The architecture of Italy perhaps doesn’t dominate the Western world in the same way the country’s art does, but the fact remains that tracing the history of Italy’s buildings is akin to tracing that of Europe in general. The Renaissance and Baroque periods are the most distinctive, but buildings and architecture from all eras make up the fabric of the Italian landscape – more, perhaps, than any other European country.
The first great Italian builders were the Greeks, who during the Hellenistic age – between the third and first century BC – left an indelible mark on the Italian regions they occupied. Greek architecture followed a very rigid system, one that has been subsequently followed on and off by just about every architectural era at some point, so it’s hard to overstate their importance, which was based on the three classical orders: the Doric, the oldest and lowest, Ionic, the middle order, and Corinthian, the highest and most florid. You can find examples of each in the various temples the Greeks left in the south – at Paestum, just south of Naples, and at Agrigento and Siracusa in Sicily, the latter of which has been incorporated into the city’s cathedral. The Greeks built small theatres too, two examples of which remain in Sicily, in Taormina and Siracusa.
At the same time as the Greeks were leaving their mark on the south, the Etruscans occupied parts of central Italy, though they didn’t leave much in the way of architecture apart from a series of necropolises, at Cerveteri and Tarquinia in Lazio, and a third-century-BC gateway in Volterra in Tuscany, part of a set of walls that once encircled this ancient Etruscan city.
The Romans were great and ingenious builders, and they moved architectural forms on from the Greeks, still using columns and pediments but often making these more decorative than supportive. That they could do this was down to the invention of concrete, which allowed the Romans more flexibility in what they built, and their use of the arch, the innate strength of which allowed them to build more solid yet more diverse structures. As with everything else, the Romans were less interested in aesthetics than the Greeks, and favoured function above form at all times; they also liked to build on a large scale, preferring big, grandiose, imperial structures that showed off the power of their system and empire. The Pantheon and Colosseum in Rome are just two examples of this love of size for its own sake, but really any Roman site demonstrates it.
The Roman love of order is also evident in the planned nature of their towns, which had their random, poor quarters but whose commercial heart, around the main forum, had a uniform style across the empire. You can see this in Rome itself, and in the ruins at nearby Ostia Antica, while settlements like Pompeii and Herculaneum demonstrate how rigid the Roman street grid could be, with three horizontal main streets – the decumanus inferior, major and superior – crossed at right angles by other main streets or cardos. The forums were surrounded by shops and businesses, law courts usually in the form of a basilica – a long building with aisles either side and at least one temple – usually a rectangular colonnaded building topped with a triangular pediment with steps leading up to the main entrance.
The Romans also built for their leisure time, constructing theatres and more usually amphitheatres for the staging of gladiatorial games and other spectacles. The Colosseum in Rome is the best-known and largest example of this kind of building, but there are other impressive amphitheatres dotted all over Italy – in Pompeii and Pozzuoli near Naples, and in Verona, to name just the most intact examples.
Roman militarism led to the building of some structures that had no more purpose than to celebrate a famous victory or conquest of a new territory, the triumphal arch – a form which interestingly stayed with us right up to the nineteenth century (for example in Paris and New York). Usually they would be decorated with frieze sculptures illustrating the heroic battles. There are three intact triumphal arches in and around the Forum in Rome, and others in Benevento near Naples, in Aosta, and in Rimini and Ancona on the Adriatic coast. Another way of celebrating imperial triumphs was to decorate a column with sculpted friezes, but far fewer of these survive – only two in fact, in Rome, dedicated by and to the emperors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.
Finally there are the mausoleums that were raised by emperors to hold the remains of themselves and their families – planned as large and fitting tributes to their imperial dynasties. As you might expect the best of these are in Rome, and most impressive is probably the mausoleum of Hadrian, which has been adapted as the Castel Sant’Angelo and is as much a medieval and Renaissance monument as a Roman one.
The first Christian structures in Italy were probably the catacombs. A series of artificial underground tunnels and caverns, they’re not strictly architecture as such, but some of the features – altars, arches, etc, used in underground places of worship – were later adopted when Christianity became the dominant religion and Christian buildings were erected above ground, too.
