Pope Clement XII

Financially shrewd pontiff used papal cash for building projects

Pope Clement XII commission many
architectural works in Rome and Ancona

Lorenzo Corsini, who during his time as Pope Clement XII substantially built up the wealth of the Vatican, was born on this day in 1740 in Florence.

While he was pontiff, Clement XII began the construction of the Trevi Fountain, established the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and carried out extensive public building works in the Papal States.

Corsini was the son of Bartolomeo Corsini, Marquis of Casigliano, and Elisabetta Strozzi, who was from an old Florentine noble family. He was a nephew of Cardinal Neri Corsini and a distant relative of Saint Andrew Corsini.

After studying at the Jesuit College in Rome, he went to the University of Pisa where he achieved a doctorate in both civil law and canon law.

He practised law under his uncle, Cardinal Corsini, but after the death of both his uncle and father, he renounced his right to become head of his family.

Instead, he purchased from Pope Innocent XI, for 30,000 scudi, a position as a prelate. He subsequently devoted his time and his money to the enlargement of the library bequeathed to him by his uncle.  His home in Piazza Navona went on to become the centre of Rome’s scholarly and artistic life.

In 1690, Corsini was made titular Archbishop of Nicomedia and he was chosen as nuncio to Vienna, receiving a dispensation from Pope Alexander VIII because he had not yet been ordained as a priest. He did not proceed to the imperial court, because Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor, declared that he had the right to select the nuncio from a list of three names furnished by the pope.

Corsini was appointed as governor general of the Castel Sant’Angelo in 1696. Under Pope Clement XI, his talents were used as a courtier and in 1706 he was named as Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna, and he was also retained as papal treasurer.

Pope Benedict XIII made him Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura and he was also appointed as the Cardinal-Priest of San Pietro in Vincoli and Cardinal Bishop of Frascati.

Luigi Vanvitelli was Pope
Clement XII's architect of choice

Under Benedict XIII the finances of the Papal States had been drained by the cardinal who had been looking after them. After Pope Benedict’s death, the College of Cardinals selected Corsini as his successor, who was by then aged 78.

After he became Pope in 1730, Corsini took the papal name Clement in honour of Pope Clement XI, who had made him a cardinal.

He restored the Papal finances, demanding restitution from the people who had abused the trust of his predecessor. Soon money was pouring into his treasury, enabling him to undertake extensive building programmes in Rome and the Papal States.

Clement XII restored the Arch of Constantine, paved the streets of Rome, and widened Via del Corso.

As part of his aim to improve the wellbeing of his subjects through economic development, Clement XII granted Ancona in Le Marche freeport status and commissioned the architect Luigi Vanvitelli to redesign the ancient port.

He also commissioned Vanvitelli to build the Lazzaretto of Ancona as a quarantine station for the port.

After Clement XII’s death in 1740 his remains were transferred to a tomb in the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, for which he had commissioned the building of a new facade after organising a competition, won by Alessandro Galilei, who completed it in 1735.

The Arch of Clementine with the
Arch of Trajan in the foreground

Travel tip:

The architect Luigi Vanvitelli  worked extensively in Ancona in the 1730s under Pope Clement XII, who commissioned him to modernize and expand Ancona’s maritime infrastructure, which had fallen into decline. His contributions included redesigning the port layout, building the Molo Nuovo (New Pier) and most notably the Lazzaretto, also known as the Mole Vanvitelliana, a striking pentagonal complex built on an artificial island, which originally served as a quarantine station for travelers and goods. He also built the Chiesa del Gesù and Casa degli Esercizi spirituali - a church and adjoining spiritual retreat house facing the port, and the Arch of Clementine, which he built just a few metres away from the Arch of Trajan, built 1600 years earlier by the Senate and people of Rome in honour of the Emperor Trajan, who expanded the port of the city out of his own pocket, improving the docks and the fortifications.

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The statue of Pope Clement XII in
front of the San Domenico church

Travel tip:

Also in Ancona, in front of the Chiesa di San Domenico and looking out across the rectangular Piazza del Plebescito, is a statue of Pope Clement XII, the work of the sculptor Agostino Cornacchini, which was erected in 1738. It was originally destined for the portico of the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, where it remained for just under a year before being moved to Ancona at the suggestion of the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini, in recognition of the work he had commissioned to modernise the port and the city.  Piazza del Plebiscito is also known locally as Piazza del Papa. The Chiesa di San Domenico, at the top of the square’s incline, is a Baroque church built by Carlo Marchionni and completed in 1778. The interior is notable for two outstanding paintings, the Annunciation by Guercino in the first chapel on the left, and Titian’s altarpiece, The Crucifixion. 

