Via Giulia

Via Giulia is a street in the historic centre of Rome, Italy, mostly in rione Regola, although its northern part belongs to rione Ponte. It was one of the first important urban planning projects in Renaissance Rome.

Via Giulia was designed by Pope Julius II but the original plan was only partially carried out. This was the first attempt since Antiquity to pierce a new thoroughfare through the heart of Rome and the first European example since Antiquity of urban renewal. Via Giulia runs from the Ponte Sisto to the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, following the tight curve of the Tiber. It became the most fashionable street for new construction for borghesi and for the Florentine community in the sixteenth century. Today its modest structures provide one of Rome's elite shopping streets, noted for its antique shops.

The Via Giulia runs for a full kilometer in a straight line, an innovative feature easily taken for granted today. Its story begins in 1508, as an aspect of Julius' wide-reaching program for the renovation of Rome and the founding of an absolute monarchy in the Papal States, which would assume its rightful place among the European powers. His financial reforms had been undertaken from the first year of his pontificate, and to free the Papacy from its dependence on the great Roman families, he turned to Tuscan bankers outside the circuits either of the Orsini or the Colonna, notably to Agostino Chigi, recently of Siena. A part of Julius' overall plan was the reorganization of the medieval city of Rome, whose unrealized assets were becoming apparent as the renewed city grew in economic importance, recovering from the sleepy backwater it had become during the fourteenth century.

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Wikipedia