‘Extra moenia’. The Developments of Roman Baroque in Romagna during the Eighteenth Century

The baroque experience not only renewed the image of Rome, but also modified the outlook of all those local centres that adopted this experience as a modern cultural address. However, the process of diffusion and internationalisation was not an either immediate, or a straightforward one. Roman baroque architecture and urban planning was characterised by a rigorous spatial configuration and a solid internal coherence, which made most built organisms unavailable to an outright emulative process. Therefore, an operation of simplification and geometric clarification was presumed a much-needed prerequisite in developing this heritage. In this regard, Carlo Fontana (1636–1714) played a key role, both in the definition of new models through his professional pursuits and in the academic teachings, which were based on a process of regularisation of these innovations. Subsequently, the baroque models initiated to be easily interpreted and exported to suburban areas. Indeed, within the Pontifical State itself, only at the beginning of the eighteenth century through the spreading of printed material and the opportunity to pursue a local version of the ‘Grand Tour’, provincial architects took advantage of expertise and offered fully developed interpretations of the new language. To explore this process, the issue of the Legation of Romagna – one of the suburban regions of the Pontifical State – is an interesting case study. This is because not only are architectural results perfectly aligned with the Roman practices, but also for the particular dialogue that its operators establish with the capital, the phenomenology of the case cannot be overviewed as a simple dependence. On the opposite, it allowed the suburbs to develop autonomously their contents, constituting themselves as pars construens of the very concept of the late baroque.