Around dusk, December 19, 1450, the year of the Jubilee, hundreds of pilgrims were leaving Old St. Peter’s, streaming over the Ponte San’t Angelo, formerly the Bridge of Hadrian, returning to their inns for the night, when suddenly the far end of the bridge was blocked. No one knows for sure what impeded the flow of people. Perhaps it was pilgrims returning on the Via Del Pellegrino (the way of the Pilgrim). Or maybe it was new construction taking place all over the city. Whatever the reason, the crowd, now obstructed, continued to mount as more and more people pushed from behind. And then the unthinkable happened: people were trampled, many crushed to death. Then, as the crowd swelled, the parapets collapsed, slamming down onto men, women, and children, killing them instantly. Dozens of people tumbled into the water and drowned. In total, nearly three hundred people died. The tragedy shocked Rome.
Hearing the news, Leon Battista Alberti, architect, and consultant to Pope Nicholas V rushed to the scene. What he saw saddened him deeply. “The number of those killed was too great to be believed. People of every age, sex, and condition died. An event worthy of being remembered.” Nicholas, who had declared the Jubilee year, was so disturbed that he immediately ordered two memorial chapels constructed near the bridge to honor the dead. Alberti loved this bridge and had recently written about it in On the Art of Building. So he got to work, sketching a new bridge, one that would be stronger and safer and at the same time more beautiful and meaningful for pilgrims. He was determined to see that these sojourners did not die in vain.
Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404. In 1443 his family was exiled from Florence. They settled in Rome. Over the decades, he had come to love Rome deeply. He was committed to its flourishing. So, when his childhood schoolmate Tomasso Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V in 1447, Alberti, himself an ordained priest, jumped at the chance to work for him. Both shared a love of beauty, grand architecture, and the desire to make Rome a magnificent, Christian city. “The city that had housed the gods, the rulers, and the people of a mighty civilization had become a rude and semi-lawless place,” wrote Joan Gadol, “and Alberti [and Nicholas], like so many before and since, brooded over the spectacle of its ruins.” (Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, 93) Nicholas and Alberti realized that the city was broken and needed to be fixed. And they had a vision for this transformation.
By 1450, after the bridge disaster, Nicholas had already begun his large building project in Rome, centered around St. Peter’s, the Borgo, and Capitoline Hill. To attract thousands of pilgrims to the city, he also planned to rehabilitate the forty churches along the Possesso, imbuing the path with symbolism and meaning. Alberti was involved in these projects, providing designs for new buildings, monuments, and plazas — what they would look like and where they would be placed, and also thinking through the meaning behind each space — what it would communicate to the Pilgrim who passed by it or entered it.
But after the tragedy on Ponte Sant’ Angelo, Alberti may have had second thoughts, not about making the city resonant with meaning, not about building structures that speak, for these he was committed to. But whether the Pope had attempted too much and too soon. Had Nicholas been building Rome for his glory, more concerned with his legacy than the glory of God, and in the process endangering not only the pilgrims on the bridge but the reputation of the church? Alberti thought so.
In 1452, with his grand treatise on architecture finally completed, Alberti gave On the Art of Building in Ten Books to Nicholas, the first book published on architecture in the Renaissance era. In the book, Alberti criticized colossal structures and overblown projects. By giving Nicholas the book, Alberti “was trying,” writes Anthony Grafton in Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, “to educate the Pope in his own aesthetics of austerity; and he hoped not just to prevent particular errors of taste but to explicate the principles a patron should follow.” (p. 304) Although Alberti believed churches should be beautiful—in fact, the most beautiful buildings in the city — he also held that churches should be simple, communicating humbleness, like the spirit of the first Christians who met in homes and catacombs. Unlike Nicholas’s grandiose plans for St. Peter’s, Alberti offered his much simpler, more austere plan to restore St. Peter’s.
Yet by 1452, Nicholas had already laid new foundations for a grand basilica of St. Peter and erected a new wall. Though he had read Alberti’s book, it did not impede his big ideas. It seemed that nothing would slow him down until three years later when another tragedy struck the papal city. In early September 1454, the great tower of Torrione, built to protect and embellish the old papal Palace, collapsed and killed several workers. Another major tragedy. Nicholas was spooked: two building catastrophes in four years. He feared that St. Peter’s might be the next to fail and imperil his entire building project. He turned to Alberti for advice, ready to listen to his advisor. Work on the Basilica came to a sudden halt. A year later, the Pope was dead, unable to see his dream for Rome come true. But did the vision of Rome as a New Jerusalem go to the grave with him?
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It was April 26, 2011, two days after Easter. My family and I had just arrived from Milan the day before. We had come to Italy to study the history and culture of Italy, two things at the heart of classical education and two things we had stressed in our children’s homeschooling. For years, we read to them about the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon River, the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Vatican. But we were also here to study and experience architecture. How it tells a story, shapes us, and why it is so important that we deliberately shape our cities.
On our first morning, as the rest of my family slept, I met up with David Mayernik, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, whose book, Timeless Cities: An Architects Reflections on Renaissance Italy, had transformed the way I looked at urban design.
“This bridge carries a lot of meaning,” said David, as we stepped onto the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, the site of the tragedy in 1450. “They designed the bridge,” he continued, “to mentally and spiritually prepare the pilgrim for St. Peter’s.” “Look at each of the statues,” David said to me as we strolled across the bridge, the River Tiber below us. “Each one is of Christ and inspired by a different part of the Passion Week. They are placed along the bridge to speak to and prepare pilgrims for their journey to St. Peter’s.”
We reached the other side of the bridge and entered a dense maze of streets. Since leaving St. Peter’s earlier in the morning, we had been following the route of the Possesso, the same route pilgrims used at the time of Alberti, which started at St. Peter’s and ended at St. John Lateran, the Cathedral in Rome.
“The streets themselves,” David told me, “and their choices for each step of the route acted as a plot in a story. All along the way, there were important buildings, ‘speaking statues,’ churches, and signs to mark, teach and remind the Pilgrim about the values and virtues of the City of God. Rome was an elaborate story, telling its inhabitants what was important, how to live, and the true end of life.” David was driving home the point that the City of God shapes the kind of buildings we make, but the sort of buildings we make shapes us. And the reason they shape us is that they speak to us.
As we walked, the Possesso got thinner; the buildings formed a street wall, enclosing us as if they were the walls in a house. Alberti once wrote, “that the city is a large house and a house is a small city.” When the city is built right, we feel at home — safe and secure, ready to flourish.
People flock to ancient cities like this because they make them feel alive, somehow more human than in American cities. As Nick Wolterstorff wrote in Until Justice and Peace Embrace, places like Rome are “cities of delight.” They fill us with joy, a deep-seated satisfaction as if we were home.
Writing about Rome in his Timeless Cities, David posits that “all the senses are touched and rewarded here. Fountains, grottos, balustrades, espaliered orange trees, and frescos were endlessly exploited for their impact on our ears, hands, noses, tongues, and eyes; not for mere delight—although that was surely part of their appeal — but to tap our five senses like a good rhetorician to get at our minds and souls…. Rome practically grabs us by the collars to get our attention … the real work of making Rome beautiful was driven by a desire to make her speak.”
After three hours of walking, David had to go, leaving me alone to walk the last half of the Possesso. It was my first day in Rome, and my family was still resting in the flat, so I took my time. As I walked, I thought about what David had told me, that they designed Rome to speak to me, to tell me something important about life and eternity. My mind raced back to Oxford, and I thought about Van and Davy (See my In Search of Deep Faith, chapter 2) and how they were influenced and shaped by the buildings, churches, and bells. From the start, the city fabric spoke to them, pointed them to the eternal, and pulled them into Christianity's orbit. Since our time in Oxford, I had wanted to understand this rhetorical ability of buildings to speak to us. Now, finally, I had time to think about it, to experience it more. And I wanted my family to learn to listen well and be moved by what monumental and beautiful architecture had to say to them.
After an hour more of walking past churches, plazas, fountains, and statues, listening to the city speak, I was inexplicably overcome with a certain melancholy. On the one hand, I was experiencing profound delight. Rome had moved me deeply. But on the other, I was filled with an uneasy sadness. It dawned on me that we only had a few weeks left in Italy. As our year in England and Europe was ending, a year marinating in so many cities of delight, I would have to return to the worn-out cities and suburban sprawl in America, to the dreariness of disposable buildings, flimsy houses, and generic civic structures. With a sigh, I thought to myself, why can’t we build cities of delight anymore? What did Alberti know that we had forgotten?
In Part 2, we will begin laying out what he knew and why it is so important for us to recover it.