Open Lecture

At the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome
Tuesday 9th of May starts at 18.00  

Camilla Annerfeldt, Gihls Foundation fellowship
“The Unfinished Palaces of Rome”

In this lecture, I will present my on-going project, The Unfinished Palaces of Rome, which aims to elucidate a specific feature in the urban spaces of early modern Rome – namely, the city’s unfinished palaces and houses. Rome is sometimes described as ‘a broken city’ since its historic city centre is full of half-built buildings. These can be identified by a distinctive serrated edge that runs up the side of a building, which tells us that the building project was never completed according to its initial plan. However, this project does not focus on the buildings themselves, but rather on the circumstances which led to these projects being left incomplete. The lecture will focus on the ways in which the urban space of early modern Rome was used for proclaiming social identity, as well as the different attitudes and aspects that enabled any performance of such. We will also look closer on a selection of some of these unfinished palaces and houses, erected between the 1550s and 1650s.

Camilla Annerfeldt holds an MA in Art History, awarded at Uppsala University in 2013. She earned her PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute in 2021, with a thesis on clothing as social identity markers in early modern Rome. Her research interests include the material culture of early modern Italy, with a particular focus on the dress worn in Rome; the concept of national identity in the early modern period; and the social history of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the upcoming academic year 2022-2023, she will be a postdoc-fellow at the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome, funded by the Stiftelsen Gihl’s fund.