ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of festivities as political and cultural tools in early modern Rome. Home to the papacy, governed by an elected rather than hereditary spiritual and secular leader, as well as a centre of pilgrimage, diplomacy and tourism, Rome was a unique and unstable political environment in which leading families sought to promote their own standing and foreign powers sought to influence papal policy and elicit financial support. This chapter explores how the staging and financing of spectacles such as fireworks, giostre (tournaments), processions and theatrical entertainments were important elements in such campaigns of cultural and political legitimation and persuasion, targeted at audiences in Rome and, through publication, further afield. It looks at the fluidity between public and private space in Rome; at how the city served as a stage for festive events and could be transformed by them through the temporary appropriation of public space for dynastic or national purposes; at how the same supposedly neutral space could be colonised by different, often rival powers; and at the relationship between ephemeral events and architectural campaigns as temporary or permanent physical representations of cultural and economic power.
