Michelangelo’s House

 

Did you know that one of the greatest artistic projects of all time as the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel was designed in an obscure and smelly alley in Rome?

In a humble house, in the most secluded corner of Piazza Venezia, near the Trajan column in a recess was Via Macel de Corvi, a narrow, winding street.

It is in this street that lived Michelangelo one of the greatest geniuses of art.

 

He did so for 26 years, continuing to live like an ordinary craftsman, without indulging in comforts and confirming his contempt for any luxury.

 

Yet, the artist of the popes and of power never moved and even when he became one of the richest men in Rome he continued to live in that house.

The Alessandrino district, where the Tuscan artist lived, was almost an open-air dump and full of garbage from the various butchers’ stores in the area.

After the death of the artist, the house remained intact until 1881 when they started the execution of the master plan, to build the so-called Altare della Patria, which provided for the demolition of all the houses in the neighborhood to build Via dei Fori Imperiali.

Michelangelo’s house was part of it and was demolished in 1902.
Today, on the facade of the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni, towards the Foro di Traiano, near the point where Michelangelo’s house stood, there is a plaque that recalls that he had lived in that place.

There was no visual evidence of the house but only a memory in some drawings of the architect Domenico Jannetti.

His drawings were used to rebuild a house identical to the one where Michelangelo had lived in Via delle Tre Pile, next to the Campidoglio steps.

Years later in 1930 it was ordered again the demolition because it was on the point of opening of the works for the enlargement of the present Via del Teatro di Marcello realized in 1930.

This time it was not destroyed and the facade that reminded of the house of the Tuscan artist was dismantled and reassembled in 1941.

The final location is due to the work of the engineer Adolfo Pernier, director of urban planning, who identified in the Janiculum the most suitable place, more precisely in the stretch of the Promenade that goes from the Monument of Garibaldi to Porta San Pancrazio.

On the building today there is an epigraph that explains that it is the “facade of the house called of Michelangelo“.