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This introduction provides a portrait of late sixteenth-century Rome. It gives background including the 1527 Sack of Rome. It discusses the Council of Trent, concluded in 1563. It introduces the main themes of the book including the idea of trading zones--that Roman infrastructure projects as well as investigation of antiquities and cartographical activities were characterized by arenas of substantive communication between men from learned and those from practical or skilled backgrounds. The chapter introduces four popes important to the book--Pius IV, Pius V, Gregory XIII, and Sixtus V. It discusses in detail the papal government of the city (or Camera Apostolica) and the city government of the Capitoline Council. It also describes the population of Rome from elite cardinals to the civic nobility, to skilled workers and to laborers and vagabonds. It treats some of the historiography of Roman governance, including the Prodi thesis.

This chapter concerns the streets and sewers of fifteenth and sixteenth century Rome. It traces two centuries of papal bulls concerning the masters of the streets and their responsibilities, including street cleaning. It discusses the laws which allowed property owners to force their neighbors to sell their property to them for their own palace expansion. It itemizes the functioning sewers in the late sixteenth century and provides a history of one of them, the Chiavica di San Silvestro. It argues that sanitation issues in Rome were characteristic of early modern rather than modern cities and that sanitation efforts failed as a whole for structural reasons.

This chapter offers a bird’s-eye view of the 100 years of debate that followed upon Regiomontanus’s death and culminated in the Gregorian Reform of 1582, focusing in particular on the time of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) and the work carried out in the 1570s by a commission of experts convened by Pope Gregory XIII, which came to favour an intricate scheme for an astronomically accurate and freely adjustable calendar. Some attention is paid to the extent to which Copernican heliocentric astronomy may have influenced, or was influenced by, the ongoing discussions surrounding the calendar reform. At the same time, the key argument of this chapter is that the breakthrough achieved in the sixteenth century rested to a very large extent on premises, concepts, and insights first formulated during the preceding medieval centuries.