Baroque Rome was not planned in a day: forms of immunity in Alexander VII’s and Louis XIV’s urban strategies (1656–68)

Fabio Gigone

Planning Perspectives, 2025, vol. 40, issue 5, 1099-1132

Abstract: In the seventeenth century, Rome’s urban territory was legally contested, particularly during the 1660s when the Popes sought to assert power over the foreign states’ territorial claims. The papacy’s influence on the urban landscape was traditionally marked by extensive building activities that bolstered its financial resources, despite a decline in temporal power evidenced by diplomatic failures in the mid-1600s. Ecclesiastical immunities and privileges were employed as legal tools to generate income and reclaim urban territory, while European powers pursued ambassadorial extraterritoriality. Two crises, the 1656–1657 plague and the expansion of Louis XIV’s diplomatic immunities, exposed papal authority, prompting Pope Alexander VII to use architecture to reformulate his political aims. This paper argues that the concept of ‘immunity’ is key to understanding the significant urban and architectural forces that shaped Rome’s Baroque city.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02665433.2025.2529302 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:40:y:2025:i:5:p:1099-1132

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rppe20

DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2025.2529302

Access Statistics for this article

Planning Perspectives is currently edited by Michael Hebbert

More articles in Planning Perspectives from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().