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Rome now is one of the grandest
cities in the world. Millions of pilgrims and tourists
come every year to admire, and be awed by, its treasures
of architecture, art, and history. But is was not always
this way. By the fourteenth century, the great ancient
city had dwindled to a miserable village. Popes and
cardinals had fled to Avignon in southern France. Rome
was dwarfed in wealth and power by the great commercial
cities and territorial states farther north, from
Florence to Venice. In the Renaissance, however, the
popes returned to the See of Saint Peter. Popes and
cardinals straightened streets, raised bridges across
the Tiber, provided hospitals, fountains, and new
churches for the public and splendid palaces and gardens
for themselves. They drew on all the riches of
Renaissance art and architecture to adorn the urban
fabric, which they saw as a tangible proof of the power
and glory of the church. And they attracted pilgrims
from all of Christian Europe, whose alms and living
expenses made the city rich once more. The papal
curia--the central administration of the church- -became
one of the most efficient governments in Europe.
Michelangelo and Raphael, Castiglione and Cellini,
Giuliano da Sangallo and Domenico Fontana lived and
worked in Rome. Architecture, painting, music, and
literature flourished. Papal efforts to make Rome the
centre of a normal Renaissance state, one which could
wield military as well as spiritual power, eventually
failed, but Rome remained a centre of creativity in art
and thought until deep into the seventeenth century.
This is how Cittá del Vaticano came to be. You must not
miss visiting it if are in Rome |
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