THE AREA OF THE TEMPLUM PACIS IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

On November 27, 1606, in the fortress of Poli (about 30 km from Rome), the brothers Carlo and Lotario Conti gave their vegetable garden in emphyteusis (perpetual lease) to the architect Carlo Lambardi, with the power to let out individual plots on long-term contracts in order to “fare case et altri edificij per habitare.” The deal, however, did not apply to Poli: the garden, whose surface was larger than a hectar, was located in Rome between the Torre dei Conti and the Basilica of Maxentius, nearly in the middle of our Via dei Fori Imperiali (Fig. 310).

The garden was what survived of a wider property that two centuries earlier already belonged to the Conti family. Indeed, on March 15, 1386, the “magnificus et potens vir Nicolaus natus quondam magnifici viri Stephani Nicolai de Comite de Polo,” gave as a gift to the Benedictines of Santa Maria Nova (nowadays Santa Francesca Romana) the land located next to the Basilica of Maxentius and the Temple of Venus and Rome – Nicola's coats of arms were painted on the temple's walls. During the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the surviving part of the Conti's property, located between the Basilica of Maxentius and the twelfth-century Torre dei Conti, was regularly cultivated; just a little house (“casetta”) and a tiny annex “pro usu et habitatione hortolani” stood there. As early as the fifteenth century, some houses faced the street corresponding to the Forum of Nerva, eventually called the Via della Croce, and the square later called Piazza de’ Conti (Fig. 311, left; cfr. Fig. 310, top). A view from the Basilica of Maxentius, dating from the first years of the seventeenth century, shows very clearly what the area looked like: the fence with a hedge in the foreground was one of the actual boundaries, like the already-mentioned houses overlooked by the Torre dei Conti (Fig. 311, right), which had not yet lost its upper part that collapsed in 1644.