My project, The Unfinished Palaces of Rome, 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 will not focus on the buildings themselves, but rather on the circumstances which led to these projects being left incomplete. By studying archival documents on a selection of Rome’s unfinished palaces and houses (erected between 1550 and 1650), I will attempt to answer why these building projects were never completed.