16th century AD

Sixteenth-century Genoa produced a distinctively new type of urban space in the Strada Nuova (or, since 1882, the Via Garibaldi) - the residential palace street or linear piazza - designed to legitimize and enhance the authority of a ruling elite.(1) Laid out in 1550-51 and built between 1558 and 1591, the Strada Nuova [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], when taken as a whole, represents two significant themes for the history of Genoa and the interpretation of Renaissance cities. First, this major example of Italian Renaissance architecture and urban planning was conceived and, indeed, functioned as a classical stagelike space for the old nobility, who governed and controlled the tightly restrictive Genoese aristocratic republic of 1528.(2) This scenographic urban enclave proclaimed the exclusive social, economic, political, and ceremonial position of the old noble families who commissioned ostentatiously rich, decorated palaces along the Strada Nuova's central, monumental perspective axis [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1, 19, 23 OMITTED]. As such, the Strada Nuova became the major public presentation space for the regime these families led.

Second, as an urban environment, the Strada Nuova highlighted the newly regained international status of Genoa, which surpassed that of even the medieval Genoese maritime republic, as the leading banking and commercial center of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire in northern and central Europe, the Mediterranean, and the New World. As the bankers of the Hapsburg monarchy, the inhabitants of the Strada Nuova put their abundant economic resources and humanistic culture to good use to shape a "modern" image of their cosmopolitan port city.(3) This was assuredly a major achievement of private-to-public patronage as well as self-conscious display - pubblica magnificenzia (public magnificence) - by a rich, ruling elite.(4)

In the early seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens publicized the Strada Nuova with its magnificent palaces [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 26, 29, 31, 32 OMITTED], along with other major palaces, churches, and villas, in a deluxe folio volume, divided into two parts, featuring full-page engraved illustrations (including measured ground plans, sections, and full facade views). A classical image of the Genoese nobility, the Strada Nuova became the centerpiece of Rubens's Palazzi di Genova, which constituted the first monographic architectural study of a patrician ensemble, an influential model for northern European noble patrons.(5) The Strada Nuova represented a classical scaena frons (scenic front) for the old Genoese nobility, which greatly impressed visiting European monarchs, dignitaries, and travelers as a sumptuous "royal court center" within the city.(6) This luxurious presentation street was thus a major example of architecture as metaphor or stage set for social aggrandizement - coherent in form, dramatic in content, hierarchical in meaning, serving an elite - which appears frequently in the history of cities. Such an urban theater concept was theorized in antiquity, and the Renaissance in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti, Filarete, Andrea Palladio, and others, and contributed to the definition of the urban type of theatrical stage-set presentation for early modern absolutist regimes that was common in Europe during the Baroque era.(7)

Sebastiano Serlio's famous chapter 3, for instance, of his Second Book on Architecture, first published in 1545, articulates not only an image of the city based on Vitruvius's description of a classical tragic stage represented in one-point perspective but also an appropriate setting for superior (that is, larger-than-life) social and moral action [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]:

Houses for Tragedies must be made for great personages, for actions of love, strange adventures, and cruel murders (as you read in ancient and modern Tragedies), happen always in the houses of great Lords, Dukes, Princes, and Kings. Therefore in such cases you must make none but stately houses, as you see here in this figure [of the tragic stage set].(8)

To Serlio and other Renaissance theorists, the city was a stage where the articulation of Aristotle's dramatic unities of place, time, and action were symbolically and physically heightened by architecture, which created a psychologically charged frame and indeed took part in the play of serious (that is, tragic) social and ethical actions.(9) What was left unsaid here, but requires expression with regard to the Strada Nuova, is that the concept of a coherent and imposing stage set in urban planning carried with it the specific message of the patrons' claims to power and privilege, aimed at local citizens and the foreign audiences who viewed it. Ancient and Renaissance theorists associated this type of urban planning with "good government," that which justified, rationalized, preserved, and acted out the predominant social order and institutional framework through an architectural-decorative-spatial construct, an imposed visual language or physical rhetoric.