We just spent some days in Rome for the CAMPO launch of Interior Tales: to celebrate our Roman week, here are a few juicy details from a map by Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630) published by printmaker Giovanni Domenico de Rossi in 1645. These are all details from sheet 4 of the portfolio. Above you can see the Colosseum right at the edge of the inhabited city centre, with Saint Clemente in an almost rural condition behind it.

North of the Colosseum (or left in the case of this map, which is a perspective from the Tiber's Vatican bank) is the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, today embedded in dense built tissue on top of the Oppio Hill.

The Capitoline Hill or Campidoglio is traditionally said to have been redesigned by Michelangelo in the 1530s and 1540s. Something quite weird is going on in this representation, however. On the left, the Palazzo Nuovo (barely a 1-bay affair with a façade to close the square) looks exactly like it does today, and yet books tell us it was supposedly completed only in the early 1660s by Carlo Rainaldi. We cannot see the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the right, but it does look finished, which matches all we know (it is the one piece probably built during Michelangelo's lifetime). But the central Palazzo Senatorio, built on the ruins of the Tabularium, still sports here a rudimentary, unfinished façade, while we know that Giacomo della Porta (who hailed from Lake Lugano like us) completed it in 1605. So...

Anyone able to solve the mystery of this anachronism? By the way, the paving with the large oval pattern was indeed designed by Michelangelo but apparently only realized in the 1900s. Curiouser and curiouser.

The most likely explanation seems to be that the Campidoglio had always been a major propaganda affair. In fact, no actual drawing by Michelangelo has survived, and there is no proof he even really conceived the scheme. The earliest and most famous extant representation (see below) is an engraving by Etienne Duperac dated 1567-69; this engraving has been widely used as advertisement for the papal renovation of what had once been the centre of Rome's civic power. So it seems likely that Tempesta copied Duperac rather than the real thing - even if this still doesn't explain why the Palazzo Senatorio remains in its unfinished state.

Etienne Duperac, Piazza del Campidoglio, 1567-59

Why didn't Tempesta copy the main facade as well? Mystery.

Here's the main square of the Ghetto, 'Platea Iudea' o Piazza Giudea; on the right you can see the wall that divided the Ghetto from the rest of the city, cutting what is today the Piazza delle Cinque Scole (Square of the Four Synagogues) in two parts, the Piazza Giudea inside the precinct, the Piazza dei Cenci outside. Below you can see the sheet in its entirety. The whole portfolio is a real beauty, stay tuned as we'll upload the other folios in the next weeks.

The first gift we received this season comes from Naples thanks to Cherubino Gambardella via Michela Bonomo. Volando sulla Megalopoli (Flying over the Megalopolis) gathers the projects produced for an exhibition that is still on show at the Cloister of Santa Maria La Nova in Naples: the exhibition closes Jan 7, 2016, so there are still a few weeks to visit it. If you happen to be in Naples, it is definitely a must! The work curated by Gambardella stands out as one of the most interesting recent attempts to discuss the urban condition in Italy. In Volando sulla Megalopoli Gambardella invites eleven architects to take a position vis-a-vis contemporary Naples using text and drawing, in a non-literal, imaginative way; the work is completed by eleven large models that illustrate in three dimensions an exemplary fragment of the vision of the author. While the work is very site-specific, we think it is not out of place to read in it a larger ambition to say something about the urban condition in Europe at large: Naples as a paradigm.

Close-up of the model illustrating Beniamino Servino's entry.

Naples is unique and yet exemplary: a law onto itself, the most and least Italian city, the most beautiful and the most ravaged by random development. The idea of constructing a sort of polyphonic project for Naples recalls Roma Interrotta and yet feels refreshingly bold and contemporary because of both the multimedia content and the subject itself - a city that is just impossible to define once and for all. Naples has it all, the very best architecture and a stunning landscape: it also has one of the deadliest volcanos in the world, and a too-complex-for-words social situation. Gambardella's drawing (above) is a perfect portrait of the complexities and contradictions of Naples. A couple of centuries ago, most big cities in Italy were all about gold and dirt - Venice, Rome, Palermo - but now perhaps Naples has remained the only place that can claim that. The book makes the potential of this condition all the clearest for avoiding data, statistics, and worn technical attempts at a 'scientific' analysis: its intelligence is all in the attempt to mobilize the visionary capital of the place.

The eleven positions are by no means homogeneous: from Beniamino Servino's sophisticated critique of the relationship between past and present, to Lorenzo Capobianco's plea for a rediscovery of collective open air space, from Maria Gelvi's hypothesis for a rethinking of residential sprawl, to Concetta Tavoletta's proposal for the decaying industrial heritage. These differences are what makes the book particularly compelling. We haven't visited the exhibition yet, but it looks like a very successful installation that makes the most of a stunning historical location and completes it with a gold-painted structure that is a nod to the city's rococo legacy. This is very much a choral piece of work; and yet, Gambardella's passion and commitment are very evident and function as the necessary link between the individual positions. Gambardella's own drawings stand out for their irony and confidence, pairing a Serlio fragment with a brightly coloured hand sketch. They make us smile and hope the best for Italy: to grow out of what Kant would call its 'self-incurred immaturity' without losing its sprezzatura. Thank you Cherubino for this gift!