I. Bufalini 1551
The Bufalini plan-map of the city of Rome (Figure 1) is the first orthogonal plan of the city since the early third century Forma Urbis. All earlier 14th and 15th century images of the city were view-maps. It is surprising that no plan-map of the city appears until this late in the Renaissance, since the technique was known and used in such earlier plans of other towns such as Leonardo's plan of Imola which dates from about 1500.
The Bufalini plan is distorted, understandably so, because it is the first of a series which culminate in the highly accurate Nolli map of 1748. A distortion grid (Figure 2) reveals the uneven distortion of the map. The rectification was made by tracing the Bufalini information over the 12 sheets of the large Nolli map (Figure 3). This was done by Allan Ceen in 1988-1989 as a senior fellow at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery, Washington DC).
Figure 4 is the second of the twelve sheets which constitute the whole redrawn Bufalini map. By leaving the Nolli plan visible below the darker lines (corresponding to the Bufalini), one obtains an instantaneous idea of the development of the Piazza del Popolo trivium over the two centuries that elapsed between Bufalini and Nolli. Bufalini's "Orti" (gardens), between Via del Corso and Via del Babuino, have been replaced by Nolli's time with an irregular grid of streets, and Piazza di Spagna has evolved out of the acute-angled intersection of two streets into a bow-tie shaped open space.
