In 1748, Giambattista Nolli published a map of Rome. It was like nothing that had been seen before.
It did not just depict the city as the spaces between the solid black forms of buildings but showed the real complexity of the metropolis at ground level. The map detailed the public and accessible interiors and courtyards, the churches and monastery gardens, the semi-public courts of palaces, the arcaded forecourts of public offices, the access alleys and covered lanes. It was the city as experienced on foot by an inhabitant familiar with a far more complex and nuanced use of space, both public and private, than the usual neutral bird’s eye view.
In Northern Europe such a map might have looked very similar; the interiors of buildings, guild halls, markets, churches, exchanges, alleys and arcades. This was a permeable city in which public and private, work and home were less delineated, in which shop and innkeepers lived above their premises, in which trading might be done in a church (think of those Dutch paintings of serious men discussing business in vast gothic naves), a courtyard or a coffee shop.