The first Christian buildings adopted the Roman basilica as their model, for example in Santa Sabina or Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, with one main and two side aisles, and were often built on the site of a saint’s martyrdom or final resting-place, for example St Peter’s on the Vatican Hill. Often they incorporated ancient columns from previous Roman buildings, and were quite bare. Later, the capital of the Church moved to Ravenna and early Christian architecture moved to a Byzantine style, with round churches, mosaics rather than paintings, and often a dome – a style which caught on quickly, and, as you can tell from looking at the skyline of Rome today, never really went away.
The first style of the Middle Ages, predominant during the tenth and eleventh centuries, was the Romanesque, identifiable by its round arches and a return to the basic basilical plan, often with transepts added – not only to add extra space but also so that the footprint of the church made the shape of a cross. There was also a tendency to build campaniles or bell towers separate from the church, and sometimes a separate baptistry too – as can be seen in Pisa, where the Duomo, Baptistry and famous leaning bell tower form a perfect Romanesque ensemble. There are other superb examples of the Romanesque style in Parma and Modena, and in the south at Monreale in Sicily, whose Norman cathedral still bears a large Byzantine strain in its impressive mosaics – a bit like another Romanesque-Byzantine hybrid, the basilica of San Marco in Venice. Another fine Romanesque Italian church, and one which formed something of a blueprint for many that followed, is the church of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan.
By the twelfth century, the Gothic style began to dominate across Europe, characterized by its use of pointed arches, vaulting, and an emphasis on verticality, space and light. However, it never took hold in Italy to the extent it did in France or England, and as a result there are relatively few Gothic buildings here, and those that exist have often been dulled by the heavier lines of the Renaissance style that succeeded it. The style was adopted most successfully in Venice, where a particular form of florid Gothic architecture took root and is in evidence throughout the city – in the Palazzo Ducale most prominently, but also in some of the buildings on the Grand Canal, the Ca’ Foscari and Palazzi Giustinian for example. Otherwise there are isolated examples of the Gothic style throughout the country: Cistercian abbeys like that of Fossanova in Lazio; some of the French-looking churches of the Angevin monarchs of Naples, in particular the monastic complex of Santa Chiara; and the cathedral in Siena, which exhibits a peculiarly Italian form of the Gothic style – very ornate on the outside, much like the nearby cathedral of Orvieto in Umbria. Perhaps the most impressive Gothic building in Italy, at least from a purists’ point of view, is the cathedral of Milan, a vast building which took five hundred years to build but exhibits all the classic features of the style, with a facade and roof that is a forest of pinnacles.
Italian architecture isn’t just about palaces and churches: domestic architecture is also a source of interest and the layout of small towns and farming settlements have had as much impact on Italy’s landscape as the country’s better-known monuments and buildings.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the countryside was unsafe, unhealthy and, in many places, uncultivated, but its topography, with an abundance of hills and mountains rising steeply from fertile plains, provided natural sites for fortified settlements which could both remove the population from malarial swamps and bandits and preserve the limited fertile land for cultivation.
In the period of their greatest expansion – between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries – hill-towns sprang up all over the peninsula. Many were superimposed on early Etruscan cities – Chiusi and Cortona – or were cave dwellings, such as Matera, in Basilicata. Most hill-towns were built within high and sometimes battlemented walls, the sheer drop afforded by these sites (often extended by the use of towers) enabling inhabitants to make good use of gravity by dropping a crushing blow onto the heads of enemies attempting to scale the walls. It was also a good way of dispatching the dead, as well as a simple form of rubbish disposal. Houses were densely packed together and constructed with materials found on or near their site, which adds to the impression that they arise naturally from their geological foundations. Most day-to-day activities were carried out in the streets, traces of which are still visible in the surviving evidence of public fountains and washhouses, wells and communal ovens. Although many hill-towns were genuinely self-contained communities, they were often under the political and economic control of the cities, particularly in north and central Italy. Each city-state set up satellite towns of its own, to protect trade routes or to operate as garrisons for soldiers, weaponry and food in case of war. For example, Siena established the fortified hill-town of Monteriggioni in the early thirteenth century along an important route from Rome into France, which also passed through San Gimignano. At roughly the same time, Florence founded similar frontier outposts, including San Giovanni Valdarno, Scarperia and Firenzuola.
