How Past Epidemics Gave New Public Spaces to Cities
The COVID-19 crisis has unprecedentedly silenced our cities: traffic noise has suddenly disappeared, and our buzzing public spaces have turned into barren lands. The images of a deserted St. Mark Square in Venice, an empty Times Square in New York City and a traffic-free Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris visually encapsulate the abrupt changes of the emergency in which we are living. When social-distancing regulations blend with the physical identity of our cities through their iconic public spaces, we suddenly become spectators of an eerie quietness which most urban enthusiasts would describe as their worst urban nightmare: a city without its people.
“have cities ever built epidemic-related monuments? ”
During the surreal lockdown silence I experienced in Boston, I incredulously stared at the broadcasted images of empty public spaces in Italy, and wondered if the stones of our cities could share any insight regarding this pandemic. Cities, in fact, are made of physical memories, and the traces of past disasters are often captured in urban objects and landmarks that populate our public spaces. However, have cities ever built epidemic-related monuments?
Naples and Milan, for example, are both rich in monuments of this kind and have also suffered the severest death toll from past plagues in Italy. The obelisks and statues built to celebrate the end of past epidemics constitute material admonishments left by previous generations in a collective effort to remember their past emergencies. By erecting these landmarks, cities constructed physical landscapes of objects that not only embody the past but also enrich the visual experience of our streets and city-wide spatial navigation.
We unconsciously wander in dozens of public spaces that were created in times of quarantine and post-epidemic phases.
Figure 1. Bronze statue of San Gaetano (1747) with angels by Andrea Falcone (Naples 1630-Naples 1677) nearby San Paolo Maggiore Church in Naples. Photograph by Carlo Raso. Source: Flickr.
During this COVID-19 urban silence, the seventeenth-century statue of San Gaetano in the historic center of Naples seemed to vigorously move its arms to an empty street, formerly crowded with Neapolitans and tourists (figure 1). The base of the monument facing the Roman decumanus of Via dei Tribunali displays the following engravings:
“B. GAETANO […] NEAPOLITAM URBEM A PESTE LIBERATAM IN PUBLICUM GRATI ANIMI MONUMENTUM ET IN LAETAM SPEM FUTURAE TUTELAE MARMOREUM SIMULACRUM”
“To Beatific Gaetano, who saved the city of Naples from the plague, [we offer] this marble simulacrum in public memory, [with] jubilant hope, and future protection”
This is a message of hope for a better future but also a simulacrum of public memory—one built to be constantly visible and present in the city's collective consciousness.
The statue of San Gaetano was commissioned by the Theatine Priests of the neighboring church of St. Paul to thank the Saint for ending the devastating plague of 1656.[1] Half of the 300,000 inhabitants of Naples died from this epidemic.
Despite its relatively small dimensions, the statue of San Gaetano contributed to the definition of a uniquely complex public space: two churches (St. Paul and St. Lawrence) define two edges of this irregularly shaped piazza, which is divided into two unequally sized areas by Via dei Tribunali. The post-epidemic construction of the statue of San Gaetano provided an elegant demarcation of the spaces facing the two churches. It still acts as a reference point to orient those approaching Via dei Tribunali from the narrow alleys of Naples’ city center (figure 2). Pedestrians can easily see the statue’s arms that stay frozen in time as they encourage Neapolitans to resurge from the deadly plague.
Figure 2. Foreshortening of Piazza San Gaetano with the commemorative statue from the narrow alleys of Naples. Source: PhotoItaliaStudio – Shutterstock.
Less than 500m away from San Gaetano’s statue, the post-epidemic 26-meter-tall monument of St. Dominic presents itself to urban spectators in a manner that cannot be ignored. This urban object—technically defined as a pyramidal commemorative monument—towers above the surrounding palaces and churches intending to demonstrate the growing prominence of the Dominican Order within the religious fabric of Naples (figure 3).
Figure 3. Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, with apse of the church and spire of San Domenico. Photograph by Seimeis6. Source: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Similar to the location of San Gaetano, the St. Dominic pyramid is located in a recessed piazza along a street parallel to Via dei Tribunali. This piazza is the only public space along Via Benedetto Croce and, therefore, a prominent urban setting to celebrate the end of the 1656 plague. This post-epidemic commemorative monument reinvigorates the centrality of the public space by occupying the intersection point of the diagonals of this trapezoid-shaped piazza. In the eighteenth century the barycentric position of the pyramid gained even more importance with the installation of a white stone 12 pointed-star nestled in the black Vesuvian lava-rock surrounding its base.
Despite their architectural differences, these two monuments share similar urban dispositions: neither is visible as one looks from the main decumanus streets and each responds to the surrounding architectural conditions of the small piazzas where they are located (figure 4).
Figure 4. Piazza San Gaetano (left) and Piazza San Domenico (right). Map data ©2019 Google.
In general, the Neapolitan post-epidemic monuments do not belong to an overall urban scheme, unlike the meticulously planned obelisks system of Rome. While the late sixteenth-century Egyptian obelisks in Rome were deployed by Pope Sixtus V to improve pilgrims’ spatial navigation and create a hegemonic urban topography, the post-epidemic monuments of Naples respond to the structural need of anchoring small public spaces around commemorative landmarks.
As Maria Ann Conelli writes in her “The ‘Guglie’ of Naples: Religious and Political Machinations of the Festival Machine,” the monumental typology of the Neapolitan seventeenth-century cityscape—also called guglia—does not act as a series of markers in a plan of urban reform. Rather they perform as a network of place-based interventions. These design gestures enrich the collective city-identity by employing urban objects that honor the memory of past epidemics and thus celebrate the prestige of prominent religious orders.
If the post-epidemic landmarks of Naples do not follow a large urban scheme, the 1576 and 1631 plague columns of Milan are part of a rigorously planned emergency urban reform. The plague columns of Milan were different from the devotional crosses scattered in the surrounding villages, which, typically, indicated the space where the people who died from various plagues were buried in mass graves. The devotional columns within the walls of Milan, instead, were the places where priests officiated masses and religious ceremonies during plagues, at the main crossroads, so that people could attend directly from their windows, without having to participate in public gatherings (figure 5).
Figure 5. View of Piazza San Babila, Milan during the plague of 1630. In the center of the piazza stand the column of S. Mona (1585) and the column of the Lion (1628). Archivio Storico Lombardo, 5th series 9 (1922). Source: Wikipedia.
This deployment of micro-spiritual units across the city—such as columns, obelisks, statues, altars—eventually triggered an unprecedented reconfiguration of major urban arteries. The locations of plague-columns, as shown in the 1700 map by Daniel Stoopendaal (figure 6), was dictated by the maximization of basic viewshed rules: the city authorities positioned the columns in the middle of 35 street intersections, where these temporarily deployed landmarks would have been visible to most of the recluse residents. The formerly chaotic streets of Milan, during the 1576 and 1631 plagues, became places of spiritual support and socially distanced interactions that eventually influenced the future urban development of the city.
Figure 6. Map of Milan by Daniel Stoopendaal, 1726 (figure edited by the author to mark the plague columns). Archivio Storico Lombardo.
Initially conceived as temporary design interventions, the plague columns remained part of the urban fabric of Milan until the mid-eighteenth century when architects Giuseppe Piermarini and Leopoldo Pollack recognized the columns as one of the main causes of traffic congestion for carriages in the city. Hence, most of Milan’s devotional columns were either demolished to free the streets from these obstacles or moved to improve the quality of newly designed public spaces.
Figure 7. The plague-column of St. Helen in Corso Italia, Milan (1920). Archivio Storico Lombardo. Courtesy of Dodecaedro Urbano.
The column of St. Helen stands out as an example of a street-traffic obstacle that Piermarini wrote about in his notes for Emperor Joseph II. This image shows the column in the middle of a busy quadrivium in Corso Italia, where even the tram-tracks had to adapt to the barycentric position of this landmark (figure 7). The column was then moved to the current position—in between the churches of St. Euphemia and St. Paul—in the 1920s (figure 8).
Figure 8. The current location of St. Helen Column in Milan (2019). Street View ©2019 Google.
Even if 400 years have passed since the plague columns were deployed across Milan, their stories remain deeply intertwined with the present transportation development of the city. As Piermarini and Pollack had to face resistance to these urban objects, contemporary Milan recently dealt with the temporary relocation of the Verziere plague column in order to safely proceed with the underground work of the city’s subway network (figure 9).
Figure 9. The Verziere plague column was moved by the city of Milan to safely proceed with the underground work of the city subway network. Source: www.metro4milano.it.
What clearly emerges from these Italian post-epidemic landmarks is the prominent role played by urban design during and after epidemic emergencies. The reconfiguration of our built environment can support quarantined inhabitants, can reclaim streets for pedestrians and, eventually, can help us build a stronger collective identity through the material memories of these events.
NOTE:
[1] Idamaria Fusco, “The causes of the epidemic” in Plague, Demography, and Taxation in the Kingdom of Naples of the XVII Century (Franco Angeli, Milan, 2007), 32.
