The interior decoration of Roman houses between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: an itinerary in the classical tradition of the Urbe

The Roman noble residences, as the celebrated Galleria Colonna under construction in the early eighteenth century, become for the Buonaccorsi family, as attested by archival sources, an unavoidable point of reference in the ambition to retrace the antique taste and splendor, in the perspective of a social and worldly reflection, as well as cultural. In order to under stand and motivate the double aspect of this emulation, we will make use of the Pietro Rossini's Mercurio Errante essay, in his re-edition, the third, of the 1715 and the Roman itinerary of the young englishman Thomas Coke, whom was in Rome from 1714 to 1717. With the exception of the significant cultural differences that exist between an english protestant lord and a nobleman of a province of the Papal States, it will be attempted to highlight the kind and the diffusion of the Roman cultural and artistic model of the early eighteenth century, as it emerges from a well known and widespread guide of Rome, from the experience in the Urbe of a traveler at the beginning of the Grand Tour experience and, finally, from the fitting out of an fashionable apartment on the borders of the Papal State.