If you’re travelling through Tuscany, Umbria or Le Marche, you’re likely to see another classic Italian structure – the country villa or Casa della Mezzadria, which became widespread during the Renaissance. Usually square in plan, it was built using a combination of brick, stone and terracotta under a tent-like roof with a dove tower (la torre colombaia) at its apex – doves and pigeons were adept at killing snakes and consuming weeds and also provided valuable meat for the table. The house derives its name from the system of sharecropping or mezzadria (based on the word mezza – “half”), under which the peasant farmer yielded up half his produce to the landowner. Used only occasionally by the landlord, these houses were the primary residence of the estate manager (il fattore), who oversaw the landlord’s interests.
In contrast, the architecture of the farming complex (la cascina) was stark, with high rectangular porticoes supported by square columns. The estate accommodated four architecturally distinct elements: the owner-manager’s house, which was more elaborate in design and often taller than the other buildings; housing for workers, tenement-like in character, with external balconies running along the upper floors used to dry and store crops; cow barns; and stables for horses with hay lofts above. Today, many farmhouses have been converted into tourist accommodation or agriturismi. In southern Italy the masseria is a more common type of farming settlement – massive, complex structures that dominate vast tracts of countryside. Consisting of a dense cluster of separate buildings, masserie were sometimes enclosed by a high-perimeter wall with defence towers built into it. At its largest a masseria virtually operated as a self-contained village incorporating church, school, medical clinic and shop, in addition to accommodating the full range of agricultural requirements for stabling, housing (of day-labourers called braccianti) and storage. In their purest, least-altered form, village masserie are still visible in parts of Sicily. Trulli, found along the coast of Puglia and inland, form one of the most remote, curious and ancient types of farm settlement in Italy. Of uncertain origin, they consist of clusters of single circular rooms, each covered by a conical roof Trulli.
Spreading through Italy from the fifteenth century onwards, the Renaissance was perhaps the high point of Italian architecture, as it was in the arts and most other disciplines, and its influence on building methods and styles remains to this day. Essentially, the Renaissance ushered in the period of the professional architect rather than a collection of masons, whose vision of a building was paramount; it also led to a spread of architectural ideas and techniques to domestic as well as religious and royal buildings.
Florence was at the heart of the Renaissance and the architect who led its revival was Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), who became famous for designing an elegant dome to top the city’s Gothic cathedral – a dome which was not only a magnificent engineering feat at the time but today is still the most enduring symbol of the city. Brunelleschi was familiar with and keen to emulate the building methods and feats of ancient Rome and Greece but was also successful in creating his own style, which incorporated the methods of the past but in an increasingly modern way. As such, he more than anyone is responsible for the fact that so many modern buildings still incorporate the columns and capitals, pediments and frames of ancient Greece and Rome.
Another Florentine, Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (1396–1471), succeeded Brunelleschi as chief architect of the cathedral, and built the seminal Medici-Ricciardi palace – a prototype for the classic Renaissance palace, with its rustic basement and more refined first floor. He worked on a number of other Florentine buildings at the time including the “tribune” of the Annunziata church, which he designed as an ancient Roman temple – a design which was finished off by Leone Battista Alberti (1404–72). Alberti was like Leonardo da Vinci in that he was the complete Renaissance man, skilled in all disciplines but perhaps excelling at architecture, although unlike his contemporaries he had nothing to do with the actual building of any of his designs. His focus was on the aesthetic of a building rather than what made it stand up, and as such he could let his imagination run riot, which he did in buildings like the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini and the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua.
The building of the Palazzo Rucellai was overseen by Bernardo Rossellino (1409–64), another architect who had a big influence both in Florence and beyond. He also completed the work on Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome and is perhaps best known for the design and creation of the Renaissance “new town” of Pienza for Pope Pius II.
Arguably the greatest architect of the High Renaissance was Donato Bramante (1443–1514), who learned a lot from his Florentine predecessors but spun it into a style of his own, in the ingenious rebuildings of the churches of San Satiro and Santa Marie delle Grazie in Milan, and most famously in his little Tempietto in Rome, which faithfully turned back to the classical orders of the past but with a small-scale sensibility that was very much of its time. Bramante’s best years were in Rome, and he was commissioned to develop the buildings of the Vatican Palace as well as rebuilding St Peter’s itself. The Greek-cross plan he came up with for the latter never saw the light of day, but the building was started while he was alive and as such he must take credit for at least part of it.
