ABSTRACT
While the senses were a very real and tangible experience in the early modern city, so too were they a symbolic and metaphorical presence, signifying the route to moral virtue and the dangers of sin.1 In Bartolommeo Del Bene’s 1609 book, Civitas veri, the ideal, centrallyplanned city is surrounded by a wall and five gates, each ascribed to one of the senses. Based on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, the moral lesson is told as a journey through the city. The roads from the gate lead through the valleys of sin to either side and lead up to the mountain at the centre. The intellectual virtues, represented by temples at the mountain, are achieved through the body and the senses, though they are also potentially the routes to danger. By the sixteenth century the well-designed city was a metaphor for the right-lived life, and the senses the means to that achievement.2