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More reading:

How the election of Antipope Clement VII sparked a split in Catholic Church

Pope Innocent XII, the pontiff who ended the practice of nepotism in the papal appointments

The flamboyant pope who helped make books available to ordinary people

Also on this day:

1763: The birth of musician Domenico Dragonetti 

1794: The birth of opera singer Giovanni Battista Rubini

1883: The birth of painter and mosaicist Gino Severini

1906: Vesuvius eruption kills more than 200

1973: The birth of footballer Marco Delvecchio

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Nicola Salvi – architect

Creator of Rome’s iconic Trevi Fountain

The Trevi Fountain was Nicola Salvi's masterpiece

The architect Nicola Salvi, famous as the designer of the Fontana di Trevi – known in English as the Trevi Fountain and one of the most famous and most visited monuments in Rome – died on this day in 1751.

He was working on the Trevi when he passed away, having been engaged on the project since 1732. It had to be finished by Giuseppe Pannini and the giant statue of Oceanus – the Titan God of the Sea in Greek mythology – set in the central niche, was completed by Pietro Bracci, yet Salvi takes credit as the lead architect.

Salvi ran a workshop in Rome that he had taken over when his master, Antonio Canevari, left the city in 1727 to take up a position working as architectural consultant to the king of Portugal in Lisbon.

He completed a number of commissions on behalf of Canevari but spent a good deal of his time tutoring others and might have made very little impression on architectural history had he not submitted entries for two design competitions run by Pope Clement XII in 1732.

One was for a new façade for the church of San Giovanni in Laterano, for which his design was commended and in which he did have some input along with Alessandro Galilei – the winner – and Luigi Vanvitelli.

Floodlights illuminate the fountain at night

The other was to revive a project started and then abandoned by Gian Lorenzo Bernini one hundred years earlier to design a new fountain at the end of the former Aqua Virgo Roman aqueduct, in front of the Palazzo Poli.

Accounts of the outcome vary, but there is agreement that Salvi’s design did not win, with plans submitted by either Galilei or Ferdinando Fuga preferred. However, both of those architects were from Florence and there was a public view that the job should go to a Roman and, after considering this, the pope decided to give it to Salvi.

Salvi imagined a fountain composed of a large central basin, surrounded by a rough-hewn cliff from which the Palazzo Poli appears almost to have been carved, the whole composition dominated by the statue of Oceanus, set into the central arched niche of the palace, standing directly above the point at which the water emerges.

The monumental façade of the Palazzo Poli was designed by Vanvitelli to provide the fountain with a suitably dramatic backdrop.

The end product, which takes its names from its location at the convergence of tre vie – three roads, represented a classic of Roman Baroque, the largest Baroque fountain in the city and the most significant building built in Rome in the 18th century.

The Via Nicola Salvi in Rome skirts the Colosseum

It defined the career of Salvi, who had been born in Rome in 1697 to a wealthy family thought to have been from Abruzzo originally. Precociously intelligent, he studied mathematics and philosophy before turning to architecture.

Until the Trevi, after a decline in the number of major structures commissioned across the city compared with the previous century, Salvi’s work had been relatively inconsequential, consisting for the most part of small, decorative projects.

He did build a baptistery at the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls but that was destroyed in a fire of 1823, while his reconstructed Chiesa di Santa Maria a Gradi in Viterbo was flattened by bombing during the Second World War.

Salvi died at his home in Via della Colonna in Rome at the age of 53, having developed bronchial problems as a result of many hours spent working in the damp tunnels of the aqueduct.

Large crowds flock to the Trevi at all hours of the day

Travel tip:

The ritual of throwing coins over their shoulders into the Trevi Fountain is followed by thousands of visitors each day.  They used to be stolen regularly by gangs of thieves but a law was introduced making it a crime to fish coins out of the basin. Nowadays, the coins are collected by teams of municipal workers every night and given to a charity called Caritas, which converts the money into shopping vouchers for Romans who have fallen on hard times. The coins collected add up to around €3,000 each day.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita

Travel tip:

Part of the Trevi Fountain’s fame around the world is down to the starring role it has played in a number of movies, most notably Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, in which Anita Ekberg jumped into the fountain fully clothed, to be followed by Marcello Mastroianni. The monument also featured in Roman Holiday, Three Coins in the Fountain and Disney comedy The Lizzie McGuire Movie. When the revered Mastroianni died in 1996, the fountain was turned off and draped in black crepe as the city’s tribute.

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Luigi Vanvitelli – architect

Neapolitan genius drew up a grand design for his royal client

Giacinto Diano's portrait of Luigi Vanvitelli,
which is housed at the Royal Palace in Caserta

The most famous Italian architect of the 18th century, Luigi Vanvitelli, died on this day in 1773 in Caserta in Campania.

The huge Royal Palace he designed for the Bourbon kings of Naples in Caserta is considered one of the greatest triumphs of the Baroque style of architecture in Italy.

Vanvitelli was born Lodewijk van Wittel in Naples in 1700, the son of a Dutch painter of landscapes, Caspar van Wittel. His father later also took up the Italian surname Vanvitelli.

Luigi Vanvitelli was trained as an architect by Nicola Salvi and worked with him on lengthening the façade of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Palazzo Chigi-Odelscalchi in Rome and on the construction of the Trevi Fountain.

Following his notable successes with the facade of the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano (1732) and the facade of Palazzo Poli, behind the Trevi Fountain, Pope Clement XII sent Vanvitelli to the Marche to build some papal projects. 

Vanvitelli worked with Nicola Salvi on the construction of the
Trevi Fountain and designed the facade of the Palazzo Poli 

At Ancona in 1732, he directed construction of the Lazzaretto, a large pentagonal building built as an isolation unit to protect against contagious diseases arriving on ships. Later it was used as a military hospital or as barracks.

Back in Rome, Vanvitelli stabilised the dome of St. Peter's Basilica when it developed cracks and painted frescoes in a chapel at St Cecilia in Trastevere. 


In partnership, he and Salvi worked on an extraordinary project that involved the construction in Rome of a chapel for King John V of Portugal, which was then disassembled and shipped to Lisbon to be rebuilt there.

Vanvitelli was eventually commissioned by Charles III, King of Naples, to build a summer palace for the royal family in Caserta and he modelled his design on the Palace of Versailles in France.

The imposing 1200-room Royal Palace seen from
the Grande Cascata waterfall

He drew up plans for a quadrilateral building, enclosing four courtyards, with 1200 rooms, a chapel, a theatre and the largest staircase in Italy.


Vanvitelli also devised an aqueduct system to bring in the volume of water needed to run the cascades and the fountains in the gardens.

The architect worked on the Royal Palace until his death in 1773, while also building a church and a monastery in Naples and designing the huge aqueduct that supplied the city with water.

Vanvitelli's Grande Cascata waterfall is a feature of the
Royal Palace's vast gardens

Travel tip:

The Royal Palace, one of the largest palaces erected in Europe during the 18th century, was in 1997 designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Vanvitelli wrote in his memoirs that it was the King who designed the palace. This may have been to flatter him or because Charles III knew was actually quite explicit in what he wanted. The celebrated staircase, 18th century royal apartments and court theatre are among the star features of the palace. The architect also designed the famous park, with its Grande Cascata waterfall.

Vanvitelli's unusual Lazzaretto di Ancona, a
pentagonal building on an artificial island

Travel tip:

Vanvitelli designed the unusual Lazzaretto di Ancona for Pope Clement XII, which is also sometimes known as the Mole Vanvitelliana. It is a pentagonal building built on an artificial island, which served as a quarantine station for the port town of Ancona in the 18th century.



More reading:

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - Italy's last universal genius

Nicola Salvi - creator of Rome's iconic Trevi Fountain

Carlo Maderno - one of the fathers of Italian Baroque

Also on this day:

1869: The birth of sculptor Pietro Canonica

1926: The birth of movie actor Cesare Danova

1930: The birth of cycling champion Gastone Nencini

Selected books:

Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture, by John Varriano

Italian Splendour: Palaces, Castles and Villas, by Jack Basehart

(Picture credits: Trevi Fountain by Diliff; Royal Palace by Reame;  Lazzaretto by Claudio.stanco; via Wikimedia Commons)

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