Siting and Constructing the Church of the Gesù: Situating a New Religious Order in the Center of Rome

Our collaborative project takes a distinctive approach to this well-studied monument. Revisiting the extensive archival documentation for the project reveals the involvement of a broad group of participants. These include the patriciate neighbors, hostile to the forced sale of their properties for the new building site, as well as the skilled and unskilled workers who built the new church. Our construction history aims for a new understanding of the networks of contributors to the building process and the ways in which the Society was incorporated into Rome’s urban fabric.

Ann C. Huppert is associate professor of architectural history at the University of Washington, specializing in the architecture of early modern Italy and the Mediterranean world. She is the author of Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi (Yale 2015) and currently is completing her book Building Rome: Carvers, Masons, Carters, Merchants and Sixteenth-Century Architecture

Pamela O. Long is an independent historian whose work centers on the history of science, technology, and cultural history in premodern Europe. Her recent books include Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth Century Rome (Chicago, 2018); and Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Hopkins, 2025).

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_{Image: Antonio Tempesta, Plan of Rome, detail showing the area of the Church of the Gesù, etching, 1593 (1645 reprint). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Edward Pearce Casey Fund, 1983.1027.}