The St Peter’s project spanned more than a century, and Bramante’s place was taken by Michelangelo (1475–1564), who added the dome but died before he could achieve very much. In Rome, the other great artist of the High Renaissance, Raphael (1483–1520), undertook architectural commissions too, designing the Chigi chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo and encouraging his pupil Giulio Romano (1499–1546) to take on vast projects such as the Palazzo del Te in Mantua. Raphael decorated another building for the Chigi family in Rome, the Villa Farnesina, which was built to the designs of Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), an important architect who designed much in his native Siena, and who worked on the Villa Farnese in Caprarola in Lazio with Antonio Sangallo the Younger (1483–1546) – the most talented member of a family of architects. Sangallo was very much the successor of Bramante and Raphael in Rome, and was responsible – again along with a very aged Michelangelo – for perhaps the city’s finest Renaissance palace, the supremely elegant and dignified Palazzo Farnese, in 1514.
Meanwhile Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570) was the principal architect at the time in Venice, and was responsible for many of the large public buildings around Piazza San Marco, most notably the Library and Loggetta, as well as several churches, all of which display an inventiveness that plays well with the fripperies of the existing Venetian-Gothic buildings there. Not far from Venice, in Vicenza, Andrea Palladio (1508–80) achieved an influence that stretched far and wide, with his refined take on Renaissance principles, building a number of palaces and villas between 1540 and 1580 that became the apotheosis of the refined country house – a symmetrical central block, with a columned portico and a central dome. Palladio rigorously followed classical rules and while this means his buildings sometimes appear dull, it is also perhaps the reason why his principles are still alive today.
In Rome Giacomo Vignola (1507–73) took over as the latest architect to oversee the progress of St Peter’s and at the same time built the influential church of the Gesù in the city, to a striking new design that dispensed with aisles and focused everything on the enormous cupola and the high altar. The church, or at least its facade, was finished by Giacomo della Porta (1533–1602), who unwittingly came up with a design that more or less every Roman church would follow for a century or more – one which used all the columns and pediments of the classical orders, but mixed them up in a new and freer way than before, with scrollwork and other features that heralded the new, flashier age of the Baroque.
As in painting and sculpture, the Baroque era was one of massive change, with the Church defiant in the face of the Reformation sweeping across the rest of Europe, and looking for new ways to keep the faithful on message. The theatrical and dramatic nature of the painting and sculpture at the time seeped into architecture, too, and nowhere more so than in Rome, where the Baroque became the dominant architectural style – and the one that most defines the city today (much as Florence is above all defined by the Renaissance).
The chief architect of this time was Carlo Maderno (1556–1629), and it was he who took over and at long last finished St Peter’s, some would say by ruining its original design and converting it to a Latin cross that undermined the original dome-focused plan. It’s the St Peter’s of Maderno that you see today, and the church is in many ways a Baroque church inside and out – much like the piazza outside, whose columned arms are the brainchild of the greatest sculptor and architect of the Baroque age, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Bernini was a prodigy of the most amazing kind, the son of a sculptor and extremely successful – as a sculptor – while still very young. He was enormously talented and incredibly prolific, which means that he more than anyone else maybe shaped the Rome you see today. Patronized as he was by the pope at the time, Urban VIII, it’s Bernini’s features that define the interior of St Peter’s, not least his vast and flashy baldachino under the dome, and although he only gravitated towards architecture later in life he is responsible for a variety of buildings and architectural features around the rest of the city. He restored Piazza Navona and added the massive Fountain of the Four Rivers as its centrepiece; he built the small oval church of Sant’Andrea delle Quirinale, and he worked on the enormous Palazzo Barberini, the seat of his benefactor Urban VIII, as well as the Montecitorio and Chigi palaces.
It’s said that the figure in Bernini’s fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome is shielding its eyes from the horrors of the nearby church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, because it was built by Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), his greatest rival, and the only one who came close to Bernini in talent at the time. As well as being more of an architect, Borromini was a very different sort of man to Bernini: more troubled, and much less of a man about town, but he, too, left his mark on Rome, becoming known as an architect who could come up with ingenious solutions to thorny architectural problems, often shoehorning grand buildings into sites that they were ill-suited for – for example the churches of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, both of which are clever and unique designs. He also worked with Bernini on the Palazzo Barberini, adding a lovely circular staircase as a counterpart to Bernini’s more traditional rectangular one.
