Palazzo Varese, by Maderno, and Palazzo Ricci. In the same period two colleges were established in Via Giulia: the
Collegio Ghislieri, another work by Carlo Maderno, and the Collegio Bandinelli, near San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, by Del Grande. In order to supply the quarter with sufficient drinking water,
Pope Paul V () had the
Aqua Paola extend over the Tiber, reaching the Regola
rione and the
Ghetto. In 1613, the
Fontanone di Ponte Sisto (lit. "The Big Fountain of the Sistine Bridge") was built on the
façade of the beggars' hospice on Via Giulia. Despite these interventions the meaning of the street in the city structure did not change. The expansion of the city towards the Campo Marzio plain, begun by Leo X with the construction of
Via di Ripetta, and the urban planning initiatives of
Gregory XIII () and Sixtus V had already irreparably relegated Via Giulia to a peripheral position with respect to the new city centre. At the end of the 17th century, the road took on a triple face, which it would maintain for another 150 years: an area of building speculation in the north, a detention centre in the middle, and an elegant location in the south, theater of feasts and games. Among the latter, a
tournament held in 1603 by Tiberio Ceuli at Palazzo Sacchetti, and a
Saracen tournament organised in 1617 by Cardinal
Odoardo Farnese at the
Oratorio della Compagnia della Morte, for which he invited eight cardinals. During the summer months the street was sometimes flooded for the pleasure of the common people and the nobility. One of the most glamorous celebrations was held by the Farnese in 1638 to celebrate the birth of the French
dauphin, the future king
Louis XIV. Via Giulia hosted
buffalo races, parades of carnival
floats, and in 1663 the organisation of a horse race with naked hunchbacks during
Carnival is handed down. During the carnival, Via Giulia hosted several feasts promoted by the Florentines. On 20 August 1662, the road was the scene of an episode that had important consequences: a brawl near the Ponte Sisto bridge between soldiers of the
Corsican Guard and
French soldiers belonging to the retinue of Louis XIV's ambassador
Charles III de Créquy resulted in the withdrawal of the ambassador from Rome and the French invasion of
Avignon. In order to avoid worse consequences, the pope was forced to humiliate himself, disbanding the Corsican Guard and erecting a "pyramid of
infamy" at the Corsicans' barracks near the street.
Development in the 18th and 19th centuries , first published in 1748 From an architectural point of view in the 18th century there were only minor interventions in the street: the development of the city was now defined in the
Tridente and
Quirinale areas, both far away from the Tiber bend, and Via Giulia remained cut off. The only works of some importance were the façade of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, by
Alessandro Galilei, the church of
Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte, by
Ferdinando Fuga, and the two small churches of
San Filippo Neri and
San Biagio della Pagnotta, rebuilt respectively by
Filippo Raguzzini and
Giovanni Antonio Perfetti. In this period too the Via Giulia was famous as a venue for parties and entertainment for the common people: in 1720 the Sienese held a festival to celebrate the promotion of
Marc'Antonio Zondadari to
Grand Master of the
Order of Malta;
Fireworks were set off near the
Fontanone di Ponte Sisto; two
triumphal arches were raised above the street, one near Santo Spirito and the other near Palazzo Farnese; and the Fountain of the
Mascherone poured wine for the people instead of water. Under
Pope Clement XI's () rule, the beggars housed in the
Ospizio dei Mendicanti were transferred to the
San Michele a Ripa. The building was afterwards occupied by both poor unmarried girls (
zitelle in the
Romanesco dialect) and a congregation made up of 100 priests and 20 clerics; the latter prayed for the souls of deceased priests. As such, the building was nicknamed the
Ospizio dei cento preti ("Hospice of the Hundred Priests"). In the nineteenth century, in accordance with the process of degradation of the building heritage that affected the whole city, Via Giulia underwent a myriad of interventions of superfetation, superelevation, and occupation of the free spaces. In this period only a few new buildings or restoration projects were realised: among them were the youth prison (
Palazzo del Gonfalone) (1825–27), the renovation of the
Armenian Hospice next to the church of San Biagio (1830), the new façade of the Santo Spirito dei Napoletani (1853), and the
Collegio Spagnuolo (1853) by
Pietro Camporese and
Antonio Sarti, which is the only building of architectonic quality among them. However, this did not stop the general decline of the street that started in the middle of the 18th century. The nobility abandoned the palaces on the street to move to the new centre of urban life in the Campo Marzio plain, and in their place the road hosted artisans, assuming an aspect of abandonment and survival.
Via Giulia since 1870 After Rome
became the capital of the
Kingdom of Italy in 1870, the Tiber (known for flooding, particularly in
Campus Martius plain) had its banks worked on in 1873 by constructing
Lungoteveres, which since 1888 were erected along the road and required the church of Sant'Anna dei Bresciani to be torn down. The Lungoteveres completely cut off Via Giulia from the Tiber and prevented the
loggias and gardens of the palaces facing the river, such as the Palazzi Medici-Clarelli, Sacchetti, Varese, and
Falconieri from having a view of the river. Moreover, the
Fontanone of Ponte Sisto was demolished together with the Beggars' Hospice in 1879 and rebuilt in 1898 on the opposite side of the Ponte Sisto in what is now
Piazza Trilussa. During the
fascist period, in 1938
Benito Mussolini ordered the construction of a wide avenue between
Ponte Mazzini and the
Chiesa Nuova. Because of that, significant building demolitions (including that of the
palazzi Ruggia and Planca Incoronati and of
Piazza Padella) took place in the central section of Via Giulia between
Via della Barchetta and
Vicolo delle Prigioni. The project was stopped because of the beginning of
World War II, and to this day the resulting empty plot has only been partially filled by the new building of the
Liceo Classico Virgilio. Starting with the
post-war years, the street regained gradually its status as one of the most prestigious streets in the city. ==Landmarks on Via Giulia==