“Architecture & the Literary Imagination” broadens the repertoire of period voices for understanding pre-modern architecture, beyond the usual theoretical tracts, to foster dialogue between scholars across disciplines, and encourage intermedial perspectives on architecture and literature.

International Conference, Rome 6-8 November 2025.

Program

Thursday 6 November
American University of Rome
Auriana Auditorium, via Pietro Roselli 16

19.00: Introductions

Keynote Speaker
19.15: Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

“Ephesians will no longer be proud of the Great Temple that Herostratus burned.” Imagined Architecture in Mexico in the XVIIth century

Reception

Friday 7 November
American University of Rome
Auriana Auditorium, via Pietro Roselli 16

Medieval

9.30: Elizabeth Pastan (Emory University)
"Let stond the wyndow glasid:" Writings about Windows

10.00: Sara Ronzoni (Università di Padova)
“La closture et la muraille”: la costruzione della città utopica tra “La Cité des dames” e “La città del sole”

10.30: Hannele Hellerstedt (Lincoln College, Oxford)
Divine Inspiration: Imagining Construction in “La Cité des dames”

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

Interiors

11.30: Klaus Tragbar (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München)
Gli ambienti di Franco Sacchetti

12.00: Caterina Cardamone (Vrije Universiteit, Brussels)
Diplomatic Reports as Sources for the Florentine Imagery of Northern Architectural Culture

12.30: Christian Frost (London Metropolitan University)
Dante and Boccaccio and the Emergence of the Civic Palazzo in Late Medieval Florence

13.00-14.30: Lunch

Vitruvius, Pliny, and others

14.30: Mikel Marini (Università di Bologna)
“Erger cantando machina sublime.” Un’analisi vitruviana dell’architettura ecfrastica in poesia

15.00: Fabio Colonnese (La Sapienza, Roma)
Between Text and Imagination. Reconstructions of the Tomb of Lars Porsenna

15.30-16.00: coffee break

Gardens

16.00: Luke Morgan (Monash University, Melbourne)
‘Bodies Without Souls’: Avatars of Circe in the Early Modern Garden

16.30: Nicholas Temple (London Metropolitan University)
Virgil’s Eclogues and Early 18th Century Pastoralism on the Janiculum in Rome

17.00-18.00: break

Aula Magna Adalberto Libera, Largo G. B. Marzi 10 – 00153 Roma
Keynote Speaker

18.00: Níall McLaughlin (Níall McLaughlin Architects, London)
My Portfolio in Poems

Saturday 8 November
AUR, Auditorium

Ruins and Humanists

9.30: Theodoris Koutsogiannis (Art Gallery, Parliament, Athens)
Atene immaginaria cartacea e la tradizione letteraria nella prima età moderna

10.00: Elisa Bacchi (Università di Pisa)
Parola come monumentum, parola al monumentum: leggere e scrivere le rovine dell’Antico nell’Umanesimo italiano

10.30: Susanna de Beer (Royal Dutch Institute, Rome)
The Literary Imagination of Ruins and the Rebuilding of Rome(s)

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

Counter Reform

11.30: Nathaniel Hess (Warburg Institute, University of London)
The Church between Two Temples: Poetry and Images in the Works of Marco Girolamo Vida

12.00: Stefano Canciosi (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
Angelo Rocca’s Approach to Classical Sources in his “Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana”

12.30-14.00: lunch

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

14.00: Giovanni Santucci (Università di Pisa)
Real and Imagined Architecture in Daniel Defoe’s “Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great
Britain”: National Ornament and the Design of Political Ideals.

14.30: Daniela Roberts (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg)
The Perception of Medieval Architecture in the Journals and Letters of English Travelers, 1720-1750

15.00: Maicol Cutrì (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)
«quanti poetici concetti potrebbero scaturire da quelle metaforiche pietre?» Spazi architettonici e invenzioni poetiche in Emanuele Tesauro

15.30-16.00: coffee

Ephemera

16.00: Micaela Antonucci (Università di Bologna)
“La storia è il più durevole monumento”. Le architetture effimere nelle cronache delle cerimonie pubbliche a Roma nel primo Cinquecento

16.30: Laura García Sánchez (Universitat de Barcelona)
“Apparato funebre dell’anniversario à Gregorio XV celebrato in Bologna à XXIV di luglio M. DC. XXIV dall’ illustrissimo & reverendiss. sig. Cardinal Ludovisi”: una fonte letteraria al servizio di una architettura effimera

17.00-18.00: break

Keynote Speaker
18.00: Shirine Hamadeh (Koç University, Istanbul)
"Poetry, Epigraphy, and the Sensory World of Ottoman Architecture"