The other great Baroque architect active in Rome was Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), whose contribution to the Palazzo Barberini is mentioned at The Baroque, but who also designed the clever and very theatrical church of Santa Maria della Pace and its small piazza. Outside of Rome, the big centres for the Baroque were in southern Italy – in Naples, where architects like Cosimo Fanzago (1591–1678) and Fernando Sanfelice (1675–1748) were active, and in Lecce, whose central core is a Baroque extravaganza, with an array of exuberant buildings fashioned from the soft local sandstone.
Like much of the rest of Europe, Italy entered a relatively bland era after the Baroque – deliberately so, for the spirit of the Neoclassical movement that followed was essentially a revolt against the excesses of the Baroque style, and at heart a return to the solid principles of Classicism. Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–73) was probably the foremost eighteenth-century Italian architect. The son of a Dutch landscape painter living in Naples, he worked with Nicola Salvi (1697–1751) on the Rococo fantasy, Rome’s Trevi Fountain, and later, after a handful of small commissions in Rome, designed and built the enormous Royal Palace at Caserta in 1752, a massive Versailles-like blend of both perfect symmetry and ludicrous grandiloquence, as well as remodelling the more restrained Palazzo Reale in nearby Naples. His successor as most prominent Italian architect was Giuseppe Valadier (1762–1839), a purer exponent of Neoclassical principles, who taught architecture at Rome’s Accademia San Luca and laid out many key parts of the city centre, including the great open space of the Piazza del Popolo, the Pincio and the streets leading off it.
The nineteenth century saw the construction of a series of shopping arcades in the big Italian cities – the Galleria Umberto in Naples, what is now the Galleria Sordi in Rome and perhaps most successfully the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built in 1865 by Giuseppe Mengoni (1829–77), who unfortunately died when he fell from the roof a few days before it opened. Around this time, the era of the Unification of Italy, Rome was remodelled as a capital fit for the new country, and it saw a huge amount of construction, most of it a mixture of the functional nineteenth-century apartment buildings that you find in most European capitals and the odd piece of faux-grandeur like the semicircular Piazza della Repubblica at the top of Via Nazionale, or, most strikingly, the hideous Vittoriano monument overlooking Piazza Venezia, the work of one Giuseppe Sacconi (1854–1905) in 1895 – though even this monstrosity has become accepted over the years.
The early twentieth century saw several international styles touch Italy in some way, for example Art Nouveau, but none really caught on and there wasn’t a new indigenous architectural movement until the Futurists. Chief architect of the Futurists was Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916), who never really built anything but had far-reaching ideas about the modern city that at the time were more science fiction than anything else. Giuseppe Terragni (1904–43) was his true heir, an arch-rationalist who built the Casa del Fascio in Como in 1936, and was the designer of an unrealized project in Rome based on Dante’s Divine Comedy as a tribute to the Italian poet. Terragni worked under Mussolini but died young, after which Mussolini’s preferred architect became Marcello Piacentini (1881–1960), who was responsible for some of the most celebrated of the Duce’s architecture – the Stadio dei Marmi, the housing complex of Garbatella and EUR, all in Rome, as well as the chilling open space of Brescia’s Piazza della Vittoria. Piacentini worked on EUR’s Palazzo dello Sport with Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979), a celebrated Italian architect who specialized in buildings based around prefabricated and reinforced concrete and who later became known for enormous works such as aircraft hangars, the trade-fair halls in Turin and the Olympic Stadium and the Papal Audience Chamber in Rome. Nervi worked with another Italian architect, Gio Ponti (1891–1979), on the prestigious and at the time – 1950 – audacious Pirelli Tower in Milan, until recently still the tallest building in Italy. Ponti was a great Italian designer as well as architect and set up the bilingual design magazine Domus, which is still in circulation today.
Perhaps the best-known Italian architect of the current era is Renzo Piano (b.1937), though more for his work outside Italy than in his home country. Famous initially for his Paris Beaubourg collaboration with Richard Rogers, he has since worked on numerous prestige projects around the world – Hong Kong’s airport, the redesign of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and a lot of big museum projects and extensions. But he recently returned to his roots, designing the hugely successful Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome.