16th century AD

Sixteenth-century Genoa produc a distinctively novel type of urban space in the Strada Nuova (or, since 1882 the Via Garibaldi) - the residential palace public way or linear piazza - designed to legitimize and enhance the authority of a ruling elite.(1) Laid on the outside in 1550-51 and built between 1558 and 1591 the Strada Nuova [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], when taken as a whole, shows 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 elderly nobility, who governed and controll the tightly restrictive Genoese aristocratic republic of 1528(2) This scenographic urban enclave proclaimed the exclusive social, economic, political, and ceremonial position of the aged 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 of that kind 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 flat 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 of recent origin World. As the bankers of the Hapsburg monarchy, the inhabitants of the Strada Nuova lay their abundant economic resources and humanistic agriculture 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 the agency of a rich, ruling elite.(4)

In the early seventeenth hundred 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 convolution divided into two parts, featuring full-page engraved illustrations (including measured mould 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 close attention of a patrician ensemble, an influential pattern for northern European noble patrons.(5) The Strada Nuova showed a classical scaena frons (scenic front) for the elderly Genoese nobility, which greatly impressed visiting European monarchs, dignitaries, and travelers as a sumptuous "royal court center" within the city.(6) This luxurious presentation way was thus a major example of architecture as metaphor or stage plant for social aggrandizement - coherent in form, dramatic in contented hierarchical in meaning, serving an elite - which appears not seldom in the history of cities. similar 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 impressed sign of theatrical stage-set presentation for early fresh absolutist regimes that was for the use of all in Europe during the Baroque era.(7)

Sebastiano Serlio's famous chapter 3 for instance, of his next to the first Book on Architecture, first published in 1545 articulates not sole an image of the city based upon Vitruvius's description of a classical tragic stage exhibited 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 have affection for strange adventures, and cruel homicide s (as you read in ancient and present Tragedies), happen always in the houses of great Lords, Duke Princes, and Kings. Therefore in of the like kind cases you must make none on the other hand stately houses, as you diocese 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 means of 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, on the other hand requires expression with regard to the Strada Nuova, is that the conception of a coherent and imposing stage put 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 emblem of urban planning with "good government" that which justified, rationalized, preserv and acted on the outside the predominant social order and institutional framework end an architectural-decorative-spatial construct, an imposed visual language or physical rhetoric.