Studium Urbis Conference on Nolli
"Giambattista Nolli, Imago Urbis and Rome"
31 May - 2 June 2003

CONFERENCE THEME / TOPIC

Through the venue of an international conference, our aim is to provide a unique opportunity to discuss and disseminate information and ideas on the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Giambattista Nolli and his 1748 plan of Rome.

Every serious student, academician and practitioner of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban studies is familiar with the Nolli Plan (Pianta Grande di Roma), which is considered one of the masterpieces of urban cartography. Prepared under the supervision of Nolli between 1736 and 1748, the plan was the first to provide a detailed and accurate image of Rome. The result, which is often referred to as a 'figure-ground' plan by architects, is a depiction of the spatial continuum that constitutes the public city rather than being the standard representation of the city as isolated blocks and monuments. Not only did the plan become the basis for a new administrative division of Rome into fourteen wards (rioni) in 1744, four years prior to its final publication in 1748, but it also provided a means to study buildings or a set of buildings in relation to one another and the urban spaces as one moves through the city. As a result, the image is an unique descriptive and analytic tool and remains valuable today for the insight it affords into the urban history of Rome from the Renaissance to modern times.

The Pianta Grande di Roma was published in twelve sections which could be joined together to produce a large (165 x 206 cm.) image of the city. Included with this set was a single sheet reduction of the large map, with vignettes drawn by Piranesi, and a reduced reprint of the first plan-map of the city (1551) by Leonardo Bufalini. Nolli was the first cartographer to make the distinction between true north and magnetic north, and Nolli's plan remained the model for nearly all the later maps of Rome until the late 19th century.

As such, the image has greatly influenced two and a half centuries of architects, designers, planners, artists, historians, educators and civic leaders. These include G. B. Piranesi and Giuseppe Vasi, both of whom used the map as a source for their architectural views, and Colin Rowe and the well-known Roma Interrotta Exhibition (1978), for which the Nolli plan provided the conceptual and topographic basis of the exhibition drawings by several influential twentieth-century architects. Recently, the advancement of multimedia and digital technologies have allowed several inter-disciplinary educational and research groups, such as those at Princeton and Cornell, to employ the Nolli plan as a base for use with these technologies so as to approach instruction and learning in new ways that explore the rich contextual relationship of architecture and urban form in Rome.

Only a very narrow selection of articles on Nolli's work can be found in English, the most extensive being those by A. Ceen and J. Rykwert. As a result, many students, educators, and practitioners are not familiar with the history and specific circumstances of the Nolli plan, such as its predecessors, creation, purpose, its subsequent influence and its current use. Clearly there is a need for a thorough English language source on Nolli and his work, and we aim to bring this knowledge to the fore with the conference and its printed proceedings. The papers and presentations by scholars and practicing professionals will comprise the majority of the conference sessions.

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