The book “Le fontane di Roma nelle piazze, e luoghi publici della città” by Giovanni Battista Falda consists mostly out of illustrations. In total the book has 224 pages but only on 110 pages is something written or displayed. There are 105 illustrations and the book has approximately a A5 format. Furthermore, the pages very thick and so the book is really heavy. The book doesn’t have a table of contents. But it is parted in 4 chapters.
To english translated it’s called “The fountains of Rome in the squares and public places of the city”. The whole book consists of drawings with a small description from the place and the architect of the object on the drawing. Furthermore other water sources in this time and also gardens. There isn’t much text to describe them. This leads to the importance of the illustrations.
In my opinion the book by Giovanni Batista Falda isn’t meant to read. It’s meant to explore, to look at the images and to identify the details of the fountains in the city of Rome without travelling there.
Giovanni Battista Falda worked in Rome for Giovanni Giacomo de’Rossi (main series of views of Rome), who chose him out of Bernini’s studio at the age of 14 in 1657, and trained him as an architectural etcher.
I found this book when searching for the topic “church”, since that is all my book “De sacris aedificiis a Constantino magno constructis” is about.
While at first glance, they don’t appear ti have any direct relation, they in fact are quite similar. Both focus on one specific topic each, in Falda’s case the fountains of Rome, and aim to show it in full detail. Naturally, this is best achieved visually and therefore both books contain many illustrations. However, Ciambini’s approach is a bit more text-heavy and his book presumably didn’t appeal to such a great audience as Falda’s “tourist guide”.
I think our books could be good friends! 🙂
My old-book-friend is called “Architectura Hydraulica, Oder: Anleitung zu denen Brunnenkünsten” and it focuses on fountains, just like Falda’s book does. However, in my book, which is written by Caspar Walter, there are also some descriptions about water wheels and other constructions including water. Walter also decided to show many illustrations. In fact, these illustrations fill about half the book which is also the case with Falda’s work. Furthermore, the amount of text and images result in a thick and heavy book. In contrary to Falda’s book, Walter chose to make use of a bigger book format which also allows to show big illustrations up to the size of three pages which are even a little bit bigger than A4 format. The authors did not live at the same time, but I think if they did, they would have had many interesting discussions about fountains with each other.
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