ABSTRACT
Throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, buildings commissioned by the ecclesiastical elite of Rome displayed many of the manifestations of Baroque exuberance and extravagance. With an economy based on the consumption rather than the production of goods and services, and inhabited by a population directly or indirectly dependent upon the immense wealth of the Roman Catholic church, Rome was largely immune from the long recession of the Italian economy that set in around 1619 and lasted throughout the seicento. Funded by the wealth of the papacy – derived in part from the Papal States – the first building in Rome with entirely Baroque attributes is the Church of Santa Susanna. Although it was commissioned by Sixtus V to embellish one of his processional routes, the Strada Pia, the church is, however, essentially a seventeenth-century building. Although publicly funded projects were mainly ecclesiastical in the Baroque age, papal patronage sometimes extended to public utility schemes.
