Envisioning Baroque Rome

Envisioning Baroque Rome

Envisioning Baroque Rome is a digital humanities project that provides an internet-based, 3D walkable reconstruction of the city of Rome ca. 1676, using the gaming platform Unity. The reconstruction is grounded in Giovanni Battista Falda’s (1643-1678) great bird’s-eye view map of that year, and subsumes the fine detail of over three hundred views of the city etched by the artist. The project enables visitors to enter the map, strolling the streets of the Baroque city as virtual pedestrians: gazing up at church facades that once towered over surrounding buildings, climbing the Capitoline Hill to look down on the tree-lined cattle market that once filled the ancient forum, crossing the Tiber River on the Ponte S. Angelo to explore the long lost portions of the Borgo neighborhood, even entering the Pantheon and following light from the oculus as it moves across the floor. Reconstructed from the map and etchings of a single artist, made over a period of just fifteen years, Envisioning Baroque Rome recaptures piazzas, streets, fountains, and architecture lost to the various urban renewal campaigns of the intervening centuries.

https://www.baroquerome.org/